Candelaria, Texas
In the early morning hours of August 19, 2025, six patrol cars pulled into the unincorporated town of Candelaria, Texas, about 50 miles northwest of Presidio on the U.S.-Mexico border. With lights blazing, they surrounded an RV by the church. A small posse of officers—representing the Border Patrol, the U.S. Army and the Presidio County Sheriff’s Office—approached the trailer.
Presidio County Deputy Jaime Sanchez banged on the door. “Abre la puerta!” he shouted. “Open the door!”
Inside, Juana Alvarez Rodriguez, a housewife in her early 50s, was sound asleep. So was her 15-year-old son, who answered in his pajamas, his mother following close behind. Deputy Sanchez asked them if they were alright. Alvarez hadn’t reported anything, but Sanchez had gotten a call from a Border Patrol agent about an armed man attempting to break in. “She said everything [was] OK, and I asked her if I could go inside to make sure,” Sanchez later wrote in that night’s report.
Alvarez was alarmed and upset by being woken up in the middle of the night—and in the middle of nowhere—by nine men, all of whom were armed, and complained to Sanchez that she had been “so comfortable” before their intrusion. An officer hefting an automatic rifle told Alvarez and her son to keep their hands in plain view while they checked the trailer for anyone concealed inside.
The sweep yielded no results, and Sanchez asked Alvarez if they had any weapons. She said they had two toy guns, and led the deputy to where they were—“they were two semi-automatic toy guns that looked very realistic, similar to a Glock,” Sanchez wrote.
Meanwhile, the Border Patrol agents on scene asked Alvarez for her documents. Her son had an American birth certificate, but she had only a Mexican voter’s ID for herself, though she said she’d been living in the trailer for nine years. Agents informed her that she would have to be arrested. Alvarez told them that she had no other nearby family and wanted to take her son with her.
They declined her request. Per court records, Alvarez told her son not to cry as they hugged before she was taken away. “God is first,” she reminded him.
Two countries, one community
The events of that night were unusual in Candelaria, a tiny town at the end of the line where FM 170 becomes a dirt track rambling along the border toward Valentine. Only a few dozen people live there, over an hour’s drive away from the nearest gas stations and grocery stores. Perhaps the biggest daily disruption is the arrival of the school bus. At 5 a.m. on weekday mornings, a bus arrives from Presidio to take the town’s young scholars on a stomach-churning ride down the rough River Road.
For centuries, Candelaria’s destiny has been intertwined with its twin, the village of San Antonio del Bravo in Chihuahua. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the brand-new U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) tightened up security along the border and closed many informal ports of entry that linked small towns like Candelaria, Lajitas and Boquillas with the wider world. A two-minute commute across a footbridge in Candelaria became a three-and-a-half-hour drive through the port of entry in Presidio.
By 2008, the Border Patrol had destroyed the bridge, but that didn’t stop the back and forth traffic. Even as late as 2019, when the town’s water wells failed, residents headed to San Antonio del Bravo to stay with relatives until repairs were made.
In 2025, President Trump’s calls for “mass deportations” changed the tone of immigration enforcement around the country—even in the farthest reaches of Presidio County. An Army deployment arrived in the spring, and with it the spectacle of soldiers in armored vehicles patrolling the River Road.
A Blue Devil in detention
On November 16, Rene Peña Santieseban—a father of two who has lived and worked in the United States for some 40 years and even graduated from Presidio High School—crossed the river for what may be the last time. That day, Peña did as he’d often done, carefully making his way back home to Candelaria from San Antonio del Bravo over a series of steel cables that serve as a makeshift bridge. A U.S. Army patrol on a hillside above town spotted him and called in Border Patrol agents who questioned him and then apprehended him on a charge of illegal entry into the United States. He was whisked away to detention.
What happened next can’t be confirmed in federal court records, which provide little information, except that Peña had no criminal history and only one documented prior run-in with the Border Patrol—in 2009, he was granted a “voluntary departure” by DHS through a port in El Paso. (A “voluntary departure” allows undocumented individuals to leave the country without a deportation order, which folks often opt to avoid because it can make obtaining documentation to enter the United States more difficult in the future.)
Big Bend Sentinel contacted numerous people who are close to Peña, including those who employed him to do work, but no one wanted to comment publicly. One would only say that the residents of Candelaria are terrified that they will be targeted for immigration enforcement.
