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While the economy in Texas has boomed over the past 20 years, along the border with Mexico about a half-million people live in clusters of cinder-block dwellings, home-built shacks, dilapidated trailers and small houses. Texas has more than 2,300 of these communities known as colonias, the Spanish word for "colony."
Three times in recent months, a Honduran woman named Alma went to US officials at the border between Reynosa, Mexico and Hidalgo, Texas, to ask for asylum for herself and her three children. She had fled Honduras because her other child had been killed by gang members, and she brought documentation to prove it.