During his whirlwind rise to Congress, U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans has on countless occasions told an abridged version of the story of his “abuelito Chavez,” who earned his citizenship through Army service in World War II.
“In 1929, my grandfather, Cuauhtemoc Chavez, arrived in the United States from Mexico,” Evans, a Fort Lupton Republican, said in a 2022 statement to the Spanish-language newspaper La Prensa de Colorado, made when he was a first-time state House candidate. “Together with his mother and siblings, they came in search of the American dream.”
The statement to La Prensa stands out as a rare instance in which Evans publicly referred to his great-grandmother, Luz Garcia Chavez. It was with Luz that the Chavez family’s pursuit of the American dream began, nearly two decades before Cuauhtemoc’s naturalization in 1946. He was just 5 years old on Dec. 9, 1929, when Luz, a young widow, crossed the border into El Paso, Texas, with Cuauhtemoc and his five siblings, documents show.
Interviews, archival research and government records requests from Newsline help illuminate the multigenerational saga of Luz Chavez, her children and their many descendants, dispersed across the country today in California, Colorado, Georgia, Texas and elsewhere. It’s a story that begins tragically, with the October 1929 death of Evans’ great-grandfather, José Vicente Chavez, in the Mexican border town of Guadalupe, and continues with the hardships of the Great Depression; military service and sacrifice in World War II and Vietnam; and eventually the election, nearly a century later, of one great-grandson to Congress.
The story is also far more complicated than the version that Evans has told on the campaign trail. Luz, Cuauhtemoc and the other Chavez siblings belonged to a generation of immigrants who faced obstacles and prejudices closely resembling the ones faced by immigrants today. The “strong immigration policies” that Evans supports would have led to his grandfather’s deportation a century ago, and many of Evans’ statements in support of those policies distinctly echo the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the 1930s stigmatizing young Mexican Americans like Cuauhtemoc as gangsters, freeloaders and drug peddlers.
As first reported by Newsline last week, Immigration and Naturalization Services documents show that Evans’ grandfather entered the country illegally in 1929, and lived without lawful status for at least the following 12 years; was arrested for violating immigration laws and subjected to deportation proceedings in 1941; and had previously been arrested for attempted burglary. The documents contradict Evans’ previous claims that his grandfather immigrated “legally” or the “legal way,” and other misrepresentations he has made about key dates and details in Cuauhtemoc’s biography.
Evans has refused to answer questions about those documents from Newsline and other news outlets. In comments to CPR News last week, he said he had spoken of his grandfather immigrating “the ‘right way’ … in reference to the fact that (he) joined the military and served his country.”
His office again ignored interview requests for this story, and declined to answer additional questions about why Evans supports policies that treat immigrants today differently than the way his grandfather’s family was treated. His spokesperson, Delanie Bomar, provided a short statement describing Evans as “laser-focused on cracking down on the cartels, eliminating the flow of fentanyl into our communities, and putting public safety first.”
In a previous statement to Newsline, Bomar contrasted “the right way” to immigrate with “the ‘wrong way’ like we saw during the Biden admin with lawlessness at the border, peddling drugs or joining illegal gangs like (Tren de Aragua), folks cutting in line, and being entitled to resources above and beyond what hardworking immigrants who are trying to do it ‘the right way’ are entitled to.”
But the documented history of the Chavez family’s immigration saga — beginning with their unlawful border crossing in 1929 and ending with the naturalization of all of Luz’s surviving children by 1950 — offers little support for any such distinctions.
“Looking at immigration (in terms of) who did it ‘the right way’ versus ‘the wrong way,’ and taking this black-and-white approach, I think is extremely harmful,” said Keilly Leon, the north regional organizer for the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition and a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient.
“I come from a generation where we’re proud about our background, and we’ve learned to be empowered in our story, and (are) discussing immigration as it is, not trying to hide it under the rug,” Leon said. “I was brought up with that knowledge — always centering the struggles, and understanding, since I was a little kid, the realities and the harshness of this broken system we have.”
