San Antonio, Texas, resonates with the sounds of Mexican rancheras and ballads. It was in one of the city’s public schools that educator and local music icon Belle Ortiz launched a mariachi training program in 1970, one that later spread to middle schools, high schools and universities across the state. Together with her husband, she also founded the acclaimed mariachi ensemble Campanas de América, which performed for five U.S. presidents at the White House. The movement flourished and became deeply rooted in the culture of this predominantly Hispanic city before spreading across Texas.
But that community is now feeling the impact of U.S. President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and the cooperation between local and federal authorities in detaining migrants: at least five mariachi musicians have been arrested by immigration agents in recent months.
Violinist and singer Brenda Smith knows three of them personally. From March onward, she performed every Friday and Sunday with a mariachi group that disbanded after two of its members were detained and a third was deported to Mexico. “This situation is horrible. How do you think I feel when I’m the only one from the group who’s still free? I loved playing with them,” the Mexican-American musician tells EL PAÍS.
Hebert Ibarra, 20, was detained by immigration agents on June 25 in the town of China Grove, east of San Antonio, while driving home after a performance at a birthday party. He was still wearing his charro suit. His wife, Marisol Pantoja, wrote on Facebook that she did not learn of his whereabouts until the following day: he had been transferred to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center about an hour from their home. Ibarra played the vihuela with the group.
Then, on August 10, the band’s trumpeter and singer, Reny Colina, was detained following a traffic stop, according to a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Since then, he has been held at the South Texas ICE Processing Center, about an hour southwest of San Antonio.
Ibarra was released on bond on July 11, a DHS spokesperson said. Days earlier, during Independence Day celebrations, he had sung the U.S. national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner, at the detention center. Both details were later confirmed on social media by Texas Congressman Joaquín Castro, who represents San Antonio.
Colina, who had his first asylum hearing in a court in January 2026, is still in detention. DHS said in an email that he will remain in ICE custody “pending his removal proceedings and will receive due process.” The agency said that although the Venezuelan had work authorization and a pending application, “that does not confer legal status in the United States.”
But neither Brenda Smith nor San Antonio’s mariachi community have remained silent after learning of these arrests. Organizing collectively, they have lobbied lawmakers including Congressman Joaquín Castro to press federal authorities to release their fellow musicians.
‘They are not criminals’
The first mariachi arrests Anthony Medrano learned about were those of the Gámez-Cuéllar brothers Antonio, 18, and Joshua, 14, and their family after they attended a routine ICE check-in on February 25. He heard about it from a friend — a middle-school mariachi teacher — who wrote to tell him about the case.
Medrano, a well-known San Antonio mariachi with nearly 48 years as a musician, says the brothers are prominent artists in Texas and members of the distinguished Mariachi Oro at McAllen Middle School. Months before their detention, he says, they had been invited to the U.S. Congress, where they performed rancheras. Together with their bandmates, they had won nearly a dozen state championships.
“Mariachi music was helping them build a path to a great future, to college. So losing them to the system and having them removed from our country would also have been a loss for the nation, and would have deprived our communities of upright and brilliant people. And as we all say: they are not criminals,” Medrano says by phone, seated in a San Antonio restaurant as mariachi music plays in the background.
The Gámez-Cuéllar family was released by ICE in early March. Antonio was greeted by teachers and classmates outside the El Valle detention center in Texas, while his parents and younger siblings were later released from ICE’s controversial family detention facility in Dilley, also in Texas.
Brenda Smith and Anthony Medrano know each other, not only through the close-knit mariachi community but also through their advocacy on behalf of fellow musicians. Medrano says the most recent known detention involved the founder of a mariachi group in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, near the southern border, last weekend. He was stopped while driving his pickup truck on the way to church.
Although only some mariachi musicians have been detained, Medrano says “no one is safe.” Under the Trump administration, where ICE agents have allegedly stopped people based on their appearance, he says there is “concern” among mariachis because their traditional charro suits make them instantly recognizable when they perform in public.
Smith says that when the group she performed with, including her friend Reny Colina, collapsed, she lost not only a friend and colleague but also a source of income.
The loss
Smith has stayed in touch with Reny Colina’s family. She met him in February while they were playing together and says she was struck by his voice. “It was strong, in tune, he could harmonize,” she recalls. She was equally impressed by his trumpet playing. “He played with real power.”
Colina is far from a novice musician. According to Medrano, he studied music in his native Venezuela at a conservatory within El Sistema, the country’s renowned youth orchestra program, which has trained hundreds of professional musicians who now perform with leading orchestras around the world. One of its most famous alumni is Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel.
Speaking from her home in San Antonio, Colina’s sister, who asked not to be named for fear of being detained, told EL PAÍS that the house has fallen silent since his arrest.
“If he wasn’t playing the trumpet, he was on guitar,” she says by phone. “He sang in the shower.” She says her brother had been a mariachi since 2020, when he formed a band with friends in Venezuela. After migrating to the United States in 2024, she says he began searching social media for mariachi bands in San Antonio. When he was invited to collaborate with one in September of that year, he was thrilled.
“He likes being a mariachi,” she says. “He’s deeply in love with what he does; it’s his passion.”
Now, in the detention center, his sister says Reny cannot even sing. When he calls, he tells her he fears losing the shape of his embouchure, the muscle control that has allowed him to play the trumpet so powerfully for years.
When Smith thinks of Colina, she recalls with particular fondness when they performed together in restaurants Amor de los dos, by Mexican singer Vicente Fernández. “We’d play around with the song; we’d hug each other.”
She says that even though San Antonio is a city of musicians, Reny’s show, his voice, and his love for the audience and the world of mariachi are not easy to replace. “Although he’s small in stature, his voice is beautiful and truly powerful. My dream is for him to get out of there and come back to singing.”
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition
