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THE NEW ELLIS ISLAND  
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Julia Preston
July 2, 2026
The New York Review of Books
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_ A history of five families in El Paso reveals the city’s
significance as a bellwether of America’s immigration policy. _

A person scaling the border wall between Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and
El Paso, Texas, December 2025, NurPhoto/Getty Images

 

Reviewed:

El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration,
Race, and Memoryby Jazmine UlloaDutton, 337 pp., $30.00

El Paso sits in a verdant opening between arid mountains at the
westernmost tip of Texas, at a place where the Rio Grande often runs
shallow enough to wade across from Ciudad Juárez, its twin city in
Mexico. Since the lands north of the river were taken over by the
United States in 1848 as the spoils of the Mexican-American War, the
pass has been a crossing point, in both directions, for Mexican
immigrants, laborers, and traders; for soldiers and smugglers,
politicos and revolutionaries; for cowboys, Native people, Black
people; for families bifurcated by the boundary.

The journalist Jazmine Ulloa grew up in the city, and in the course of
her work over the past decade she came to feel that her hometown had
been wrongly marginalized in the story Americans tell about the
origins and development of their country. In _El Paso: Five Families
and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory_, she sets
out to restore the city “to its rightful position” as a place of
entry and connection as consequential as Ellis Island to the east and
Angel Island to the west, and more enduring than either. Her book is a
panoramic, abundantly detailed history of a century of turmoil and
restless migratory movements gravitating around El Paso. Challenging
the persistent calumny of Mexicans as menacing outsiders, Ulloa shows
how resilient immigrants and Mexican Americans have contributed to the
economic progress of the borderlands and their continuously evolving
multiethnic mix, despite the United States’ efforts, generation
after generation, to build walls and jails to thwart the flow of
people.

Ulloa’s determination to elevate El Paso was spurred by a horrific
event. As a reporter for _The Boston Globe_,_ _she returned to El Paso
to cover the aftermath of a mass shooting by Patrick Crusius, a young
white supremacist armed with an AK-47-style rifle and one thousand
rounds of ammunition, at a local Walmart on August 3, 2019. He killed
twenty-three people, among them both the mother and the father of an
infant. Minutes before the attack, Crusius had posted a manifesto
online in which he decried “the Hispanic invasion of Texas” and
said, “I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic
replacement.” At the time, President Donald Trump was routinely
vilifying Mexicans as criminal predators stampeding over the border.
Crusius amplified to an extreme the fear of Mexicans that had long
permeated the Southwest and was spreading, fanned by Trump’s
rhetoric, across the country.

Ulloa begins her history by reminding readers of an event that should
be prominent in any account of the consolidation of the United States
as a nation. At the end of the Mexican-American War, with the signing
of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, perhaps the most spectacular
real estate deal in American history, the United States obliged Mexico
to accept $15 million for 55 percent of its territory, including
modern-day California, Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico, most of Arizona
and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. Mexico, in
defeat, also relinquished its claim to Texas and recognized the Rio
Grande as the border, making El Paso “a passageway between two
uneasy nations,” as Ulloa puts it.

Her history then picks up in the late nineteenth century. In the later
years of the dictatorship of President Porfirio Díaz, El Paso and
Ciudad Juárez became hotbeds of revolutionary ferment where Mexican
intellectuals, journalists, workers, and insurgents, on the run or in
exile across the border in the United States, plotted their
rebellions. The newspaper editor Lauro Aguirre, the anarchist brothers
Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón, and the opposition politician
Francisco Madero, who eventually led the bloody nationwide uprising
against the dictator in 1910, all conspired in the insurgency from the
border cities. Illustrating the perennial diversity of immigration in
the region, Ulloa grounds these chapters in the story of Herlinda Wong
Chew, the Mexican-born daughter of a prosperous Chinese hotelier. Wong
Chew helped to sell food to hungry Mexican revolutionary soldiers, and
once was photographed in the pose of a rebel _soldadera_, with ammo
belts slung across her chest. But as the Mexican Revolution churned on
through seven years of tumult, her entrepreneurial husband, a Chinese
immigrant to Mexico, founded a grocery store and soon a chain of
burgeoning businesses in Ciudad Juárez. Wong Chew became a cultural
intermediary and a protectress of Chinese laborers as they shuttled
back and forth across the border, navigating violent surges of
anti-Chinese xenophobia in both Mexico and the United States.
Eventually the Chews themselves were forced to move for safety to El
Paso, where they opened more grocery stores.

