When they saw their house engulfed in flames, as if a fire-breathing dragon were slowly swallowing it, the Gutiérrez-Pulido family felt they had lost too much: the birth photos of their three children, now reduced to ashes; the collection of Princess House pots, disfigured by the fire; the children’s musical instruments, reduced to rubble; even the jacket their eldest son, 17, had bought for his high school graduation. “When he looked at the fire, Ángel just kept saying, ‘My senior jacket, my senior jacket!’” says his mother, Griselda Pulido. They had lost so much, and yet life still had something more to take from them. Three days later, while he was clearing the rubble of the house where they had lived for 20 years, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) took the father, José Mendoza Gutierrez, and the family thought that now they were completely lost.
The day before his arrest, on January 20, 2026, Gutiérrez, a 45-year-old Mexican man who had arrived from the state of Guerrero when he was 15, stood in front of what remained of his house in Nacogdoches, a quiet town of about 30,000 residents in East Texas, and told his wife and some neighbors who were with him: “My house burned down, now pray for me so that immigration doesn’t catch me.” The family, like anyone else in their undocumented status, lived with that fear. Gutiérrez wasn’t joking about the possibility of being detained; he simply felt like the most wretched man on Earth.
A raging fire engulfed their home in just a few hours on Sunday afternoon, reducing the hard-won house to rubble. On the afternoon of January 18, the family attended a service at the Apostolic Church of the Faith in Christ Jesus, about 10 minutes from their house. Their youngest child had turned eight the day before, and the father had promised to take her to one of the Olive Garden Italian chain restaurants in the city of Lufkin. It was around five in the afternoon when they left the church and arrived at the location. A neighbor had been calling Pulido’s cell phone, but no one answered. After they finished dinner, the mother answered the phone. “I said, ‘What’s going on?’” The neighbor on the other end sounded frightened, her voice trembling with emotion. “Your house. Your house is burning,” she managed to say.
They left the restaurant and got into the car. They couldn’t believe what was happening. The children asked what was going on. “I told them our house was on fire and they started crying. I felt helpless, I wanted to get there and do something, but all I did was try to calm down,” Pulido says.
After a long twenty-minute drive, the family arrived in the Nacogdoches neighborhood and saw the gathering of neighbors, friends, onlookers, and firefighters. It seemed as if they were all attending a wake for a corpse, which was none other than their house, consumed by fire with no one able to do much to stop it. Pulido stared: “I didn’t know what to do. I watched it burn. Everything was engulfed in flames. The porch was consumed, the house was half-destroyed, and the fire kept burning. Two bathrooms, the living room, the dining room, and the kitchen were all burned. The children were crying and screaming.” The firefighters tried to extinguish the flames with water, but the fire continued to rage. The mother watched as the fire reached her bedroom, as it entered her privacy without her being able to close the door.
Around 1:00 a.m., when the fire—whose cause is still unknown—was under control, the family left, burdened by the understanding that nothing from then on would be easy. The firefighters asked them to wait 72 hours before beginning the cleanup. They spent the first few nights in a hotel. Pulido found it hard to believe that something like this had happened to them. “You try so hard to build something, and now there’s nothing left,” he says.
By Wednesday, they had decided to start their lives over: they took the children to school, the mother set about getting clothes for all four of them, and the father, a man with many friends, organized a group to begin collecting trash and cleaning up the mess left by the fire. Gutiérrez, who worked for a metal roofing company, attached a trailer to the back of his pickup truck, which, with help, he filled with debris. The father went out to take the accumulated trash to a landfill, and on his way back, a highway patrol officer stopped him, demanding his documents and a driver’s license, which Gutiérrez couldn’t provide. He was undocumented, like nearly 2.1 million other immigrants living in Texas, or like the almost 15 million who remain undocumented throughout the United States.
Gutiérrez, stranded by the side of the road, managed to send a message to his wife. “‘Gris, the police stopped me.’ That was all he could write.” Then Pulido called him, but Gutiérrez didn’t answer. His uncle, who was with him, asked the officer if he was going to send him to immigration authorities. The officer said no. Gutiérrez himself let him know that he wasn’t doing anything wrong, just collecting the remains of his burned-down house. “The officer told him he was sorry, but that he didn’t have a driver’s license,” his wife recounts.
“Homeless, and left like this, with nothing, on the street, and then they take José, the head of the household…,” says Pulido, unable to hold back her tears. The mother had to break the news of another loss to her children for the second time in four days. Since then, they haven’t stopped asking questions. The youngest of the three has asked, “Why did immigration take dad?” The oldest can’t imagine reaching the end of his high school studies and his father not being there, enjoying his band’s last concert.
For nearly a week, no one heard from Gutiérrez; he didn’t show up on any locator, and they had no idea how to find him. Although the family says there had been few arrests in Nacogdoches since the Trump administration began its anti-immigrant raids, Texas was one of the hardest-hit states in late 2025, with more than 33,136 people detained by ICE. Now, Pulido says, they’ve heard of more arrests in the area, which used to be a peaceful place that seemed to protect them from the situation that terrifies so many across the country.
Now the father remains at the Cameron County Detention Center in Brownsville, 500 miles from what used to be his home. From there, he calls and asks how the children are doing, or if friends have helped Pulido clear the rubble, or if the church members have joined in the cleanup efforts at what’s left of the house. There are days when Gutiérrez tells his wife, “If they had taken me, but at least they had the house, it would be different.” But his wife knows that’s not the case, that the house can be rebuilt, but that their greatest fear is the possibility of losing him.
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