By Rachel Monroe
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% 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.” 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. 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.”
Villalobos, who is fifty-nine, has a story that’s broadly common to many of his generation in the Valley. The son of migrant workers, he started picking onions and cucumbers alongside his parents when he was in first grade. His older brother, the first person in the family to graduate high school, “opened the door,” Villalobos said; both brothers eventually earned law degrees. Villalobos typically voted for Democrats until around 2007, when he switched parties, a move largely motivated by “economic concerns,” he said. At the time, politics in the Valley were dominated by a powerful Democratic Party machine. When Villalobos served as the chair of the local chapter of the Republican Party, he said, “we would get clobbered no matter what”; in 2012, Barack Obama won more than seventy per cent of the vote in Hidalgo County.
Republican gains in the Valley are the result of overlapping forces. The Valley’s population tends to be patriotic and religious, with relatively lower rates of educational attainment. Republicans touted their support for law enforcement and oil and gas—significant sources of employment in the area—while local Democrats were increasingly seen as complacent, and in some cases corrupt. In 2022, McAllen’s congressional district, which had been held by Democrats for more than a century, elected its first Republican. (The district had been redrawn after the 2020 census to make it more favorable to Republicans.)
Although a number of the rising right-wing stars in the Valley have attached themselves to the MAGA movement, Villalobos is more traditional. When he ran for mayor, he promised low taxes, limited spending, and pro-business policies. In McAllen, the mayor is a nonpartisan role, and Villalobos’s party affiliation didn’t appear on the ballot. He won by fewer than three hundred votes. Nonetheless, Republicans seized on his election to the city’s top office as a sign that the Valley was on the cusp of a political transformation. “Republicans and Hispanics in Texas share common values, and more Hispanics are voting Republican and getting elected as Republicans,” Greg Abbott tweeted after Villalobos’s win. “They want to help keep Texas Red.”
As mayor, Villalobos has largely avoided culture-war posturing, and he prickled at the common right-wing characterization of the Texas border as a lawless zone. “You’d think there were bandidos running around here with guns,” he said. “Even under the previous Administration, our area wasn’t chaotic.” Now he feared for the local economy. “We have two international bridges, and the bridge crossings are down twenty-five per cent since around a month ago. With sales tax, we’ve been breaking records for the past few years—then, this past month, it went down. Restaurants don’t have the employees. I always knew, of course, we have people who are not here legally, and I guess maybe we have a little more than I thought,” he said. “We know that our population is getting older. We know that the birth rates are getting lower. We need people. And sometimes people get angry when I say this, but it’s true: the work ethic of a lot of American people is not what it was, starting with my kids. They’re not out there working in the fields. They’re never going to do that.”
Local activism against the federal immigration raids has been growing. In February, a lively and well-attended protest march took over the streets of downtown McAllen; a news site compared it to a celebration after a high-school-football victory. “It’s a lot of new people who are showing up, people who have not typically participated in these events,” Michael Mireles, the civic-engagement director for LUPE, a nonprofit group that supports low-income community organizing, said. “And you have elected officials who are speaking out for the first time.” (Mireles added that he finds it “frustrating” that leaders are framing the issue mostly in economic terms. “People are not willing to take a moral lens on the issue because they don’t want to come off as far left or something,” he said.)
At the prayer luncheon, the theme of Villalobos’s brief speech was the danger of indifference. “I ask you to join me and pray,” he told the crowd. “Pray that the government makes decisions that are good for all people—it cannot be just a few.” Before the keynote speaker (Anne Beiler, the founder of Auntie Anne’s pretzels) took the stage, I ducked out of the room. In the hallway, two security guards were chatting about the raids. One, whose name was Eric, worked nights providing security for gentlemen’s clubs. Everyone at the clubs was buzzing about the ICE raids, and wondering if they’d be next. “They hit Chicas Locas and Stilettos and, like, three night clubs downtown,” he said. “They don’t let people leave—they come in and you’re locked down. You’re going to eat without a thought in the world, and then the next thing you know you get stuck.”
Eric said that he doubted the raids would change the minds of the many people he knew who’d voted for Trump. “But everybody’s thinking about it,” he said. “Small companies, big companies, even our farmers. Because I’m not going to wake myself up at no 4 A.M. to go work the fields.” ♦