Depression-era immigration politics
After falling to nearly zero during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border without authorization reached record highs in 2023. The vast majority were refugees fleeing political and economic instability in South and Central America, and many were allowed by former President Joe Biden’s administration to remain in the country while awaiting the outcome of immigration court proceedings, or through a variety of humanitarian parole programs. The Migration Policy Institute estimated that at least 5.7 million people who illegally crossed the border were granted these temporary authorizations — a “significant” number, but far below the figure of 20 million or more routinely claimed by President Donald Trump and other top Republicans.
A similarly sharp rise in immigration preceded Luz Chavez’s arrival with her children in El Paso, where they settled on the city’s south side in a neighborhood known as El Segundo Barrio. A yearly average of about 50,000 Mexican immigrants were granted legal entry to the U.S. in the 1920s, but twice as many others likely entered unlawfully, according to government estimates compiled by historian Lawrence A. Cardoso. This wave of immigration — though largely supported by employers in the Southwest who relied on Mexican workers, known as braceros, as a source of low-wage labor — stoked the fires of nativist backlash across the country.
Supporters of harsh immigration restrictions successfully pressed for measures including the creation of the U.S. Border Patrol and passage of the so-called Undesirable Aliens Act, which expanded federal deportation powers and, for the first time, made crossing the border without authorization a misdemeanor criminal offense. Anti-immigrant rhetoric used today by Trump and his allies bears a striking resemblance to statements made by the bill’s supporters at the time.
“Hordes of undesirable immigrants from Mexico are coming into the United States,” Rep. Charles Edwards of Georgia said in support of the act during a House floor debate in 1929. “As a rule they are not the better or higher-type Mexicans, but generally of the less desirable type … Something must be done to stop this.”
The Undesirable Aliens Act went into effect on July 1, 1929, about five months before records show the Chavez family arrived in El Paso. Together with the new law, pressure from the anti-immigrant lobby forced the federal government to sharply curtail the lawful entry permits granted to Mexican citizens by the Department of State.
The existence of large numbers of immigrants residing in the country unlawfully — known as “deportable aliens” under U.S. law — was well understood at the time, and policymakers and political commentators publicly wrestled with the question of how, as the El Paso Herald-Post put it in 1935, “to humanize treatment of law-abiding aliens, who are technically deportable but whose presence here is not socially harmful.” But immigration restrictionists, still a powerful force in American politics, defeated multiple attempts by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration to establish pathways for immigrants to legalize their residency.
As the Great Depression set in during the 1930s, some Mexican Americans were rounded up and returned to Mexico in deportation raids, while many others — as many as half of them U.S. citizens, according to one estimate — were pushed out through a coercive campaign that became known as the “repatriation” movement.
“As a result of the crash, there is a kind of binational effort (from) both the U.S. and Mexico, to get folks to go to Mexico,” said Romeo Guzmán, an assistant professor of history at Claremont Graduate University. “There’s a lot of fear tactics and fear campaigns. … There is a whole series of ways in which folks are being encouraged to go back, and that includes folks that are U.S. citizens.”
Depression-era benefits programs became a particularly bitter flashpoint in immigration politics — especially in El Paso, where local officials estimated that noncitizens made up nearly 40% of people on relief rolls. In a 1933 editorial headlined “Feed Our Own People,” the El Paso Times attacked the local relief board’s practice of not discriminating between citizens and noncitizens in handing out free groceries.
“Let this go on, and soon — very soon — there will be a strange filling up of south side tenements, and at the same time a horde of hungry peons will be besieging relief headquarters and carrying away armloads of groceries,” the Times wrote. “We shall be feeding part of Chihuahua and Sonora if there is not some check on aliens. … And there will be that much less for American citizens.”
