New Yorker
Javier Villalobos, the mayor of McAllen, a city in the Rio Grande Valley, has noticed a change in his community in the past few weeks, after a series of ICE raids across the region, which is situated in the southern tip of Texas. “You go to some subdivisions that are being constructed, and it’s empty. You go to Home Depot, and there’s nobody around there,” Villalobos told me. “It’s weird. It feels like ‘The Walking Dead.’ ”
The Valley, a longtime Democratic stronghold, has in recent years been used as evidence of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement’s appeal to nonwhite voters. In 2021, when Villalobos was elected, Republicans celebrated the win as a sign of good things to come.
Javier Villalobos, the mayor of McAllen, a city in the Rio Grande Valley, has noticed a change in his community in the past few weeks, after a series of ICE raids across the region, which is situated in the southern tip of Texas. “You go to some subdivisions that are being constructed, and it’s empty. You go to Home Depot, and there’s nobody around there,” Villalobos told me. “It’s weird. It feels like ‘The Walking Dead.’ ”
The Valley, a longtime Democratic stronghold, has in recent years been used as evidence of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement’s appeal to nonwhite voters. In 2021, when Villalobos was elected, Republicans celebrated the win as a sign of good things to come.
“Amazing news! McAllen, Texas is a major border town of 140,000 people. 85 percent Hispanic—and just elected a Republican mayor,” Steve Cortes, a former Trump adviser, posted on Twitter. “The macro realignment accelerates in South Texas, and elsewhere, as Hispanics rally to America First.”
In last year’s Presidential election, Trump won every county in the Valley, including one where Hillary Clinton had beat him by forty points, in 2016. McAllen had the second-biggest shift in party share of any large city in the nation, trailing only Laredo, another Texas border community. “In the Rio Grande Valley, the Red Wave Makes Landfall,” the Texas Observer declared, calling the 2024 election a “bloodbath” and wondering whether Texas Democrats were “doomed.”
But Trump’s tariff policies have put economic strain on a region that’s heavily dependent on trade with Mexico. Then, in mid-June, Trump posted on Truth Social that, “by notice of this TRUTH,” ICE officers were ordered to “do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.”
But Trump’s tariff policies have put economic strain on a region that’s heavily dependent on trade with Mexico. Then, in mid-June, Trump posted on Truth Social that, “by notice of this TRUTH,” ICE officers were ordered to “do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.”
In attempting to meet a quota of thousands of deportations a day, the Trump Administration has targeted cities run by Democrats, most notably Los Angeles. But Texas has not been spared, despite Governor Greg Abbott’s crucial role in helping to get Trump elected. McAllen is a city with roughly the same percentage of noncitizens as Los Angeles. Raids have been reported at night clubs, restaurants, and immigration hearings in the area.
When I visited a popular flea-market complex, it was unusually subdued; it had been raided recently, a plant vender told me. Since then, he estimated, traffic had decreased by ninety per cent. The wide-reaching impact of the raids is making some Republicans concerned that, as Villalobos told me, “we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.”
Last month, at an event in San Antonio hosted by the South Texas Business Partnership, Villalobos vowed to “ruffle feathers” about the raids. “Supposedly, they were going to be deporting murderers, rapists, criminals. That’s not what’s going on,” he said. Instead, “it’s like a dragnet—it’s going to affect us all.”
One day in June, the heat was already punitive by mid-morning, but the McAllen Convention Center had a refrigerated chill. Villalobos, dressed in a snappy cobalt-blue suit, walked in a half hour before the fifty-second annual Mayor’s Prayer Luncheon, an event that aims “to promote greater understanding in our community and to ask for God’s divine guidance in conducting the affairs of our City.”
A crowd of people in church dresses and felt cowboy hats milled around tables with decorations featuring an image of a dove with an olive branch in its beak. The day before, Villalobos noted on Facebook that he had been discussing “the hot topic of immigration enforcement and how it is negatively affecting all sectors of our economy” with Congress members from Texas, including the Democrats Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez.
“Together, Republicans and Democrats thinking logically and with common sense, can solve this,” he wrote. “God bless and save the USA!” Online, the reaction had been mixed (“I wish more Republicans shared your viewpoints on the matter”; “Americans first period”), but at the convention center people were uniformly supportive.
A woman in a patterned dress pressed Villalobos’s hand and thanked him for his efforts. “It’s not about 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 black dress shirt with a gold saint’s medal pinned to the lapel. Moreno owns a company that does commercial and residential construction in the Valley. In the wake of the raids, he said, many of his employees were afraid to show up to work. “Most of the time, you have four to ten people at a home that’s being worked on, but right now we’re anywhere from zero to two. Yesterday, I only had two people working, and that’s because they were my friends, and they came down from Corpus to help me hang Sheetrock,” he told me.
Roel Moreno, Jr., wore a black dress shirt with a gold saint’s medal pinned to the lapel. Moreno owns a company that does commercial and residential construction in the Valley. In the wake of the raids, he said, many of his employees were afraid to show up to work. “Most of the time, you have four to ten people at a home that’s being worked on, but right now we’re anywhere from zero to two. Yesterday, I only had two people working, and that’s because they were my friends, and they came down from Corpus to help me hang Sheetrock,” he told me.
Moreno said that he called a worker and asked, “ ‘Hey, can you come to start a house?’ He’s, like, ‘Roel, I’m scared to go. I came over at the age of three—you know, DACA, but now DACA’s not even good.’ He’s, like, ‘My wife, my kids are here, my parents are here, my grandparents are here. If I get sent to Mexico, I have nowhere to go. This is home.’ ” Moreno added that, like many people in the Valley, he had “conservative values”:
“We believe in family, God, preserving our property values, and protecting our people.” He declined to say whether the raids would have an impact on his politics. “I mean, I keep the faith strong. I believe that God created us all equally, and that things are going to get better,” he said. “We’re going to need to continue to extend our hands out to our friends and neighbors.”
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