Throughout the book Ulloa portrays the United States’ fickle cycles
of luring and then callously rejecting Mexican laborers. Miguel
Martinez was a fifteen-year-old farm boy in 1911 when he was recruited
by the roving army of the rebel commander Pancho Villa. Lacking
revolutionary zeal, Martinez eventually defected, wading across the
Rio Grande, then an open border, and trudging through the desert until
he collapsed from thirst under a mesquite. He awoke to see an American
rancher staring down at him, saying words that American employers have
said to Mexicans countless times since: “Do you want to work for me?
I have plenty here.” He remained in Texas for nearly fifteen years,
during a period of brisk economic expansion in the West after the end
of World War I. He lived with his family in a boxcar and worked
steadily, although he never entirely recovered after losing three
fingers in an accident at a stone quarry.

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In the 1920s Congress, driven by racist suspicions supported by the
pseudoscientific bigotry of eugenics, extended existing bans on
Chinese immigration to exclude most immigrants from Asia, while also
enacting the first official controls at the Mexican border. In 1924
Congress formally established the Border Patrol, with the intent of
keeping an eye on Mexican laborers without necessarily keeping them
out. Then the devastation of the Great Depression struck, and
President Herbert Hoover promised “American jobs for real
Americans.” Brutal, illegal raids erupted as local police carried
out the exhortations of federal authorities that Mexicans had to go.
The wave of forced expulsions even swept up many Mexican American
citizens. Although Martinez had obtained legal papers, he felt the
hostility and in 1931 he decided his family needed to leave. As for
the Chews, the Depression, as well as the harsh US restrictions on
Chinese immigration, squeezed their businesses and left them
struggling financially in their later years in the 1930s.

Another person who endured the demeaning pull and push of US policy
was Sabino Rubio, a young Mexican who joined millions of his
compatriots as they returned to the United States after 1942, when the
cycle swung around again during World War II and their labor was in
high demand. Mexicans were allowed in as farmworkers under the Bracero
Program, and Rubio came with the last annual cohort, in 1964. He was
sprayed down with anti-lice insecticide to prevent him from spreading
disease and dispatched to grueling days of picking cotton across
Texas. The formal program ended in December of that year, but Rubio,
like many others, kept coming back without legal work documents. He
found his way to construction jobs, building highway bridges and parts
of Interstate 10, an economic lifeline of the Texas borderlands. In
1976 he moved with his Mexican wife to a town near Houston, and one of
his children, a daughter, was born in Texas, a US citizen.

By the 1970s the Border Patrol was expanding its deportation
operations, hunting for undocumented immigrants deeper into the
interior. El Paso became a revolving door through which thousands of
Mexicans were expelled, only for them to turn around and cross right
back into the United States. Rubio made the mistake of thinking that
his years of work might have earned him a place in Texas society. When
he showed up with his kids at the annual Texas Rice Festival, _la
migra _was on watch and spotted them in the white crowd. Rubio was
deported together with his whole family.

Ulloa chronicles the terrible losses, of lives and progress, that
followed when the legal commerce generated by the North American Free
Trade Agreement in 1994 coincided with a swelling illicit trade that
supplied the vast market for cocaine and other narcotics in the United
States. Over time El Paso was transformed into a bustling commercial
hub, while criminal traffickers unleashed a plague of murderous
violence just over the river in Ciudad Juárez, widening what proved
to be lasting disparities in wealth and public security between the
two cities. In Juárez American companies opened tariff-exempt
assembly plants, or_ maquiladoras_, which attracted a workforce
largely made up of young women from all over Mexico. Soon women’s
bodies were showing up shot, stabbed, and sexually assaulted; other
women just disappeared. The Juárez femicides were notorious far
beyond Mexico, revealing the vicious machismo lurking in the
country’s slowly modernizing society and the collusion of the police
and some Juárez politicians with the criminal organizations suspected
of committing and covering up the crimes. Before long, dark alliances
between corrupt officials, venal law enforcement, and heavily armed
drug cartels became entrenched across Mexico, crippling its democratic
development.

In the 1990s El Paso was also an early testing ground for what would
become the Border Patrol’s dominant strategy, as it shifted from
rounding up migrants after they had crossed the border to setting up
concentrated, aggressive deployments at certain, mainly urban, points
along the boundary line, in order to deter unlawful crossings. The
Border Patrol took these deterrence measures to San Diego and other
border cities, with the effect of pushing undocumented crossers out
into scorching deserts and craggy mountains, leading to a steady rise
in migrant deaths along the line.

