In the northwest corner of Arkansas, immigrants, mostly from Mexico, began arriving in the 1980s to work in the region’s thriving poultry industry.
For many here, this was ultimately a welcomed development. Immigrants, they say, are a big part of the region’s extraordinary economic success. Chris Allred, who has lived in this area all his life, doesn’t see it that way.
Mr. Allred, a recruiter at a trucking company, does not like people who enter the country illegally. He believes they are “an army of takers,” filling spots in emergency rooms and schools that American citizens have to pay for. He does not like President Trump, either, but one of the reasons he voted for him last year was that it seemed as though he would actually take action on immigration.
“We don’t have an industrial base anymore,” Mr. Allred told me over dinner at his apartment in Bentonville. “We have trillions in national debt. It’s impossible. We can’t take on millions more people. It’s financially not possible.”
But something has happened in Mr. Allred’s life that is bumping up against this view. He finally met, and married, the love of his life. And his wife is in the country illegally.
Mr. Allred’s story may be unusual, but his views of immigration are not. For many Americans, a loose border is like a house with no door, or a club with no membership restrictions. It makes belonging, or being inside, mean less. But once the door is closed and the question becomes what to do with those inside, things can get complicated quickly.
“It all sounds great until you get a call from the mayor of a small community who says, ‘Why are your agents catching the dad of the valedictorian of our high school class?’” said Asa Hutchinson, the former Republican governor of Arkansas who lives in the neighboring town of Rogers and helped oversee border enforcement in President George W. Bush’s administration.
“Everybody wants to enforce the law until it hits home with a personal story,” he said.
Mr. Allred, 48, grew up on a farm in western Arkansas. He watched as his father, a machinist, struggled to navigate a rapidly changing economy. His father lost three factory jobs when the companies that employed him either closed or moved their production abroad, including to Mexico. He tried raising chickens, but ended up losing his investment.
Mr. Allred went to college, something his father hadn’t done, but during his first year, his mother died of breast cancer and he dropped out. His sister had been murdered the year before, and the tragedies knocked his life off course. For years he was depressed. He contemplated suicide. He went from job to job, working in pool maintenance, ad sales at a newspaper, H.I.V. counseling and as a security guard at a nightclub. He wanted a family, but never felt stable enough to provide for one.
Two things broke the cycle. In 2018, he got a job he liked, working for a trucking company that was part of the now-booming economy of northwest Arkansas. And he moved back to the farm to take care of his beloved grandmother, Leta Mae Allred, who was 92. She told him that she prayed every day that he would find someone to marry. And when she died, on his 44th birthday, he promised himself he would try.
In the summer of 2023, using a dating app, he matched with a woman in Southern Illinois. Her name was Geleny, and she was from Ecuador. She was cute, he thought, and talkative.
“This was the only person I’ve ever been on text with for 12 hours, nonstop — I’ve never been like that,” he told me over dinner. Geleny, who goes by Gely, had prepared an Ecuadorean dish of spicy fish soup.
She had told Mr. Allred how she had moved from her small town to the capital, Quito, where she worked her way up in a media company, but lost the job when the company closed. She started a restaurant in the town she was from, but lost it in a flood. She decided that the way to get ahead financially was to go to the United States. So she left her three children, now ages 5, 8 and 23, with her father, and paid a coyote to make the trip.
The more they talked, the more he felt attached. At some point he also began to realize that she seemed to be in trouble. She was working in a restaurant and having arguments with the man who ran it. This activated something inside him. She needed his help. He told her he would drive up to see her.
“I just knew I had to help her,” he said.
It was late when he walked into the bar where she told him to meet her. He was nervous. As soon as they saw each other, he said, they kissed. Mr. Allred calls it their Hollywood moment.
“I knew I loved her from that exact time. I just knew,” he said. “I call it the spark.”
He told her he’d pay for a ticket back to Ecuador, or she could come to Arkansas with him. She chose Arkansas. He proposed later that summer. They got married on Leta Mae’s birthday, Dec. 30, in Liberty Baptist Church in Dutch Mills, Ark., the church she had belonged to for 75 years.
“She’s the woman that my grandma prayed for me to find,” Mr. Allred said.
‘A Walking Contradiction’
Mr. Allred’s objection to illegal immigration started with what he saw growing up: Arkansas jobs, like his father’s, going to Mexico, and Mexican workers coming to Arkansas. Those immigrants, he believes, were good for people who owned chicken companies, but less so for everybody else.
More recently, immigrants were coming illegally from all over the world, not just from Mexico. Mr. Allred remembers thinking that it felt like anybody could get in.
“This is going to be an absolutely horrendous thing I want to say, but if you can’t talk about the truth you really can’t have a real conversation,” he said. “They’re parasites. What do parasites do? Over time they eventually kill the host. And that’s what this country’s headed towards.”
One of the immigrants who had come in this most recent wave was Mrs. Allred. Her life seemed to contradict a lot of Mr. Allred’s assumptions. She was entrepreneurial. (She started a cleaning business a few months after arriving in Arkansas.) She was learning English quickly. She was not taking government benefits. She was not even going to the doctor. And she followed driving rules closer than he ever did.
So how did Mr. Allred reconcile these two versions of what an illegal immigrant was? Had his views changed? Before I had the chance to ask him, Mrs. Allred did.
“Baby, baby, I have a question,” she said to him after she’d put away the soup. “Before me, you didn’t like illegal immigrants?”
“I still don’t,” he said.
