When Elmer Romero walks into his Gulfton office lately, the lobby is mostly empty – a sharp change from the crowds that once waited there for help with immigration cases.
When he and his coworkers go to a nearby Salvadoran restaurant for lunch, they’re often the only customers. And when he drives around the neighborhood on weekends, he sees fewer families celebrating birthdays in neighborhood parks.
This is life in Gulfton, known as the Ellis Island of Houston, under the second administration of President Donald Trump. More than half of the neighborhood’s residents were born outside the United States, according to Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, making Gulfton the largest immigrant community in Houston…