El Cenizo is battling a ‘show me your papers’ law that bans sanctuary cities and empowers police officers to ask the immigration status of anyone they detain

When Texas passed a law this month banning so-called sanctuary cities and empowering police officers to ask the immigration status of anyone they detain, protests rippled through the state’s major cities. Politicians and activists vowed legal action.

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The first place to sue was not liberal Austin, the hub of the fightback, but tiny El Cenizo, a city of 3,800 that nestles along a bend in the Rio Grande and faces Mexico to the north, west and south.

Here, where 99% of residents are Hispanic and 15% to 20% are undocumented, a “safe haven” ordinance has been in place since 1999, forbidding local authorities from making immigration inquiries. When the new state law goes into effect in September, the failure of Texas officials to cooperate with immigration authorities will become a criminal offence also punishable by fines.

The lawsuit argues that the Texas bill, known as SB4, unconstitutionally inserts the state into the federal government’s job of immigration enforcement. SB4 is the most hard-line immigration law passed by a state since Arizona introduced SB 1070, a rule dubbed “show me your papers” by detractors that has largely been neutered by litigation from civil rights groups.

While the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, claims SB4 promotes law and order and keeping dangerous criminals off the streets, it was opposed by sheriffs and police chiefs in the state’s major cities, who worry that it will erode community trust and discourage the reporting of crimes. Critics of the law also worry that giving individual officers the option to pose immigration questions invites racial profiling and will turn routine traffic stops into preludes to deportation.

El Cenizo is now back in the national news, 18 years after a flurry of attention when it decided to make life easier for most of its residents by holding city meetings in Spanish, generating criticism from conservative groups who felt that not using English was unAmerican.

The timing is unfortunate for the 33-year-old mayor, Raul Reyes. In the week of 8 May, when the suit was filed, he was studying for his finals for a master’s degree in public administration. He also runs two businesses; being mayor pays only $100 a month.

I don’t have any respect for the Texas Republicans who passed this bill, who amended it even to make it worse Raul Reyes, mayor of El Cenizo

The city’s annual budget is $250,000, a modest sum reflected in rickety infrastructure. It was incorporated in 1989 after starting off as a colonia – the name for a poverty-stricken border neighbourhood without basic facilities. A handful of newer buildings and a smart playground and basketball court by the river hint at a brighter future, but overgrown foliage looms over sagging streets pockmarked by trash-strewn vacant lots and many homes are dilapidated. In 2010 the US census estimated the median household income at $25,302. Most people work a half-hour drive away in Laredo, the country’s largest inland port.

While El Cenizo can ill afford to pay any fines for non-compliance, Reyes is not backing down.

“It is a bill that discriminates against a segment of the population,” he said in his office on Thursday. “I don’t have any respect for the Texas Republicans who passed this bill, who amended it even to make it worse.”

Reyes looks fresh-faced in his campaign posters, which is not a trick of the lens: he first ran for mayor in 2002, aged 19, and was elected two years later. He spoke in a moderated tone that did nothing to disguise his anger that El Cenizo is in the middle of a culture-wars issue that he feels is more about political point-scoring than sensible policy.

“I’m here to serve my people and work for them,” he said. “I don’t give a damn what politicians at our state level or federal government think of me or think of my community. They ain’t doing anything to help us meet our challenges and meet our demands.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest El Cenizo. Photograph: Tom Dart/The Guardian

‘Every single child that lives here is a US citizen’

Outsiders with simplistic views, he said, miss the nuances of life on the border. The safe-haven ordinance was not introduced to make it easier to harbour foreign criminals but to reassure residents that local leaders would not react to opposition by threatening to call Border Patrol to remove dissenters.

Reyes is against SB4 because he fears that families will be ripped apart – like the one he recently helped as a witness to a power of attorney agreement so that a grandmother could look after a couple of children in elementary school whose mother had been deported.

“Every single child that lives here is a US citizen,” he said. “So that is why I am very passionate in my opposition against this bill. To somehow think that we’re just going to turn our backs on people that we’ve gone to school with, that we’ve shared a meal with, that we sit next to [in church] … is just inhumane. It’s just not who we are as a country or who we should be as human beings.”

Many of the suspicious activity reports are from the population of undocumented immigrants within our community Raul Reyes

El Cenizo’s police department consists of five reservists, three currently active. The chief is Edgar Garcia, who runs a truck company in Laredo. He said by phone that he had “a mixed point of view” about the new law: entanglement in immigration will be an extra burden, but it might help him catch more serious criminals.

“I don’t have a problem helping out homeland security, Border Patrol, because at the end of the day we’re on the same side,” he said, “we’re here to protect and serve, to enforce the law. But it’s very difficult to add more tasks to a city police officer. It’s going to be very difficult. It already is.”

The Border Patrol is a daily presence. Though it takes only seconds to cross the Rio Grande by boat, there is no fence in this part of the frontier, so enforcement relies on technology and the presence of agents.

One woman who lives next to the river, who declined to give her name, said she is often disturbed by migrants walking through her property who are picked up by waiting cars. The city is surrounded by dense brushland, making it easy for those on foot to vanish from view.

“You do get a lot of drug trafficking, human trafficking things of that nature that you don’t normally see in other places in the US,” said Miguel Reynero from behind the counter of the colourful general store he runs in El Cenizo, the Los Compadres Grocery and Meat Market. “Here it’s a little high.”

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Citing concerns over the movement of narcotics and weapons, Reyes said: “There are people in my community that favour a wall and I don’t blame them.” He believes an increased investment in technology would be a better use of money than the construction of a physical wall, which was one of the central promises of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

To anyone who thinks that opposing SB 4 means that he is soft on crime or would welcome a surge of undocumented migrants, Reyes has a trenchant riposte: “You don’t know us, so just keep your mouth shut, because in essence you’re just rambling nonsense because we do have a working relationship with the Border Patrol.

“Many of the suspicious activity reports that they receive are from the population of undocumented immigrants within our community. So it’s very complex.

“Nonetheless, we’ve made it also very clear to them that they have no business patrolling our streets and stopping our community people and asking them for papers. They used to do it.”

If it seems strange that a small town swarmed by immigration agents still has a high proportion of long-term undocumented immigrants, then that underlines the delicate balancing act between residents and law enforcement in border settlements.

It is a tangled mix of rules, resources and relationships that seems in the process of being upended by more strident political climates in Washington and Austin; a tale of pragmatism being toppled by dogmatism, of little El Cenizo being told it no longer knows best by desensitized voices from afar.