She laughed and turned to me to explain.
“He doesn’t like bad immigrants, he doesn’t like lazy immigrants, who take all that’s free in the country,” she said. “Maybe he likes good immigrants — smart, hardworking immigrants.”
Mr. Allred dipped into dessert, a slice of tiramisù. He acknowledged that there was an inconsistency between his views and his experience with his wife.
“I’m a walking contradiction,” he said, smiling.
He said if he’d known that Mrs. Allred had immigrated illegally from the beginning, he doubts he would have pursued a relationship with her.
“I may have said, ‘Hey, you know what, guess what, have a nice life — good luck,’” he said.
But he was in love. So he called a lawyer.
The Legal Way
Mr. Allred hired Aaron Cash, an immigration lawyer in the town of Rogers. His law partner is a man who fled the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s. Their office, in a building that used to be a TV station, is next to a Walmart. Many of his clients are walk-ins.
Mr. Cash got into immigration law by accident. Some of his friends were police officers, and he wanted to become a prosecutor, but he did not get hired as one after law school, so he ended up taking a job at an immigration law firm. At the time, he said, “I was clueless.” Like many people he knew, he assumed that becoming legal in America was easy.
“How hard can it be?” he said, describing the thinking, which he said had long been common, even among his lawyer friends who don’t know this area of law.
He eventually learned how hard it really was. Paths to legal residence for illegal immigrants are extremely limited. Even those with a privileged connection — such as a spouse or an adult child who is a citizen — often have to leave the country first and wait years.
“Every single person wants to do it the legal way if there is one,” Mr. Cash said. But for a vast majority of people he meets with, “there isn’t one.”
Mr. Cash said his firm had always been busy and that hadn’t changed since Mr. Trump returned to office. On a Wednesday afternoon in June, its phones were ringing constantly. But the work, he said, is different. More rushed, more deportations, some when he least expects it.
Like the marriage case he had in April. Mr. Cash was expecting it to be a routine interview — an American citizen taking a step to legalize her immigrant husband. Instead, the immigration officer assigned to conduct it delayed the appointment, and then said the computers were down. Mr. Cash said he realized what was happening only when he saw Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in the lobby.
Mr. Cash posted the story on Facebook. He said many people commented sympathetically, including a hard-right Trump supporter he knows who asked for the wife’s contact information so he could send her money.
“Sometimes it’s, ‘Oh, that’s a good one, but everybody else needs to be deported,’” he said of people’s views. “But sometimes it’s surprising.”
“People are more complicated than their Facebook posts.”
The Immigrant
On June 2, the Allreds were faced with a decision. They learned in an immigration court in Chicago that either they could file an asylum claim for Mrs. Allred, or she would have to leave the country. There was no other path available if she wanted to continue the legal process.
For Mr. Allred, it was the end of a two-year journey into an unfamiliar world. He has been to court hearings, paid legal fees and seen firsthand how hard it is to get legal status.
I asked if it had changed him. He said it had made him, “a little softer, a little more aware, a little more compassionate.”
He said he learned that the law was so slow and so restrictive that it was difficult to follow. He gave an example of a Haitian woman with her teenage son waiting ahead of them in line in Chicago. She was given a court date two years out. He said the legal limbo that creates is dangerous for immigrants.
“You work black-market jobs,” he said. “You can’t have a bank account. You’ve got to carry cash. You’re extremely vulnerable.”
I interviewed dozens of people in northwest Arkansas, and many expressed discomfort with the way Mr. Trump was going about reducing the numbers of illegal immigrants in the country. They liked the goal in the abstract, but the particulars of courthouse arrests and workplace raids rubbed many the wrong way.
This was also true for Mr. Allred. He called the arrests at courthouses a “dirty trick” played on people who were trying to follow the law.
“You show up, you think you’re trying to do the right thing, and ICE is right outside the door — no warning, no nothing,” he said. “I think if a person takes the responsibility to show up, they deserve a chance to at least go through the process.”
He said the number of illegal immigrants should be brought down, but not in the way it is happening now. His mind still contains a split screen: Yes, illegal immigrants are parasites, he believes. But no, they should not be treated inhumanely.
“Kristi Noem’s out there saying, ‘We’re gonna find you. We’re hunting you down.’ Like they’re animals,” Mr. Allred said, referring to the homeland security secretary. “No. They’re human beings. They’re people. There’s a base line of respect that they deserve.”
After their court hearing in Chicago, Mrs. Allred decided to leave the United States. Mr. Allred thought she had a reasonable asylum case. But if she lost, it would be much harder to return, and she was not willing to risk that. So she is going back to Ecuador. She has until Sept. 2 to exit.
Mr. Allred is going with her.
Shortly after turning 48, he will become an immigrant. He will be the one asking for entry, and trying to make his way. He said he had no idea what to expect. The only time he has been out of the United States was an hour in Tijuana, Mexico. He admits that he is terrified. He has been staying up late, doom-scrolling murder rates in Ecuadorean cities.
“You know, to myself, I’ve said a few times, I just kind of want my simple little life back,” he said.
Instead, he’s preparing to leave the country. He’s studying Spanish, and selling his belongings. He is starting to think about how he might work in Ecuador. Maybe in medical tourism.
He said he hoped Mrs. Allred would eventually become legal, and that they will get to return to the United States, maybe even with her children.
“I’ve said to my friends, maybe helping her get her kids and bring them to a place where they have some opportunity,” he said, “maybe that’s the one thing I do good in my life.”
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