Hold the Line
ON ELECTION NIGHT in 2016, Carlos Spector turned off the TV as soon as the networks called it. He shifted on the couch toward his wife, Sandra, and said, “We’re fucked, honey.” The next morning he awoke at 4:30 like always and drove across El Paso to the two-story law office with his name out front. The mahogany desk upstairs was littered with case files. As he sat in front of the large windows that overlooked the border, he asked himself, What are we going to do? Soon attorneys all along the US-Mexico line called him asking that same question, because he was Carlos Spector, and surely he had a plan.
His plan, he said, was to wait.
Spector specializes in arguing asylum cases with the worst odds, and after working for nearly 30 years in one of the country’s strictest immigration courts, he’d learned the value of patience. Sometimes it was only a matter of finding the right client, like in the early 1990s, when he represented a border-town mayor who, threatened by machine politicians, became one of the first Mexicans to win asylum in the modern era. Since then, Spector had become something of a border celebrity. Sandra complains to this day that they can’t go to a restaurant without someone—a local who Spector helped with her papers, a newcomer refugee—yelling, “¡Abogado! ¡Abogado!”—Lawyer! Lawyer! Many people still recognize him from the early 2000s, when his firm rented an hour of TV time on a cross-border station, between the telenovelas, answering immigration questions for free. “If you want to throw your money away, give it to me,” he’d joke. “At least I’ll tell you the truth.” The program generated steady clients, as well as the cases he craved: those that would force the United States to accept the violent realities immigrants were fleeing.
But by the time Donald Trump’s “Build the
