‘they Got Duped’: Why Democrats Think Latinos Can Help Them Overcome Texas Gop’s Gerrymander

HIDALGO COUNTY, Texas – Not long after Texas Republicans sliced up their congressional map to create five new GOP seats, Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar approached House Speaker Mike Johnson with a question: Who should I thank, you or the White House?

Cuellar’s new district is redder at first blush — President Donald Trump won it by 10 points in 2024, as opposed to a 7-point margin before. But when Cuellar’s team crunched the numbers, they were shocked to find it actually might be more favorable to him. House Democrats, Cuellar included, performed a whole percentage point better in 2024 in the new district. Democrats down-ballot had won there. And it was still overwhelmingly Hispanic.

Cuellar told POLITICO he showed the figures in disbelief to Johnson, who scanned the ledgers. Thank the White House, Johnson said. (Johnson spokesperson Greg Steele said he “didn’t know any details” about the anecdote, but said the veteran Texas politician “will lose this seat.”)

Cuellar, alongside Rep. Vicente Gonzalez and a pair of Democratic challengers in the new South Texas districts, are trying to do what seemed unlikely a year ago: Ride local discontent over a lagging economy and Trump’s harsh immigration crackdown to overcome Texas Republicans’ aggressive gerrymander.

“Hispanics are having buyer's remorse,” Cuellar told POLITICO in an interview during a South Texas Builders Association conference in the Rio Grande Valley.

Control of the House could run through heavily Hispanic South Texas, whose voters flocked to Trump in record numbers in 2024. When they redrew the map in 2025, Texas Republicans hoped to net five seats statewide — including three in South Texas.

Democrats think they’re competitive in all three, and could even pick off a fourth, though Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust who drew the Texas map, disagrees. When asked about Cuellar’s premise that his new district is more favorable for Democrats, Kincaid called it “illogical” because “you don’t use House results to draw new districts, you use statewide results.”

Cuellar and Gonzalez are both running against well-funded opponents in majority-Hispanic districts that stretch north from the border into south-central Texas. Sandwiched between them is a skinny strip of a district where Tejano music star Bobby Pulido is challenging GOP Rep. Monica De La Cruz — a seat Democrats had held for nearly a century before she triumphed in 2022. And in a new district that stretches south and east of San Antonio, one of House Democrats’ prized recruits, former sheriff’s deputy Johnny Garcia, is facing GOP businessman Carlos De La Cruz, the congresswoman’s younger brother.

Trump rode concerns over former President Joe Biden’s border policy to flip once-deep-blue South Texas, winning 14 of 18 border counties, and he won every new South Texas district by 10 points or more. But that will only hold up if the GOP can maintain the historic high-water mark the president managed in the region.

“[Republicans’] plan backfired, and now we're seeing Latinos shift back to our party, the same Latinos that they thought they had in the bag,” said Garcia.

Monica De La Cruz is adamant Hispanics will stay with her party, but she acknowledges the immigration crackdown has made things tough.

“Whether I'm at church, at the grocery store, while I'm in activities with my children, I'm hearing those same concerns — that people are feeling frightened in the community,” said Monica La Cruz. She said she has emphasized to Republican congressional leadership that immigration should be “focused on cartels, on traffickers and on violent criminals.”

That could be enough to sway voters away from the party, other Republicans warn.

"I don't think Latino voters that voted in 2024 will stick around," said Massey Villarreal, a Houston-based businessman who previously chaired the Republican National Hispanic Assembly. "[Trump] is targeting the Latino community. He's separating families. He's breaking businesses."

Border business

On a recent weekday morning in Pharr, a community 15 miles north of the Rio Grande River, some 200 construction executives, elected officials and others, almost all of them Hispanic, funneled into a cavernous event center. A mariachi band and Mexican folk dancers greeted them. Then, on the screens overhead, video footage showed an early-morning ICE raid targeting construction workers.

“Those of you all that hunt, you got to know when the hunting is good, right?” said Jacob Monty, an immigration attorney. “They hunt our workers early in the morning on the way to work.”

