Is the Hispanic Red Wave for Donald Trump Starting to Crash?
Javier Villalobos, the mayor of McAllen, a city in the Rio Grande Valley, has noticed a change in his community in recent weeks, after a series of ICE Raids in the region, which is located in the southern tip of Texas. “You go to subdivisions that are under construction, and it’s empty. You go to Home Depot, and there is no one there,” said Villalobos. “It’s weird. It’s like “The Walking Dead”. “”
The valley, a long -standing democratic bastion, has been used in recent years as proof of Donald Trump and his Maga Call of movement to non -white voters. In 2021, when Villalobos was elected, the Republicans celebrated the victory as a sign of good things to come. “Incredible news! McAllen, Texas is a large border city of 140,000 inhabitants. 85% Hispanic – and has just elected a republican mayor,” published Steve Cortes, a former Trump advisor, published on Twitter. “The realignment of macro accelerates in southern Texas, and elsewhere, while the Hispanics are first gathering in America.” During the presidential election last year, Trump won all the counties of the valley, one where Hillary Clinton beat him in 2016. McAllen knew the second quarter of work in the part of the country’s parts of the country, following only Laredo, another community of the Texas border. “In the Rio Grande Valley, the red wave touches earth”, the Texas Observer Declared, qualifying the 2024 “bloodbath” elections and wondering if the Democrats of Texas were “condemned”.
But Trump’s pricing policies have exerted an economic break in a region which depends strongly on trade with Mexico. Then, in mid-June, Trump posted on Truth Social that “by opinion of this truth”, ” ICE The officers were ordered to “do everything in their power to achieve the very important objective of providing the biggest mass expulsion program in history”. By trying to meet a quota of thousands of deportations per day, the Trump administration has targeted the cities led by the Democrats, notably Los Angeles. But Texas was not spared, despite the crucial role of governor Greg Abbott by helping to eliminate Trump. McAllen is a city with roughly the same percentage of non-citizens as Los Angeles. Raids have been reported in night clubs, restaurants and immigration hearings in the region. When I visited a popular flea market complex, it was unusually moderate; He had been searched recently, told me a plant seller. Since then, he said that traffic has decreased from ninety percent. The impact of the great scope of raids means that some Republicans are concerned that, as Villalobos said to me: “We are shooting in the foot.”
Last month, during an event in San Antonio organized by the South Texas Business Partnership, Villalobos promised “flying” on the raids. “So-called, they were going to expel the murderers, the rapists, the criminals. This is not what is happening,” he said. Instead, “it’s like a dragnet – it will affect us all.”
One day in June, the heat was already punitive in the middle of the morning, but the McAllen Convention Center had a refrigerated cold. Villalobos, dressed in a catchy cobalt blue costume, walked half an hour before the prayer lunch of the annual mayor of fifty-two, an event which aims “to promote a better understanding in our community and to ask for the divine direction of God in the conduct of the affairs of our city”.
A crowd of people in church dresses and cowboy hats felt around the tables with decorations with an image of a dove with an olive branch in its beak. The day before, Villalobos noted on Facebook that he had discussed “the burning subject of the application of immigration and the way he negatively affects all sectors of our economy” with the members of the Texas Congress, including the Democrats Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez. “Together, Republicans and Democrats logically think and with common sense, can solve this problem,” he wrote. “May God bless and save the United States!” Online, the reaction had been mixed (“I hope that more Republicans have shared your views on the issue”; “American first period”), but at the Congress Center, people were uniformly favorable. A woman in a patterned dress pressed the hand of Villalobos and thanked her for her efforts. “It is not a question of being republican or democrat. It’s about doing the right thing for our economy and our civilization here, ”she told me.
Roel Moreno, Jr., wore a shirt of black dress with a medal of Saint Or pinned on the reverse. Moreno has a business that makes commercial and residential constructions in the valley. Following the raids, he said, many of his employees were afraid to come to work. “Most of the time, you have four to ten people in a house on which he is worked on, but at the moment, we are from zero to two. Yesterday, I only had two people working, and it is because they were my friends, and they got down to the corpus to help me hang Sheetrocks,” he told me. Moreno said he had called a worker and asked, “” Hey, can you come and create a house? “It is, like” Roel, I’m afraid of leaving. DacaBut now Dacais not even good. He is, like: “My wife, my children are there, my parents are there, my grandparents are there. If I am sent to Mexico, I have nowhere to go. This is at home. “Moreno added that, like many people in the valley, he had” conservative values ”:” We believe in the family, to God, preserving our real estate values and protecting our people. “He refused to say if the raids would have an impact on his policy.” I mean, I keep the strong faith. To extend our hands to our friends and neighbors.
Villalobos, which is fifty-nine, has a history which is largely common to a lot of its generation in the valley. Son of migrant workers, he started choosing onions and cucumbers alongside his parents when he was in the first year. His older brother, the first person in the family to obtain their graduate diploma, “opened the door,” said Villalobos; The two brothers finally obtained law diplomas. Villalobos generally voted for Democrats until 2007 around 2007, when he changed his party, a decision widely motivated by “economic concerns”, he said. At the time, valley policy was dominated by a powerful machine of the Democratic Party. When Villalobos was president of the local section of the Republican Party, he said: “We would be hooked whatever happens”; In 2012, Barack Obama won over seventy percent of the votes in the county of Hidalgo.
Republican gains in the valley are the result of overlapping forces. The population of the valley tends to be patriotic and religious, with relatively lower education rates. The Republicans have praised their support for police and petroleum and gas forces – significant sources of employment in the region – while local democrats were increasingly complacent and in certain corrupt cases. In 2022, the McAllen congress district, owned by Democrats for more than a century, elected its first Republican. (The district had been redesigned after the 2020 census to make it more favorable to the Republicans.)
