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 of Joe Biden’s border policies, won by nine points. In 2024, she won by fifteen. But, this year, Republicans in Washington have worried that Trump’s nationwide gains with Latinos in 2024 might be reversed, or at least diminished, by his crackdown on immigrants. “We’ve 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,” 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 “mass deportations,” Axios reported.
“It’s a good time for Bobby Pulido to run, if I’m going to be honest,” Daniel Garza, the president of the Koch-family-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’t as strong as some had hoped it would be, Republican agenda items were stalling in Congress, and Trump’s program of immigration enforcement, which didn’t include options for unauthorized immigrants to get their documents, risked alienating Latino voters. But that didn’t mean that Garza wanted the President to slow down. “I’ve said that—do not apologize for deporting criminals, the people who hate America,” he added.
Pulido has made immigration his cause célèbre. In early March, he’d just arrived in New York City for an event with the centrist political-action committee WelcomePAC when he learned that Antonio and Caleb Gámez-Cuéllar, 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 Gámez-Cuéllars were released, after a nearly two-week detention—Antonio had been incarcerated at a facility in Raymondville, while the rest of the family was held in Dilley—a friend of the family, Steve Cavazos, asked Pulido’s uncle (also his music manager) if he could borrow Pulido’s fifteen-person tour van to reunite them. Cavazos drove the van, vinyl-wrapped in “Bobby Pulido for Congress” signage, to a Whataburger in Raymondville. Antonio was waiting there with De La Cruz and her team, who had lobbied for the family’s release and picked him up from the detention center. Pulido was not there, but he enjoys recounting the story: “They just went blank, like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ ” (Cavazos, who has known Pulido for years, told me that De La Cruz and her team didn’t react in any visible way.) In a written statement, De La Cruz, declined to say whether she thought Trump’s immigration crackdown had gone too far, but noted that it should be focussed on “criminals and genuine threats to public safety.” “As for who gave them a ride,” she wrote of the family, “I’m just glad they’re home.”
Though he’s 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’t want migrants “in droves and caravans coming across the border illegally.” He follows Scott Galloway’s new-wave masculinity commentary, is personally opposed to abortion, and told me that he wouldn’t vote for an assault-weapons ban. (He’s hunted since he was a kid, and named his first-born son Remington.) He’s 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 “too big and powerful.” Of his district’s previous Democratic candidate, the Bernie Sanders-endorsed Michelle Vallejo, Pulido said, “She got the Democratic nomination, but she ran on a progressive platform, in a conservative-drawn district. Square peg in a round hole, maybe?”
