{"id":254658,"date":"2026-04-17T20:07:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T20:07:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/254658\/"},"modified":"2026-04-17T20:07:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T20:07:08","slug":"the-south-texas-democrat-who-will-sing-at-your-quinceanera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/254658\/","title":{"rendered":"The South Texas Democrat Who Will Sing at Your Quincea\u00f1era"},"content":{"rendered":"

If Democrats have a prayer of flipping any House district this fall in deep-red Texas, it will likely be the Fifteenth, a strip of terrain between the borderlands of McAllen and the eastern outskirts of San Antonio. The district, which in 2024 was eighty-one per cent Hispanic, has been held up as evidence of the Latino shift to the G.O.P.: in 2022, De La Cruz, a former insurance agent who burnished her brand as both the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants and a critic<\/a> of Joe Biden\u2019s border policies, won by nine points. In 2024, she won by fifteen. But, this year, Republicans in Washington have worried that Trump\u2019s nationwide gains with Latinos in 2024<\/a> might be reversed, or at least diminished, by his crackdown on immigrants. \u201cWe\u2019ve got a little hiccup with some of the Hispanic and Latino voters for certain because some of the immigration enforcement was viewed to be overzealous,\u201d Speaker Mike Johnson said during a House G.O.P. retreat in Doral, Florida, in March. In a closed-door meeting at the retreat, James Blair, then a White House deputy chief of staff, urged House Republicans to emphasize the removal of immigrant criminals over \u201cmass deportations,\u201d Axios reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a good time for Bobby Pulido to run, if I\u2019m going to be honest,\u201d Daniel Garza, the president of the Koch-family<\/a>-backed LIBRE Initiative and a senior advisor for a PAC called LIBRE Action, which turned out the vote for De La Cruz in the last two cycles, told me over coffee, in McAllen. The economy wasn\u2019t as strong as some had hoped it would be, Republican agenda items were stalling in Congress, and Trump\u2019s program of immigration enforcement<\/a>, which didn\u2019t include options for unauthorized immigrants to get their documents, risked alienating Latino voters. But that didn\u2019t mean that Garza wanted the President to slow down. \u201cI\u2019ve said that\u2014do not apologize for deporting criminals, the people who hate America,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

Pulido has made immigration his cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre. In early March, he\u2019d just arrived in New York City for an event with the centrist political-action committee WelcomePAC when he learned that Antonio and Caleb G\u00e1mez-Cu\u00e9llar, two teen-age asylum seekers who were part of an award-winning high-school mariachi band in McAllen, had been detained by ICE during a scheduled check-in with their parents and younger brother. Pulido recorded a video calling for their release and accusing De La Cruz of not doing enough to help them. When the G\u00e1mez-Cu\u00e9llars were released, after a nearly two-week detention\u2014Antonio had been incarcerated at a facility in Raymondville, while the rest of the family was held in Dilley<\/a>\u2014a friend of the family, Steve Cavazos, asked Pulido\u2019s uncle (also his music manager) if he could borrow Pulido\u2019s fifteen-person tour van to reunite them. Cavazos drove the van, vinyl-wrapped in \u201cBobby Pulido for Congress\u201d signage, to a Whataburger in Raymondville. Antonio was waiting there with De La Cruz and her team, who had lobbied for the family\u2019s release and picked him up from the detention center. Pulido was not there, but he enjoys recounting the story: \u201cThey just went blank, like, \u2018What the fuck is this?\u2019\u00a0\u201d (Cavazos, who has known Pulido for years, told me that De La Cruz and her team didn\u2019t react in any visible way.) In a written statement, De La Cruz, declined to say whether she thought Trump\u2019s immigration crackdown had gone too far, but noted that it should be focussed on \u201ccriminals and genuine threats to public safety.\u201d \u201cAs for who gave them a ride,\u201d she wrote of the family, \u201cI\u2019m just glad they\u2019re home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though he\u2019s scathing in his criticisms of De La Cruz, Pulido, a self-styled conservative Democrat, is careful not to sound like a rabble-rouser. He supports immigration, but says that he doesn\u2019t want migrants \u201cin droves and caravans coming across the border illegally.\u201d He follows Scott Galloway\u2019s new-wave masculinity commentary<\/a>, is personally opposed to abortion, and told me that he wouldn\u2019t vote for an assault-weapons ban. (He\u2019s hunted since he was a kid, and named his first-born son Remington.) He\u2019s talked about how much cheaper it is for him to get health care on the other side of the border, in Mexico, than it is in Texas, and points out that he and Trump agree that insurance companies have become \u201ctoo big and powerful.\u201d Of his district\u2019s previous Democratic candidate, the Bernie Sanders-endorsed Michelle Vallejo, Pulido said, \u201cShe got the Democratic nomination, but she ran on a progressive platform, in a conservative-drawn district. Square peg in a round hole, maybe?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If Democrats have a prayer of flipping any House district this fall in deep-red Texas, it will likely…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":254659,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[10738,2671,2133,2132,27,29,28],"class_list":{"0":"post-254658","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-texas","8":"tag-campaigns","9":"tag-congress","10":"tag-democrats","11":"tag-latinos","12":"tag-texas","13":"tag-texas-headlines","14":"tag-texas-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254658\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/254659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}