Local construction industry leaders have warned for months that Trump’s immigration raids were causing a labor shortage and driving up costs. Now, many are furious.

“Let's be real. We voted for this,” said Ronnie Cavazos, president of the South Texas Builders Association, the group hosting the event. “I'll take the blame.”

Gonzalez and Cuellar attended the conference, pledging to the construction executives in attendance that they would fight for their workforce. Few Republican officials attended.

Democrats openly acknowledge that the Biden administration’s border policy was a failure, and credit that — alongside the flailing economy — as the reason Hispanics lurched rightward in 2024. But they think the Trump administration’s hard line on deportations has swung the pendulum in the other direction.

“Everybody here wants criminals deported. We want a safe and secure border,” Gonzalez said. “But what we don't want is to lose half of our labor force to hyper-aggressive ICE raids that have had a direct impact on our economy.”

The immigration raids remain front-of-mind for many locals. Deyanira Sanchez, a mother from the small city of Hidalgo, said she sees headlines about ICE activity every time she logs online: There was the undocumented man in Houston shot and killed by an ICE officer; the teenage mariachi musicians detained in Dilley; the evangelical pastors arrested at the McAllen airport.

Father Greg Labus, the pastor at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in McAllen, was aghast when he got word one of his nuns was detained while walking to Sunday Mass in June. “I said, ‘You've got to be kidding me! She's a nun!’” Labus told POLITICO in an interview at his church, where bilingual signs dot the walls. “If this can happen to a nun, nobody’s immune.” (Sister Leticia “Letty” Ugboaja was released from ICE custody after Cuellar and Monica De La Cruz intervened, but is still at risk of deportation.)"They started out by saying they were going to get rid of the bad ones only," said Pulido, who's challenging Monica De La Cruz. "People now know that that wasn't the plan all along. They got duped."

Big swings

Republicans say they plan to patch up concerns over the immigration crackdown by reminding voters what it was like when Democrats were in charge.

“When you're asking, ‘Hey, who do you trust more to handle the economy?’ I always get, ‘the Republicans,’” said Carlos De La Cruz.

But Trump’s immigration campaign has hit business hard, too. On a March morning in McAllen, ICE detained a Mexican woman who left a wellness club to get a hairbrush from her car. Word got out quickly that there was ICE activity; within hours, the once-bustling strip mall became deserted, a lull that lasted for weeks.

Esmeralda Knapp, a hairstylist who has operated a salon next door for over 20 years, said even longtime customers stopped coming. She opened a small jewelry business on the side to try to get by. “In my life, I haven’t seen it this bad, other than Covid,” she said in Spanish. “We thought it would be better with Trump, but no.”

Knapp said she voted for Trump in 2024 but won’t support Republicans this November.

The food sector has also been ravaged. Dante Galeazzi, president of the Texas International Produce Association, said farmers have struggled to maintain a workforce as immigration officers round up laborers — even some who are in the country legally.

“If you're a grower and you have a product that's ready to go in the field, and you have an interruption with your labor, you can't just press pause on that product,” Galeazzi said. “If you miss a harvesting window, that's it.”

Democrats point to March’s primary elections as evidence the crackdown is animating voters. Democratic turnout surpassed Republicans for the first time since 2020, and the distinction was especially pronounced in South Texas: In Cuellar’s district, for instance, Democrats outvoted Republicans in their respective primaries by a four-to-one margin.

But souring on Republicans and flocking back to Democrats are two different things.

Eric Flores, the veteran and former assistant U.S. attorney running against Gonzalez, points to the 38-point rightward swing in Cameron County since the 2016 presidential election as a sign the political realignment fueled by Trump is deeper than a one-cycle shift. “The South Texas voter, the Hispanic, is realizing that the Democrats, for almost 100 years now, have neglected the valley,” he said.

Even so, Republicans — however diplomatically — acknowledge that the Trump administration’s approach on immigration should change.

“We want a secure border, but we also are in need and deserving of a workforce,” said Flores. “That means giving these individuals — these farmers, these ranchers, these home builders, these general contractors — a little bit of say as to their seasonal workers.”