Latinos in South Texas Voted Against Illegal Immigration and CBP Demonization

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Center for Immigration Studies interviews with numerous residents on the Texas border and an analysis of hyper-local border media reports certainly confirm that voters in historically blue counties like Starr, Zapata, Cameron, Webb, Val Verde, La Salle, Frio, and many others that either went red for the first time in living memory or came close did feel repelled by Joe Biden’s talk of transitioning away from oil and gas fracking and pandemic-related business lockdowns.

But that was the least of it. Left largely unreported in the national press is that hundreds of thousands of Latino voters in rural Texas — the sons and daughters of early legal migration — also felt repulsed by the 2019 mass-migration crisis during which nearly one million illegal Central Americans swamped the border as Democratic voices encouraged it, litigated efforts to staunch the tide, and promised open gates under a Biden administration.

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A Biden presidency was widely viewed as portending more of the same, according to Gilbert Rodriguez, a fourth-generation co-owner of a family-held industrial equipment business in Del Rio, Texas, in Val Verde County and a staunch Republican who has often felt politically lonely.

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The experience of seeing “armies” of unvetted strangers from all over the world — Haitians, Congolese, Middle Easterners, and others — pour over from Mexico during 2018 and 2019, with the encouragement and political protection of national Democrats, not only turned off many Latinos in the region to the party but also “scared them shitless”, explained Rodriguez, who lives 500 feet from the Rio Grande and recalled how Border Patrol would routinely “line them up and frisk them on our fence”.

“It’s not just Mexican people, and they’re not coming one or two at a time. There are thousands and thousands,” Rodriguez told CIS this week, adding that criminals and murderers are always among them. “A lot of the Hispanics don’t like that. They don’t like that. They’re saying, ‘our people filled out the papers and paid the fees and followed the rule of law.’ They want everyone to follow the law. Just … follow the law. And instead these people are just coming over and flipping the bird at us and just saying, ‘feed me.'”

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Along illegal immigration lines, federal agencies are a major source of employment and stability for border communities. Voters there recoiled at seeing and hearing Democrats nationwide demonize their bread-winners for months on end and obviously went hard the opposite way, said Tony Castaneda, former police chief of Eagle Pass and Republican precinct chairman in next-door Maverick County, where the vote for Trump was surprisingly strong.

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