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In the years when free trade optimism was still fresh, Alfredo Holguin
and his brothers started a bus company in Juárez that carried people
around in the city’s sprawl. Their family enterprise thrived. But
drug cartels started to compete for _plazas_,_ _or turf, at transit
points like El Paso. Around 2008 local cartel henchmen began demanding
_derecho de piso_,_ _a protection fee, from the Holguins. For a while
they paid, until another group of gang members, possibly a rival
cartel, wanted its payments as well. One Holguin brother later
recalled “the deep inner terror that became part of their everyday
lives” as the death threats multiplied and Juárez descended into
lawlessness. In 2009 Alfredo’s twenty-three-year-old son was gunned
down while out with a friend at a bar. With that the Holguin clan fled
to El Paso—all of them except Alfredo, whose border crossing
document had been revoked.

By Ulloa’s account, the Holguins never felt entirely settled on the
American side of the river. They founded an organization called
Mexicanos en Exilio that helped Mexicans gain legal status, including
through the relatively novel approach of requesting asylum. Before
that time the legal route of asylum had not been much used by
Mexicans, because it was difficult for them to show in immigration
court that they were not economic migrants but victims of persecution.
Despite the proliferating violence in Mexico, asylum generally
remained unavailable to them. With enforcement intensifying and border
walls rising, the divide between immigrants with US documents and
those without became starkly significant. Alfredo Holguin eventually
joined his family in El Paso, but he died of Covid in 2020 without
ever achieving the affirming safeguard of asylum status.

This saga of strife and bloodshed is tempered by a strikingly
different view from the author herself as she returns home to El Paso
for family visits and research. She summons affectionate memories of
her high school years in the city that locals call El Chuco, a
nickname whose origins remain in dispute. Ulloa was a wayward
teenager, a _vaga_, frustrated by how little trendy Latina clothing
she could purchase owing to her divorced mother’s meager resources.
Her social group, largely untouched by the mayhem on all sides, moved
easily across the border and was differentiated by a precise taxonomy
of race, class, and geography:

We called ourselves Mexicanos and México Americanos and Hispanics and
Latinos. Afro-Latinos and Blaxicans. Gringos and gabachos and coconuts
if we looked Mexican but acted white. Fresas and juniors if we had a
little money. Mexas and Frontchis if we came in from Ciudad Juárez or
looked like it.

(The latter was a reference to Mexican license plates marked
“FRONT” for _frontera_, or border, and “CHIH” for the Mexican
state of Chihuahua.) There were “nerdy Latinos and punk Latinos and
later emo Latinos,” she recalls. “There were Latinos who were rich
and Latinos who were poor. Latinos who were all shades of black,
brown, and beige.” By her account they all got along, with little
judgment: “My hometown afforded me the privilege to be all parts of
myself—as much Mexican as American, as much from here as from
there.”

Surrounding Ulloa’s stories of the migrating families is a sweeping
review of the many histories that converged at El Paso over the
century. The book races through the Mexican Revolution; through
decades of US immigration expansion and contraction; through the
growth of the Border Patrol and the interior enforcement police;
through the inexorable rise of drug cartel power in Mexico and the
failing US and Mexican drug wars; through feckless efforts in
Washington at immigration reform; and much more. It is colorful and
informative, if at times dizzying.

The last person she focuses on is Kaxh Mura’l, a Mayan activist
forced to flee in 2019 from right-wing hit squads in the highlands of
Guatemala. He represents the most recent generation of migrants
through El Paso, coming from Central America and farther south. Like
Mura’l, many hundreds of thousands of them came to the US border and
asked for asylum, initiating legal cases that have overloaded the
already dysfunctional immigration court system to the point of
foundering. In telling the story of Mura’l, Ulloa haphazardly
condenses centuries of foreign domination and often bloody race and
class conflict in Guatemala. She suggests a direct causal connection
between the US interventions of the cold war—especially the
CIA-engineered coup in 1954—and migration streams more than sixty
years later. (At one point she refers to a second “CIA-backed
coup” in Guatemala, said to have been in 1982 and “authorized by
President Ronald Reagan,” but provides no sourcing for readers
looking to know more about this claim of decisive US participation in
those events.) The 1954 coup was a catastrophe from which Guatemalan
democracy and society have never fully recovered, and the genocidal
slaughter by the Guatemalan military in the Mayan highlands in the
early 1980s, a legacy of the coup, has been conclusively documented.
But Washington lost strategic interest in Guatemala after the
UN-brokered peace accords between the government and leftist rebels in
1996. Since then US administrations have modestly funded programs to
fortify democracy and combat organized crime, and provided military
aid to counter narcotics traffickers, with limited success. Ulloa does
not elucidate more contemporary causes of the exodus of indigenous
Guatemalans. She does portray the dystopian dangers Mura’l
encountered at the US border while he waited for more than a year in
Juárez, dodging extortionist drug gangs, for his asylum claim to be
processed in a system that Trump, during his first term, tried hard to
close down.