El Paso’s Catholic charities were among those who rejected such sentiments, and fought deportations of noncitizens whom officials accused of having become a “public charge.” One member of the city’s relief board argued that Mexican immigrants who had been “brought over here and bled to death on low wages” were no less deserving of help. In California, Gov. Culbert Olson, who vetoed a measure to throw noncitizens off the relief rolls, similarly argued that immigrants had “worked for low wages to help create (the state’s) wealth and are entitled to share in it.”
Trump has made false claims about immigrants receiving public benefits at least 270 times, according to an analysis by The Marshall Project. Evans has adopted similar rhetoric to justify the deep cuts to social programs pursued by Trump and congressional Republicans in 2025, including by defending his vote this month in favor of more than $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts on the basis of misleading claims that the program is burdened by the obligation to provide “free handouts to illegal immigrants.”
Immigrants in the U.S. unlawfully are not eligible for Medicaid or most other federal benefit programs, despite paying a total of $100 billion in federal, state and local taxes annually — including $33 billion in payroll taxes that fund Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
Like several other states, Colorado has established a state-funded program to provide health coverage to about 15,000 undocumented children and pregnant people, at a cost of about $50 million a year — a small fraction of the annual loss of more than $1 billion the state faces under the GOP’s Medicaid cuts.
‘We were always hungry’
For the Chavez family, life in El Segundo Barrio during the Great Depression was hardly the realization of the American dream. Lalo Delgado, a Chicano poet who grew up in the neighborhood in the 1930s, called it a “square mile of poverty and misery.”
In a 1993 letter to the editor of the El Paso Times, Cuauhtemoc Chavez — by then 68 years old and retired in New Mexico — praised another writer’s vivid reminiscences of “the lifestyle some of us grew up with in El Segundo Barrio.” They had belonged, he wrote, to a small fellowship of south-siders “who lived it and, thank God, outlived it.”
Work was hard to come by, and sanitary conditions were poor. The 1930 census shows the Chavez family shared an address at a small two-story tenement building with 15 other households. Luz — and from a young age Cuauhtemoc and his brothers and sisters, too — scrounged for work as maids and delivery boys.
El Segundo Barrio “functioned as the city’s vice district,” wrote historian Benjamin Marquez, and reform-minded journalists and judges accused police and municipal officials of taking bribes to allow its gambling and prostitution rings to operate. During Prohibition, the neighborhood was a well-known haven for smugglers, and after its repeal in 1933, local newspapers filled up with lurid stories of the “marihuana” trafficked by young Mexican Americans on the south side: “Nine more boys nabbed in drive on dope,” read an El Paso Herald-Post headline in March 1941. “Police blame marihuana for (El Paso) ‘gangs,’” the El Paso Times reported later that year.
Like Trump and other Republicans, Evans has consistently linked the fentanyl crisis and other drug issues to unauthorized immigration, despite the fact that the “vast majority” of fentanyl entering the U.S. is smuggled through ports of entry by U.S. citizens or other people lawfully crossing the border, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Surviving documents shed little light on the circumstances of Cuauhtemoc’s arrest as a teenager for attempted burglary, beyond the fact that he was subsequently released.
If he had committed no crime, he would have been far from the only one of his peers to have been wrongfully accused of such an offense; when waves of petty crime hit El Paso in the Depression years, suspicion often fell on young Mexican Americans, who were liable to be rounded up in heavy-handed dragnets. After one jewelry store heist in 1940, the Herald-Post reported, 17 boys were arrested by police for “thorough questioning,” and all but four were released days later.
Merely being charged with a property crime is enough to be held in detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement under a new law enacted by Republicans and a handful of Democrats in Congress this year. With Evans’ support, the Laken Riley Act was passed despite widespread concern that its detention requirements violated due process principles.
When asked by CPR News about his grandfather’s attempted burglary arrest, Evans said it was “something that happened 80 years ago” and that authorities had “looked at the totality of the circumstances” in granting him citizenship.
“Every single case is different in its own unique individual and the facts of that case,” Evans said.
