Local immigrants share stories on navigating life in the United States under shifting immigration policies

ST. JOSEPH, Mo. (KQTV) -- For Melinda Kovacs, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Hungary, and Guillermo Peña, a U.S. citizen originally from Honduras, the American experience has been shaped by decades of navigating identity, belonging and now, a new landscape of immigration enforcement.

Their stories offer contrasting perspectives on the immigrant experience in America, one from an European academic who arrived for graduate school 30 years ago, another from a Honduran man brought as a child by a mother seeking safety and opportunity.

Shifting policies, rising enforcement

Shifting immigration policies have been a trend since Donald Trump took office one year ago. According to deportationdata.org, deportations increased by about four and a half times in the first nine months of Donald Trump's presidency.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has also grown in size, including staffing, funding and detention capacity, allowing for more agents on the streets.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, this has enabled roughly 600,000 immigrants to be deported and 2.5 million people living in the country without documentation to leave the U.S. since January of 2025.

Kovacs: 'I carry my passport with me at all times'

Kovacs arrived in the United States from Hungary in the early 1990s to attend graduate school at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Now a political science professor at an HBCU, she became a naturalized citizen in 2018, a decision she made deliberately during the first Trump administration.

"As a political scientist who grew up in Eastern Europe and studied regime change, my educated guess was: I need to get an American passport before things get bad," she said.

Her appearance has shaped much of her American experience.

Though she is from Eastern Europe, she said she is often mistaken as Latina.

"Until I open my mouth, people tend to believe the part of the world I should be from is the southern part of the Americas," she said. "You walk around looking like this, immediately the assumption is that you should speak Spanish."

These encounters, questions like "Where are you from?" at grocery stores, she describes as microaggressions, often unintentional but constant reminders of being seen as "other."

Kovacs draws parallels between current U.S. policies and her childhood in state socialist Hungary, where identity cards were required and journalists faced repercussions for unfavorable coverage.

She recalls a recent moment when a convoy of black SUVs caused her to pull over and hyperventilate.

"They were not there for me," she said. "But we are way past 'I felt less welcome after September 11.' Where we are right now is a whole lot worse."

Since the start of the second Trump administration, she carries a card-format copy of her U.S. passport at all times.

"I don't know if it would save me from being grabbed off the street, but it's the best chance I've got," she said.

Despite her fears, Kovacs has not personally experienced encounters with ICE, nor have her family members.

She attributes this partly to how she navigates interactions, identifying herself as European before specifying Hungary, a strategy developed over three decades.

"I've gotten really good at it," she said. "It's a self-preservation response."

Peña: 'I remember hiding in the closet from immigration'

Peña's journey began differently.

Brought from Honduras as a young child by his mother, who he says fled threats of violence, he grew up in the United States with the constant awareness of his family's immigration status.

Today, he is a U.S. citizen.

"My mother made dresses, cleaned houses to bring us here," he said. "She gave up so much. When you mess with my family, that's what hurts me."

Now a citizen, Peña describes the lingering fear from childhood memories.

"I remember hiding in the closet from immigration in the '90s," he said. "Now it's happening again, and I don't want that for my nieces and nephews."

Despite his own citizenship, the fear has not faded, because his family members hold different statuses.

"At least I'm a citizen," he said, but the uncertainty remains. "What if my sister, who is a green card holder, goes and wants to apply for citizenship, and they see she has a small DUI or something? Will they arrest my sister? We're scared to go through the process."

He says the climate has shifted dramatically in the past year.

"If you're going for a court hearing to make sure you have an asylum case, you can't do nothing," he said. "People are scared. My friends in Omaha (Nebraska), they've been arrested, but it's always under the radar."

Peña points to divisions within the Latino community itself, with some distancing themselves from newer immigrants.

"You've got light-skinned Latinos saying, 'I'm not like that,'" he said. "It divides us even further. We're fighting amongst ourselves who can assimilate faster, who is lighter-skinned, so nobody gets taken away."

He worries about what could happen to his family members.

"Am I going to be racially profiled if I travel? What if my sister gets hit, can we call the cops?" he asked. "It scares me."

For Peña, citizenship has not erased the fear of immigration enforcement, because in a household of mixed statuses, one family member's vulnerability affects everyone.

Comparing experiences under different administrations

Both immigrants described shifts in immigration enforcement across presidential administrations, though their perspectives differ.

Kovacs, who has lived in New Jersey, North Dakota, Minnesota, Texas and the Midwest, said she noticed changes after Sept. 11, 2001, but describes the current period as qualitatively different.

"There is a dispensing with any kind of facade, any kind of pretext," she said. "It's just raw, naked power, random and violent."

She points to recent instructions circulating in some communities for people delivering groceries: leave your phone behind, write the address on paper, and if stopped, "eat the piece of paper."

"That was the harsh repression era when my parents were growing up," she said. "1950s Soviet Union, or Minneapolis in 2026."

Peña draws distinctions between recent administrations as well.

"Under Obama, there was process, there were enough judges, not always enough, but there was due process," he said. "People being deported were being vetted. Under Trump, it's a wild card. You don't know what's next."

He said the change has been dramatic in just one year.

"There was no chaos before. Now there's nothing, no due process. It's three times worse," he said.

Detention centers and comparisons to the past

Both immigrants used strong language to describe current immigration detention facilities.

Peña, whose sister was held in a detention center in the 1990s, described those experiences as formative.

"Her pastime was pulling her eyebrows out with a piece of string, that's what women were doing," he said. "Those places have always felt like concentration camps to me."

Kovacs drew parallels to historical atrocities, noting that "every genocide starts with disputing the humanity of a group."

"I don't think you can have arguments about immigration detention centers, which are quite frankly homemade gulags, without on some level thinking the people you're putting in them are not fully human," she said.

Paths forward

Kovacs and Peña emphasized the need for immigration reform, though they expressed doubt about prospects for change.

"Every day I've been in the United States, it's immigration reform today, immigration reform tomorrow, immigration reform forever," Guillermo said. "We never have a simple way to vet people and have enough judges."

Melinda said her approach is to teach students "what the ideal is, so they can sense how far the practice is from it."

She recalled her own citizenship interview in 2018, when a federal officer, after asking standard questions about American government, added an unexpected query: "So are you turning college students into left liberal extremists?"

Under oath and facing a federal officer, she said she laughed it off.

"I said, 'Sir, I can't even get them to read the syllabus,'" she recalled.

The moment, she said, illustrated the institutional challenges immigrants face.

Guillermo's message to his community is more direct: participate.

"I want Latino people to continue to determine themselves and empower themselves," he said. "I want them to vote. I want them to run for city council. I want us to protect our people, because the people we're asking are not hearing us."

He remains uncertain about the future.

"Maybe in the midterms with a new Congress, we might have some change," he said. "But I don't know if it's going to be enough for us."

While their journeys began continents apart, both Kovacs and Peña now find themselves bound by a shared uncertainty, navigating life in the country they call home, yet facing the same question of whether they truly belong.