Yet Garza isn’t regretful about helping elect Trump—he voted for him three times and says he’d do it again if he could. Libre helped promote the tax portions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which, among other things, allocated seventy-five billion dollars in funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and sixty-five billion dollars to Customs and Border Protection. On the whole, Garza believes that the MAGA movement has benefitted Latinos more than anything Kamala Harris could have offered, and says that he agrees with Republicans on “eighty to ninety per cent of issues,” including the deportation of immigrants who have committed crimes.
At the same time, Garza hasn’t seen the G.O.P. invest enough money to build on Trump’s gains with Latinos in 2024. Republicans started “taking things for granted, like they just happen automatically,” he said. “This isn’t accidental, man.”
In his study at home in Mission, Texas, Garza keeps a collection of leather-bound volumes—the Iliad, the Odyssey, an assortment of Shakespeare plays, books on the fall of the Roman Empire. An illustrated version of “Don Quixote” sits open on a stand. At Libre’s office in Grand Rapids one Thursday in August, Garza, who wears thick-rimmed glasses and slicks back his hair, stood in front of some sixteen volunteers wearing yellow shirts and quoted Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary: “Tierra y libertad,” or “Land and liberty.” They were the same principles, he said, that the U.S. Constitution reflected. “We can’t stay quiet while other Latinos are pushing the idea that we need more government, that we should be more dependent on the state, that our money should be centralized, and that more power should be in the hands of politicians,” he said in Spanish. “Ya basta.” Sitting at round tables, the volunteers, many of them immigrants, opened an app on their phones that gave them a call list and a script. “I wanted to know if you knew Mike Rogers?” one woman said into her phone. “Your call has ended,” the program replied.
Many of the volunteers I met had arrived in the United States within the past ten years. The atmosphere in the office felt similar to that of a Bible-study group: there were trays of chicken nuggets, mac and cheese, and salad near the entrance, and the organization had bought a birthday cake for one of the volunteers, who said that she wanted to spend the day with Libre, “en familia.” Some people had met Alfaro through his church; others discovered the organization through its nonprofit arm, which has provided community services in places with growing immigrant populations—English lessons, driver’s-education courses, and classes for the U.S. citizenship exam, among others. The group declined to share its operating budget—Americans for Prosperity, one of its backers, has raised about ninety million dollars this year—though Garza clarified that Libre doesn’t receive funds from the Trump family. In some ways, he said, the fact that Koch had been such a prominent and visible donor had shielded the identities of the others.
Garza was born in California, while his parents were working the grape season there. He grew up in Washington and travelled often due to his parents’ itinerant work; by the time he was seventeen, he’d missed so much school that he dropped out and joined his father in the fields, where he saw incidents of Americans taking advantage of the workers. But he also grew skeptical of the labor-rights movement led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. Its members could be inflexible and doctrinaire, he thought; at one point, his parents stopped associating with them because the activists decided to march under the banner of the Virgen de Guadalupe, and they were evangelicals. He later became a police officer, a city councilman in Toppenish, Washington, and a public liaison officer in the George W. Bush White House.
After Garza started Libre, in 2011, as a partner of the Americans for Prosperity network, the backlash from Latinos on the left was swift. By 2015, as Trump launched his Presidential run, Huerta was telling Univision: “They are against the Latino community.” That same year, Hillary Clinton’s campaign officials acknowledged that they needed to figure out a way to match the group’s organizing. “The reality is that Libre is VERY good,” Clinton’s national political director wrote in an e-mail to leadership. “They have finally figured out the FOX approach to Latinos.” Albert Morales, a former Hispanic-engagement director for the Democratic National Committee, and a friend of Garza’s, remembers, after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, seeing images of Libre volunteers greeting victims at Florida airports with merchandise. Meanwhile, he said, Democrats in Florida, such as Senator Bill Nelson, who was running for reëlection, had done little outreach to Latinos. “I remember the campaign manager telling me, ‘You’re the one who requested this call.’ And I knew then, this one’s gone,” Morales said. (Nelson’s former campaign manager called this claim “inaccurate and laughable.”)