Ulloa is not a historian; she is a journalist on a voyage of discovery
through the history of her city. She names the historians and other
scholars whose research she draws on and credits them in her
bibliography. But some passages need more careful attribution. She
writes, for example, that El Paso sits “at the center of three
border wars, not one: a war against drugs, a war against migrants, and
a war against terror on the American homeland.” This flourish would
seem to call for a more explicit nod to the scholar Tony Payan, whose
book, published in 2006, was titled _The Three US-Mexico Border Wars:
Drugs, Immigration, and Homeland Security_.

_El Paso_ closes with the advent of Trump 2.0, as the president
revives the specter of an alien invasion to justify a mass deportation
blitz. Yet the outcomes for Ulloa’s families are mostly positive,
proving her point about borderland social mobility. Raúl Reyes, the
grandson of Miguel Martinez, is a historian in El Paso dedicated to
recovering the past of his and many other Texas families. The judge
who arraigned the Walmart shooter in an El Paso courtroom was a
descendant of the Chews. Blanca and Susan Rubio, the daughters of
Sabino, were elected to seats in the California state legislature.

“We are those bad Mexicans that he talks about,” Blanca Rubio
said, referring to Trump, in a newspaper interview not long after
Susan was sworn in. “We were undocumented, and then we fought hard,
we got an education, and now we’re sitting here.”

In his State of the Union address this February, President Trump
revived the tropes of Manifest Destiny to express his view of the
nation’s origins. Americans, he said, had “carved pass through an
unforgiving wilderness, settled a boundless frontier, and tamed the
beautiful but very, very dangerous wild west. From empty marshes and
wide-open plains, we raised up the world’s greatest cities.” Ulloa
comprehensively refutes this version of events. In the Texas
borderlands, the marshes were never empty nor were the plains wide
open. The story Ulloa tells also makes clear that the unfettered
nativism of Trump’s second term is not new in American history—not
the poisonous invective depicting Venezuelans and other immigrants as
gangsters and thieves, not the cruel removals of people who provide
essential labor in American workplaces, not the roundups that ensnare
noncitizens and citizens alike.

The border at El Paso is quieter now than it has been in decades, as
Trump has made good on at least one of his campaign promises, to
impose control by blocking illegal crossings and eliminating access to
asylum along the boundary line. By the end of Trump’s first year
back in the White House, Border Patrol encounters with migrants at the
Mexican border had plummeted to the lowest numbers since 1970,
according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center.

Yet, consistent with Ulloa’s argument, El Paso is still an epicenter
of the United States’ system of social engineering through
immigration. Despite the calm at the border, the city has not been
spared Trump’s deportation campaign. The Catholic bishop of El Paso,
Mark J. Seitz, in a pastoral message shared in parishes throughout the
diocese on March 15, described its impacts. “Neighbors are being
snatched as they walk out of immigration court proceedings
downtown,” the bishop reported.

Workers are being taken from construction sites across the city….
Young women are languishing in mental torture for months in private
detention centers, even when, coerced by the conditions of their
imprisonment, they beg to be deported…. So many people are once
again being made to feel like they are less than American.

In the first half of 2025, El Paso was second in the country in the
number of deportation arrests of immigrants after hearings at the
city’s immigration courts, surpassed only by arrests at the courts
in New York City, according to a study by the mathematician Joseph
Gunther.

El Paso is also a major juncture in the United States’ punitive
immigration infrastructure. Not far from downtown sits Camp East
Montana, an enormous tent city constructed in 2025 in a bleak patch on
the grounds of Fort Bliss, a US Army base that makes recurring
appearances in Ulloa’s account. The camp is the country’s largest
immigration detention center, part of an archipelago that the
Department of Homeland Security is assembling nationwide to hold as
many as 100,000 immigrants. People who were arrested as far away as
Chicago and Minneapolis have been sent to Camp East Montana. Under
Trump’s rules, immigrants have been denied bond and forced to wait
out slow-moving immigration court proceedings in detention, with the
evident intent of causing them to despair and leave the United States
on their own. To date more than four hundred federal judges and three
appeals courts have ruled this policy unlawful and ordered immigrants
released; two appeals courts have backed the policy, allowing DHS to
continue.

