As recently reported in the El Paso Times, U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, has once again called for accountability for UTEP President Heather Wilson after a federal investigation into a cancelled National Science Foundation grant concluded that “no apparent wrongdoing” had occurred in the preparation of the grant proposal.
The grant was initially suspended in the spring of 2024 and then eventually cancelled in 2025 by the NSF after UTEP officials erroneously reported that the grant proposal contained inaccuracies.
Rep. Escobar similarly faulted Wilson for the initial loss of the grant in a statement issued in August of 2025.
In her statement, Escobar had characterized the grant, which had the potential to expand to $160 million over an interval of 10 years, as a once-in-a-generation transformative economic opportunity for El Paso.
Former El Paso City Representative Susie Byrd has gone even further in her criticism of Wilson and has openly called for Wilson’s removal from the presidency of the University of Texas at El Paso.
It’s certainly encouraging to see at least some local political leaders directly confronting Wilson at this point. This confrontation was long overdue.
Dr. Oscar Martinez, Regents’ Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Arizona and a former professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, along with other local political activists have been calling for Wilson’s resignation for quite some time, albeit for different reasons. As Dr. Martinez explained in an editorial appearing in El Paso News in April of 2024, “Mexican American leaders were outraged that the Regents, seemingly influenced by politics and cronyism, had passed up yet another opportunity to name a fully qualified Mexican American educator to the UTEP presidency [.]”
During an appearance on a local podcast in 2021, Dr. Martinez also acknowledged that Wilson was, in all likelihood, part of a larger coordinated effort to “facilitate the spread of conservative ideological thinking among college students in El Paso.”
I myself have maintained that Wilson’s close association with the Trump Administration, which I have consistently described as the most anti-Mexican American presidential administration in modern American history, automatically rendered her unfit to serve as president of the University of Texas at El Paso.
And while I wholeheartedly support the idea of holding Wilson accountable and removing her from the presidency of UTEP, I would simply like to add the observation that if Wilson deserves to be held accountable for the grant debacle, then so does El Paso Mayor Renard Johnson.
He was, after all, instrumental in bringing Wilson to UTEP, and, to date, has yet to pay any political price for this disservice to UTEP and El Paso.
I am not exactly sure what Johnson did to ingratiate himself with Texas Governor Greg Abbott, but Johnson was apparently on such good terms with the MAGA-aligned governor that he was placed on the search committee that would ultimately recommend the appointment of Wilson to the presidency of the University of Texas at El Paso.
It apparently didn’t bother Johnson in the least that Wilson had been loyally serving in the Trump Administration immediately prior to her appointment as president of UTEP.
He also didn’t seem to mind that the recommendations provided by twenty-eight prominent Mexican American community leaders including Dr. Martinez were dismissed by the search committee and, ultimately, by the Board of Regents of the University of Texas System as well.
It’s important to keep in mind that Johnson, as a member of the search committee appointed by the governor, was in a uniquely privileged position to oppose Wilson’s selection and side with elements of El Paso’s Mexican American community who categorically opposed Wilson’s appointment. He didn’t.
He chose instead to side with the likes of Dee Margo, Woody Hunt, and Paul Foster, all high-profile supporters of the Republican Party in general and Trump in particular.
He doesn’t seem to want to talk about it much now, but in the immediate aftermath of Wilson’s appointment, Johnson continued to speak glowingly about her, and there’s absolutely nothing on the record that I am aware of to indicate that his position on Wilson has shifted in any way.
In fact, most recently, Johnson has conspicuously refused to criticize Wilson for the catastrophic loss of the NSF grant, which he has disingenuously dismissed as just a “setback.”
Yes, it’s definitely time to hold Wilson accountable and finally rid our community of this MAGA-aligned crony.
But real accountability should not stop with Wilson. It should extend to Johnson, who was an integral part of the flawed process that brought Wilson to UTEP and El Paso in the first place.
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