DALLAS — Carlos Joaquin Salinas feels desperate, lonely and tempted.
As the Guatemalan migrant awaits an asylum hearing scheduled for 2026, he is recruiting family and friends from his homeland to join him in North Texas. He’s even talking to the smuggler who once charged him and his son Fernando $6,000 to cross the border between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso.
So far, he has helped more than 40 undocumented workers come to the Dallas area, he says. His actions come at the behest of employers who want more workers like him: agile, energetic people “que saben echarle ganas – who don’t quit,” he said.
The job opportunities are such that when he’s not fixing roofs, or working flea markets, he’s mowing lawns from Fort Worth to Frisco, thanks to his new landscaping business. His co-employee: his 14-year-old son, who’s on summer break.
“If I was to bring everyone I knew back in Guatemala – everyone I played soccer and baseball with, the ones who once shared a dream of being farmers like me – there still wouldn’t be enough” workers to fill jobs in the area, said Joaquin, 34.
After crossing the border in 2019, the migrant agreed to check in periodically with The Dallas Morning News about his asylum case and how he and his son adapt to life here. Over four years, interviews have offered a glimpse into the real-time evolution of an immigrant amid shifting immigration policies.
In many ways, Joaquin’s effort to help bring his friends and family to North Texas represents the kind of immigrant network-building dating back generations.
During wars, immigrants are eagerly greeted by communities, as was the case during World War I, World War II and the Korean War. In current times, migrants are often scapegoats for politicians trying to score points with voters, said Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.
“It’s sort of like a pendulum that goes back and forth,” he said. “Anti-immigrant, pro-immigrant, less immigrant- or more immigrant-friendly policies — it just depends on the politics of the moment.”
Joaquin’s story reflects an immigration system that too often forces employers to rely on “personal connections” to take care of their labor needs, Ruiz said. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates there are some 9.9 million job openings in the United States, with only an estimated 5.8 million unemployed workers.
The burden often falls on undocumented workers to help with labor shortages, and that leads to migrants recruiting other migrants to come to the U.S., Ruiz said. “To be fair, most of immigration is about personal connections, right?” he said. “Somebody who comes in… and says, ‘I made it, so can you.’ That’s the sort of driving force behind it.”
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Joaquin could make money by helping migrants come to North Texas, but he has resisted that temptation, he said. He is helping them because they are relatives and friends, and they are poor, just like he was when he lived in Guatemala.
“This is part of being a good Christian,” he said.
Adapting to a new country
The News first shared Joaquin’s story in April 2019, when Donald Trump was president. Joaquin remains grateful to him for the opportunity to request asylum.
He cited extortion and gang threats as reasons for leaving Guatemala. Two of his family members had been killed by gangs. Climate change was making farming more difficult each year. He sold a plot of land, three cows and two chickens to finance his trip, heading to the U.S. to work, and sent money home to his wife and two other children.
He harbored bitter feelings for smugglers who promised him an easy trip to a country they said needed him, especially if he brought a child with him. He picked Fernando, the eldest of his three children, to make the journey.
The smuggler left the father and son on the Mexican side and told them to run across a busy highway. On the U.S. side, they turned themselves in to the Border Patrol. The agency was so overwhelmed with migrants that border agents held them temporarily under an international bridge surrounded by chain link fences. They felt like “caged animals, [part of] a circus,” Joaquin recalled.
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Detention centers were filled to capacity, so Joaquin didn’t go through a typical asylum process to establish “credible fear” in his homeland. Instead, he gave U.S. immigration authorities an address in North Texas and promised to make every appointment until a judge ruled on his case for asylum. His initial court date was the summer of 2019. That was quickly postponed until a year later.
When the pandemic came in 2020, he went from regretting his move to fearing he would die from COVID-19. Last year, he vowed that by 2023, certainly no later than 2024, he’d return to Guatemala.
But to mark his fourth anniversary in North Texas this spring, Joaquin did what he’s done from the beginning: He showed up to his appointment only to be told his hearing has been delayed until the summer of 2026, underscoring a backlog of more than 2 million cases in immigration court, according to TRAC, a data-gathering organization at Syracuse University.
