A Halloween display featuring skeletons dressed as immigration agents chasing Mexican skeletons over a fence has stirred backlash outside a Mobile County sheriff’s home.
The display sits on Sheriff Paul Burch’s front lawn days bef0re Mobile’s Latin Fest. Grace Resendez McCaffery, who heads Latino Media Gulf Coast, said she drove from Pensacola to see it for herself after photos spread online. (RELATED: ROOKE: CBP Commander Upends Democrats’ ICE Agent Narrative)
“It’s sad,” McCaffery told NBC 15 News. “I feel like we’ve regressed about 50 years.”
McCaffery, who also founded the Hispanic Resource Center in Northwest Florida, said the decorations could fuel “more hostility, fear and discord within the community.” Some Hispanic residents have reportedly already voiced concerns about stepped-up immigration enforcement in Mobile and Baldwin counties, where the sheriff’s office assists in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations.
Sheriff faces backlash over Halloween ICE display in his front yard. https://t.co/FsomAL4AiP pic.twitter.com/wq9gk9Ilzd
— WRDW WAGT News 12 26 (@WRDW_WAGT) October 8, 2025
The sheriff told the outlet Monday that festivalgoers had nothing to fear.
“They should not,” Burch said. “We work day in and day out with Homeland Security and ICE in Mobile. I’m not aware of any operations targeting the Latin Fest.”
Burch hasn’t commented directly on the decorations, but his wife, Michelle Alfonso Burch, defended them in a statement released through an attorney Tuesday.
“Every year, I make tongue-in-cheek Halloween decorations with a topical theme at my home,” she wrote, describing this year’s setup as “playing both on my Cuban background and new, needed changes in federal immigration enforcement.”
She added that her parents were legal immigrants and that her husband “has nothing to do with these, other than mowing the grass around them.”
McCaffery rejected that defense. “Whether it’s done by another immigrant, Hispanic person, it’s still harmful,” she said.
Hispanic American Business Association of the Gulf Coast president Silva Lessa called the situation “an unfortunate distraction” but said Saturday’s event will go on as scheduled.