HOUSTON – There’s a lot of fear and uncertainty circulating among the people that frequent this diverse nonprofit community center called the Neighborhood Centers Inc. on the heels of President Trump taking office.
The folks here want the city of Houston to remain as inviting as ever and there's fear that could change with the signing of Trump's immigration executive orders Wednesday.
Fidel Deaquino walks to his kindergarten classroom at the Neighborhood Centers Prromise Community School every day with pride.He’s a 23-year-old UT-Austin graduate with 22 students to look after.
“Within my students, seven countries are represented,” Deaquino said.
When Trump took office, Deaquino said many of his students were worried because of the new president’s well-known hard stance on illegal immigration and the border wall.
“There’s fear in general from 7-year-old kids, 6, 7-year-old kids of being thrown out of the country,” Deaquino said.
Deaquino also moved to the United States when he was 3 from Guadalajara, Mexico. He first moved to California and then to Houston.
“I grew up here, I haven’t been back to Mexico at all," Deaquino said.
Wednesday, he wouldn’t be preparing for Thursday’s lesson had it not been for President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
DACA allowed him to get a Social Security number, an education at UT-Austin and a job as a teacher.
“I’m actually very disheartened in the fact that Donald Trump, the president of the United States, wants to leave people like myself out in the cold,” Deaquino said.
What Trump signed Wednesday focused primarily on the border wall and penalizing sanctuary cities. DACA was not included in the executive orders.
Houston is not officially a sanctuary city. But Mayor Sylvester Turner said Wednesday the city wont institute a policy of profiling people who may or may not be here legally.
"The Houston Police Department is not going to be the immigrations and naturalization service it's not going to happen," Turner said.
“Walls don’t work, there’s never been a fence or a wall high enough to contain human aspiration,” said Angela Blanchard, the president & CEO of Neighborhood Centers, Inc.
Blanchard pointed out, in 2014, that foreign-born Houstonians contributed $116.5 billion to the area's GDP, according to a study by the New American Economy.
"We want to keep that going,” Blanchard said. "This is a time when I think we point to Houston as an example of what’s possible when you’re welcoming. This is what welcoming looks like and this is how a high-functioning city performs when people from all over the world can contribute.”
Channel 2 spoke to a number of Houstonians on Wednesday to try to get a variety of perspectives on the president's executive orders. No one, the than the people quoted in this article, wanted to speak on camera.
Off camera, many wondered how Trump planned to pay for the wall or how it would be built. Those in favor of the wall said they felt a sense of security, knowing the border would potentially be stronger to keep potential criminals out.