“I was depressed” about the delay, Joaquin said. “I was dreaming I was home again. Yes, it’s dangerous there, but I miss living life.” In the U.S., he works seven days a week and said he has “forgotten how to live.”
Missing his family
He feels uneasy going out and socializing because he is undocumented, he said. He feels desperate, because he doesn’t know when he’ll ever be able to return to his homeland to see his son and daughter, both pre-teens, and his mother and grandmother.
He feels lonely, as he can only connect with his two younger kids via a video call a few times a week. His mother is recovering from a brain hemorrhage.
“Sometimes, I dream that I go back to visit, and everyone is dead,” he said.
The U.S. has been good to his son Fernando, as he is learning English and getting an education.
Fernando said he thinks his father wishes he were back home in Guatemala. “I promised him from Day One we would be together no matter what he decides, and that’s how I feel today,” Fernando said. “I want him to be happy, and I don’t think he is. He works too much.”
Related:North Texas migrant sees awful irony — his success is why others die to reach U.S.
In the past few years, Joaquin has sent money back to his family, and they have built a new home and opened a small grocery store. He is also building a new home for his mother, with the help of his brother and sister.
Both arrived last year with his financial help. The two siblings told their older brother how the pandemic has taken a dramatic toll on Guatemala. His priest in his home region of Santa Rosa, Guatemala, told him the pandemic decimated Latin American economies that were once projected to grow.
The region was also hit with two strong hurricanes. The decline in economic growth is expected to worsen income inequality and poverty in the region, according to the Congressional Research Service.
An estimated 10% of Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans now live in the U.S., according to a Migration Policy Institute study co-authored by Ruiz and published in June. Remittances represent as much as one-quarter of GDP for each country.
An estimated 3.2 million immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala live in the U.S. Of that, about 1.1 million are Guatemalan natives, according to an MPI study last May.
Joaquin’s siblings and other new arrivals started raising money through a tanda. This is a form of savings between friends or coworkers who contribute an agreed-upon amount of money to a weekly or monthly pool.
But the tanda became unreliable. This year, many of the arrivals, including Joaquin’s brother and sister, left North Texas. Some went to Austin. Others left for the Northeast, where labor shortages are so deep employers, especially in food service, lure workers with cash, as much as $30 an hour, friends have told Joaquin.
The 40 workers he brought in have dwindled to about half of that, he said.
Talking to the smuggler
Employers asked Joaquin to bring more workers like him. These days, he’s providing the financial loans on his own and talking to the smuggler who brought him and others to figure out the safest route. For now, he’s bypassing Ciudad Juárez, where at least 17 of the 40 migrants killed in a fire inside an immigration federal detention center were from Guatemala.
In North Texas, migrants keep coming, not just from outside the U.S., but from within, he said.
Lately, a new batch of migrants from Florida arrived in the Dallas area after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a 2024 Republican presidential contender, signed a new law to tighten restrictions on Florida’s undocumented community.
The law voids out-of-state driver’s licenses for those without proof of citizenship and requires companies in Florida to verify the immigration status of workers, a move that’s led to an exodus to states like Texas. Gov. Greg Abbott, who has made border security one of his key priorities, is calling for bigger penalties against human smugglers.
While politics play out, Joaquin is overwhelmed but buoyed by the latest development in his life.
Lonely in this new country, he met a Guatemalan woman last year and formed a relationship. This spring, he became a father of a baby boy. He beamed as he showed pictures. The smile on his face soon disappeared and he had tears in his eyes.
Success, he said, has come at a steep price. His wife in Guatemala left him soon after he departed. She still calls him for remittances, even though his two sons live with his mother.
Through a WhatsApp video call, he presented his baby son to his loved ones in Guatemala to “much cheering and laughter,” and that helped him cope with his loneliness, he said.
Still, desperation persists.
“The American dream is at times a nightmare, not easy,” he said. “The young one renews a sense of hope, and my son loves his baby brother. But I may never go home again, at least not for a long time.”
