Escobar began calling her leadership team, and other officials in Texas and in the federal government. “There were just a million questions swimming through my mind,” she told me. Her first thought was that perhaps President Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, had decided to bomb cartel targets in the city of Juárez, across the border from El Paso—something that various Administration officials, including the President, had been threatening to do for months. “If my community was about to be put in harm’s way,” Escobar said, “we had very little time to act.”