In recent years, Los Fresnos has changed, much like the rest of the Rio Grande Valley. More retail chains are coming to the town of around 8,400, mostly along Highway 100—called Ocean Boulevard in town. Suburbs expand from that road toward Olmito or Bayview, with the oldest neighborhoods being rural colonias or collections of craftsman homes. The farmland and railroad tracks that spurred the city’s development remain, but it is the roadside businesses that most people know—including, for the last 13 years, Abby’s Bakery.
Abby’s has been a mainstay stop for conchas and donuts not just for the growing population of Los Fresnos locals but also for those traveling to or from the coastal town of Port Isabel and the touristy South Padre Island. Now, Abby’s has become something else as well: a target of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans.
In the weeks after Trump’s second inauguration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents began making highly publicized arrests, including in Cameron County—home to Los Fresnos—where 8.5 percent of the population is undocumented.
Social media livestreams have shown ICE actions in real time across the Valley. On February 12, video footage circulated on Facebook showing apparent arrests being made by agents with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the wing of ICE ostensibly focused on transnational crime, in the parking lot of Abby’s Bakery. According to a federal criminal complaint filed two days later in the Southern District Court of Texas, eight undocumented immigrants were apprehended that day at Abby’s, including two who were designated as witnesses in an investigation into the bakery’s owners, Leonardo Baez and Nora Alicia Avila-Guel, for “bringing in and harboring certain aliens and aiding and abetting the harboring of aliens.”
