| New reporting is calling out Monica De La Cruz for her failed attempts to save face after rubber-stamping Republicans’ chaotic immigration agenda.
After casting a reckless vote to add billions of dollars to expand Trump’s unpopular agenda, students from a local high school Mariachi band were arrested – the same students De La Cruz paraded around the Capitol just a year before.
Rather than rushing to help her community, De La Cruz’s staff said “there was little the office could do,” and ultimately De La Cruz didn’t get involved until South Texas Democrats called her out.
This isn’t the first time Texans called out De La Cruz’s fake-advocacy. Last year, after voting to fund the agenda that is destroying local construction industry and causing workers to lose jobs and businesses to go bankrupt Monica De La Cruz brought industry leaders to Congress – yet a board member at the meeting said it was “‘just all photo-op’ and that he felt ‘censored,’ unable to fully voice his concerns.”
DCCC Spokesperson Madison Andrus:
“Monica De La Cruz is a liar. Her faux-advocacy for South Texas’ immigrant communities only lasts as long as it takes to stage a photo-op. She has proven she won’t hesitate to throw them back to the wolves to continue pleasing her extremist party bosses in D.C. Her self-interested cowardice doesn’t belong in Congress.”
Read more about De La Cruz’s hypocrisy:
Migrant Insider: She Funded the Machine That Took Them.
- In July 2025, Rep. Monica De La Cruz, R-Texas, voted to hand ICE $75 billion — effectively tripling the agency’s annual budget to nearly $29 billion per year, with another $45 billion earmarked to expand detention capacity to 100,000 people in custody daily. The Trump administration’s stated goal: deport one million people a year. Only two Republicans voted against it. De La Cruz was not one of them.
- Seven months later, that machine came for Antonio Gámez-Cuéllar, 18, and his brother Caleb, 14 — students in the McAllen High School Mariachi Oro, the same group De La Cruz had brought to the United States Capitol the previous summer, put on the House floor, and praised for their contributions to Tejano culture. ICE picked up the entire family at a routine check-in on Feb. 25. No criminal record. No missed court dates. A final immigration hearing scheduled for September.
- The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was the legislative foundation of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. De La Cruz voted for it in July 2025.
- Under the law, ICE received a $75 billion supplement it can spend over four years, on top of its existing base budget of roughly $10 billion — nearly tripling the agency’s total annual funding. An additional $45 billion went toward detention expansion. Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said the goal was to hold 100,000 people in custody daily. The Trump administration set a deportation target of one million people per year.
- Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, put it directly on X: “The reason there isn’t ‘common sense enforcement’ is because Stephen Miller demanded ICE arrest 3,000 people/day. Republicans gave ICE the money to achieve that perverse goal in their ‘one big beautiful bill.’ Only 2 Republicans voted against the bill. She wasn’t one of them.”
- Antonio and Caleb were members of Mariachi Oro — the McAllen High program that has won eight Texas Association of Mariachi Educators state championships and ten consecutive UIL honors…In the summer of 2025, De La Cruz brought them to Capitol Hill, where they were recognized before Congress and toured the Trump White House.
- On Feb. 25, when the family showed up to a routine ICE check-in, agents detained all five of them. Antonio — who had just turned 18 the month before — was sent alone to the El Valle Detention Facility in Raymondville. His parents and younger brothers went to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center.
- South Texas Democrats moved first…De La Cruz took most of the day to respond.
- The day after the arrest, Ezra Cavazos — Antonio’s girlfriend — reached out to De La Cruz’s office. Staff said they would look into it. The next day, they said there was little the office could do, according to the San Antonio Express-News.
- One person close to Antonio told the New York Times that his release was delayed until De La Cruz could arrive at the facility for a photo opportunity.
- De La Cruz has publicly described her Bracero Program 2.0 Act — an agricultural guestworker visa reform bill — as her “top legislative priority”…[But] the construction industry in the Rio Grande Valley has been gutted…De La Cruz funded the enforcement that caused it.
- In recent months, she took constituents to meetings with the Labor Department, the White House, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., urging the administration to focus enforcement on what she called “the worst of the worst.”
- The South Texas Builders Association wasn’t buying it. Mario Guerrero, the association’s executive director, told Politico: “People feel abandoned because you never showed face, and now that there’s an actual crisis, you want to show face? It’s like, dude, it’s a little too late, man.” A board member who attended the De La Cruz-Johnson meeting told The Hill it was “just all photo-op” and that he felt “censored,” unable to fully voice his concerns.
- The Gámez-Cuéllar family did everything the American legal system asked of them…And when the government came for them anyway, the congresswoman who had put them on the House floor had already cast the vote that made it possible.
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