Texas Dems Plan to Aid ‘Vulnerable Communities,’ Immigrants Following Election

As Republican Ted Cruz stepped up to the podium to celebrate yet another successful run for the U.S. Senate on election night, audience members broke out into chants of “Build the wall.” Cruz, scanning the crowd, nodded, pointed at the raucous audience members, and said simply, “We’re going to.”

He was met with cheers. 

Immigration emerged as a major talking point in the final months of election season, with disinformation surrounding Haitian immigrants in Ohio, fear-mongering about the Southern border and conspiracy theories about Venezuelan gangs taking over American apartment complexes signaling a return to former President Donald Trump’s 2016 political rhetoric. 

The anti-immigrant shift is concerning, but not surprising, to Jen Ramos, a South Texas native and state Democratic organizer. Ramos told the Observer that Texas Democrats will need to work overtime in the months leading up to the presidential inauguration to secure resources and aid for Texas’ “most vulnerable populations,” including immigrants, who she believes will be targets of the Trump administration and the Republican-led Texas Legislature. 

“We know what’s going to happen because of what happened in 2016,” Ramos said. “We experienced fear in the Trump administration, so we know the terror that is to come.”

Promises to ramp up border control measures may have paid off for Republicans in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley region. 

Along the Texas-Mexico border, Republicans tallied wins across a region that was won by Joe Biden in 2020 and has historically voted for Democrats. The trend is in line with national data that shows Latino voters skewed increasingly conservative in the polling booth. One major shift was recorded in Republican Monica De La Cruz’s race; the representative for Texas’ 15th Congressional District ran a campaign centered on border security, and she claimed a victory in Hidalgo County, where the majority of her district lives. 

De La Cruz lost the primarily Hispanic county by 13 points in 2022, and by 20 points in 2020. On election night this year, she won it by four points. On social media, De La Cruz celebrated the county’s flip, stating “The Democrats took us for granted, insulted our values, and foisted a radical open borders agenda on us. Republicans are the party of prosperity and opportunity! ¡Gracias!”

Border policy can’t completely account for Republicans’ overwhelming victory in South Texas, Ramos warns. Instead, she thinks the economy was the motivating issue for a majority of Latino voters, who she believes do not typically identify with anti-immigrant rhetoric or rhetoric targeted at Latinos from countries other than their own. Ramos points to comments made by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” at one of Trump’s final rallies, as a comment that may have caused shockwaves within the Puerto Rican community but not the Latino community as a whole. 

“In South Texas, where everybody’s Hispanic and everybody’s Latino, there’s this conceived notion of, ‘Oh, you know, that’s those immigrants,” Ramos said. “We look at communities that are predominantly Mexican-American, and they don’t see themselves reflected in the comments about immigrants being rapists or terrorists or criminals.”