Despite receiving $45 billion for detention in Trump’s big 2025 tax
and spending bill, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has
demonstrated that it is overwhelmed by the demands of jailing so many
people. Almost as soon as it opened, Camp East Montana devolved into a
hellhole with inedible food, eating areas flooded with sewage, a lack
of basic hygiene, and dangerously inadequate medical care that led to
outbreaks of measles and tuberculosis, according to a report in
December by the American Civil Liberties Union that was based on
interviews with forty-five detainees. The death on January 3 of a
Cuban detainee, Geraldo Lunas Campos, was ruled a homicide by the El
Paso County medical examiner. It was the result of a “spontaneous
use of force” by guards, ICE admitted in an official incident
report. The report states that the guards were trying to prevent Lunas
Campos “from harming himself.” But a witness interviewed by the
_El Paso Times_ said he heard the man pleading for asthma medication.
Lunas Campos is one of three detainees who have died in the camp since
December. According to a report published on June 9 by the US
Government Accountability Office, another detainee died in January by
suicide after being left alone and unattended in a windowless holding
room. The GAO report found that some of the teeming dormitories at the
camp were cleaned only once a week. No treatment plans were in place
for detainees with HIV or diabetes. The conditions posed “serious
risks to the safety and security” of detained people and staff, the
report found. In March ICE fired the contractor running the facility,
but then hired another one instead of closing the camp down.

What is new in Trump’s second term is the scale of the deportation
blitz. The whole country is becoming a borderland, as DHS tries to
achieve Trump’s goal of deporting one million people this fiscal
year. Acting largely on his executive edicts, agents have extended
into the country’s interior the race-based stops, strong-arm
arrests, disregard for due process, and fast-track removals that have
long been the regular practice of the Border Patrol in remote reaches
along the line. A Border Patrol chief from California, Gregory Bovino,
led Operation Metro Surge, the occupation by more than three thousand
agents of Minneapolis and surrounding areas, applying what he called,
in an interview with _The New York Times_, his strategy of “total
immigration domination.” After the shooting deaths of Renee Good and
Alex Pretti, protesters who were US citizens, Trump sensed that the
show of force had gone too far. He replaced Homeland Security
Secretary Kristi Noem with Markwayne Mullin, a Republican senator who
is equally hard-line but said in his confirmation hearing that DHS
would be less conspicuous: “My goal in six months is that we’re
not in the lead story every single day.” Bovino retired. But under
the command of the “border czar,” Tom Homan, agents are still
hunting down immigrants, regardless of whether they have criminal
records, in homes, schools, grocery store parking lots, and
workplaces, if less noisily. On June 5 the Republican-led Congress
voted to provide another $70 billion to ICE, Customs and Border
Protection, and other DHS offices for enforcement, detention, and
deportation.

Also new is the widespread resistance to Trump’s crackdown. In Los
Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Charlotte, and many other places where
ICE arrived—including El Paso—citizens have rallied with whistles
and horns to alert immigrants of danger, tracked agents’ movements
with phone cameras in hand, provided food for families too scared to
leave their homes, and even offered places for them to hide. When ICE
has tried to open new detention centers, towns have been fighting back
with lawsuits, city council resolutions, environmental restrictions,
petition drives, and street protests. Places as distant as Chester,
New York, and Oklahoma City have succeeded in stopping ICE’s
projects. As with the social blend of El Paso, many immigrant families
now include a mix of legal status, with undocumented parents, US-born
children (who are by definition citizens), and relatives with other
forms of status. Neighbors can see that the kids attend local schools
and the parents work in the community. More Americans have become
witnesses to the damage left behind when parents are separated from
their children, including many who are US citizens, and deported.
Polls show that Trump’s assault is losing public support. In a
survey in March by the Public Religion Research Institute only 35
percent of Americans rated Trump’s handling of immigration
favorably, down from 48 percent in March 2025; 48 percent held very
unfavorable views. If Ulloa’s history is any guide, it may be that
the country is reaching the nadir of one of its perennial immigration
cycles.

_JULIA PRESTON is a former national immigration correspondent for The
New York Times and a former contributing writer at the Marshall
Project._

_THE NEW YORK REVIEW was launched during the New York City newspaper
strike of 1963, when the magazine’s founding editors, Robert Silvers
and Barbara Epstein, alongside Jason Epstein, Robert Lowell, and
Elizabeth Hardwick, decided to start a new kind of publication—one
in which the most interesting, lively, and qualified minds of the time
could write about current books and issues in depth. _

_Readers responded by buying almost every copy and writing thousands
of letters to demand that the Review continue. From the beginning,
the editors were determined that the Review should be an independent
publication; it began life as an editorial voice beholden to no one,
and it remains so today._

_Subscribe to the New York Review of Books_
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