When reached by phone, a family member, who did not want to give details of Peña’s arrest, said they did not know where he was being detained or what the future held for him. Attempts to find him using the Immigration and Customs Enforcement online database of detainees showed no records for Peña, nor did a call to an ICE phone number.
Federal court records show that the criminal charge was disposed of on November 18, with a penalty of “time served.” Since he is a Mexican citizen with no documents to reside here legally, he was not released and was instead taken to an unknown detention location.
Gone but not forgotten
Both Alvarez and Peña were charged with a violation of Section 1325(a)(1) of the U.S. Code, which makes it a federal misdemeanor crime to enter the United States anywhere except a designated port of entry. The Western District of Texas deliberates hundreds of these types of cases every year, and the process is typically quick and the paper trail is minimal. It’s rare for an illegal entry case to go to trial—but quick thinking by Alvarez’s lawyer, Federal Public Defender Christopher Carlin, pushed the case in a direction few of its kind go.
Carlin outlined his frustrations with the government’s case in a fiery motion to suppress evidence that argued that Alvarez’s Constitutional rights—which apply to everyone on U.S. soil, citizen or not—were violated through what he alleged was “a textbook warrantless non-consensual search and seizure.”
To start, Carlin wasn’t fully convinced by the government’s pretext for the search of Alvarez’s trailer. Records from the Presidio County Sheriff’s Office show that Deputy Sanchez received a call through dispatch around 10:20 p.m. for backup from Border Patrol on a possible break-in. Sanchez and the Border Patrol agent played phone tag for a while, and Sanchez relayed back to dispatch at midnight that he was headed to Candelaria, where he learned from a trio of Army personnel that the suspect “was a possible African American with a pistol.”
The Border Patrol’s own internal recordkeeping recalled that Agents Edgar Barraza and Marcos Rodriguez were assisting the Presidio County Sheriff’s Office in conducting a “welfare check” after a “suspicious armed person” was spotted entering the trailer. “The presence of a gun-toting individual in a tiny unincorporated West Texas ranching community such as Candelaria is not only non-suspicious, it is trivial,” Carlin wrote.
Presidio County Sheriff Danny Dominguez said Monday his deputy’s actions and those of the Border Patrol agents were justified, since officers have to be extra careful any time a gun is reported. The remoteness and history of the town don’t factor into their policework. “If somebody gets a call about a man going with a gun, we’re going to handle it the same way if it was Candelaria or here in Marfa,” he said.
In the end, a child was left without a mother, and a woman was left in a jail cell facing an uncertain future. “The agents’ lack of concern with leaving a teenager in his home without any adult family member in remote Candelaria, Texas, 50 miles away from the nearest services … demonstrates exactly how concerned these agents were with the family’s welfare,” Carlin wrote.
Alvarez was poised to go to trial at the end of August, just over a week after she was arrested, but Judge Ronald C. Griffin granted a motion to dismiss with just hours on the clock. Then she all but vanished in the labyrinth of federal immigration databases. Court records listed her son at an address in Midland but revealed no further information.
A silent town
Big Bend Sentinel traveled to Candelaria on Saturday to see if anyone in town would talk about how they feel about the recent detentions or provide more details on the arrests. The streets were empty, but one man found near his home said he didn’t know anything.
A rough dirt and grass road at the edge of town leads to the old river crossing. On the way, an elderly man with a rough beard and straw cowboy hat was hiking toward Candelaria. He said he lived in San Antonio del Bravo and didn’t recognize the names of Peña or Alvarez.
That afternoon, an armored U.S. Army vehicle sat perched on the edge of a hillside above Candelaria where wells and a waterstack supply the town. A camouflaged man stood outside the vehicle staring into some type of binoculars at this reporter parked on a road below who also was peering back through a camera lens. A trip up a road to the top of the hill gave a closer look at the patrol, which was parked directly across the road from the graves of the late teacher Johnnie Chambers and her husband Boyd, who once served as a Presidio County commissioner.
A soldier in the passenger seat did not acknowledge a wave. Another soldier on the driver’s side merely remained fixed on looking out at the horizon over the span of land on either side of the river, peering toward San Antonio del Bravo and the mountains beyond.
Things were quiet, but there was no doubt that times had changed.