Such a case-by-case approach would be a shift from Evans’ long history of support for “immediate deportation for criminals.” In recent months, as the share of people in ICE detention without criminal convictions has risen sharply, he has repeatedly defended the detention of anyone “arrested and charged with a crime.”
“We have to aggressively target those individuals who are illegally in our communities, committing crimes, and those are the folks that we have to deport,” he said in an October 2024 debate. “I’ve never wavered from that.”
On social media, Evans frequently highlights crimes allegedly committed by immigrants in the country unlawfully while attacking Colorado’s “sanctuary” policies, a habit that hasn’t been interrupted by the revelation that his grandfather was accused of a crime as a teenager. ICE announced on July 23 that it had arrested 243 immigrants lacking permanent legal status in the Denver area during a nine-day enforcement operation. Though the agency released the names of only four detainees, and only claimed that about 50 of the 243 had been charged with or convicted of a crime, Evans praised the operation’s removal of “240+ dangerous illegal immigrants” from the streets.
“Sheltering these criminals makes our entire state unsafe and Colorado Democrats are to blame,” he wrote.
In March, Evans falsely claimed that crime rates rose following an influx of migrants to Denver in 2023. Studies have consistently shown that U.S. immigrants broadly, and undocumented immigrants specifically, commit crimes at substantially lower rates than the U.S.-born population.
Service and citizenship
On July 25, 1941, Cuauhtemoc and at least two of his sisters were arrested by federal agents for violating immigration laws, INS documents show. All three were accused of “illegal entry” and “made the subject of deportation proceedings” in El Paso. The outcome of those proceedings is not known. Deportation records from El Paso and most other ports of entry “were destroyed years ago,” according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Cuauhtemoc next appears in the historical record on Dec. 18, 1942, two months after his 18th birthday, when he was cited in El Paso traffic court for operating a commercial vehicle without a license, receiving a $10 fine. On the same date, he filled out a registration card with the county draft board. He was drafted into the U.S. Army three months later, becoming one of more than 15,000 Mexican American noncitizens to serve in the armed forces during World War II before his honorable discharge in October 1945.
Cuauhtemoc’s naturalization petition, submitted in January 1946, indicates that he received citizenship under a 1944 law that eliminated proof of “lawful entry” as a requirement for naturalization, if the petitioner had “serve(d) honorably in (the armed) forces beyond the continental limits of the United States.” On his petition form, references to “lawful entry” are blacked out, and next to fields for listing his dates of service, the phrase “And during such service I served honorably beyond the Continental U.S., to wit: Europe” was added. He was granted citizenship on April 1, 1946.
All five of Cuauhtemoc’s siblings eventually attained legal status, according to INS records. One, a sister named Greda, died at age 23 in 1946, but court records show that each of the other four became naturalized citizens through various means by 1950. A half-brother, Augustin, was born a U.S. citizen in El Paso in 1932.
In the postwar years, Cuauhtemoc — who went by “Cuate” or “C.E.” — went on to serve as president of a union representing civil service workers at El Paso’s Fort Bliss. After Greda’s death, he helped raise her son, Alfredo Reyes, who served in the Marines and was killed in action in Vietnam in 1967.
Though Cuauhtemoc died in 2014, his union service and the death of his nephew top the list of reasons why Jennifer Chavez, Cuauhtemoc’s daughter and Evans’ aunt, is certain that he would have strongly opposed Trump’s presidential candidacy two years later.
“I can’t even begin to imagine what my dad would have thought of Trump — being that, you know, he was a coward and a deserter,” Jennifer said in an interview, referring to Trump’s five draft deferments during the Vietnam War. “My dad would have had zero, and I mean zero, tolerance for someone like that.”
“When Gabe started to misrepresent our father in his campaign,” she added, “by portraying my dad as being in support of everything that Gabe is in support of — (that) would have pissed my dad off.”
This article originally appeared in Colorado Newsline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: [email protected].
