Reyna Medrano

Owner, Reyna's Business Center and Insurance Services

Professional Services | Sanger

Reyna built her business around people the system wasn't designed to serve. Reyna's Business Center and Insurance Services offers tax preparation, insurance, and legal paperwork support for clients who face language barriers and limited access to mainstream financial services. She offers insurance to people without driver's licenses. She files taxes for ITIN holders. Her entire business model is, in her words, "100 percent focused on immigrants."

That focus made her indispensable to her community. It's also made her one of the most direct casualties of federal immigration and tax policy changes. Her tax business, once reliably serving a thousand or more clients a year, saw that number fall to 400. The drop isn't about competition or service quality, it's due to policy. Changes affecting ITIN filers have flipped what used to be tax credits into tax debts for clients without documentation, and many have simply stopped filing altogether. When filing means owing money rather than receiving a refund, clients who are already financially precarious stop showing up.

"My book of business is usually a thousand or more clients. This year, I've had only 400. We went from $25,000 to $30,000 a month to months where no money came in — literally zeros. I let go of five employees."

The financial consequences have been severe. Reyna's Sanger office typically generated $25,000 to $30,000 a month. From January through June of this past year, both locations effectively stopped producing. She describes months of literal zeros. To survive, she laid off five employees, people she built her operation around, and has only been able to bring three back temporarily for tax season.

Reyna hasn't gone bankrupt. But she says she came close. And what she's watching isn't just her own losses but the systematic defunding of immigrant economic participation that her business was built to support.