Republican Monica De La Cruz Fear Mongers in Misleading Ad With Decade-Old Photo

Republican Monica De La Cruz’s amateur congressional campaign stumbled again this week when she released a new TV ad featuring a fear-mongering, nearly decade-old photo that has “long been a staple of racist GOP ads” and was not taken anywhere along the border — or even in the United States.

In a shameless effort to stoke racist fears about Hispanic men, multiple Republican candidates and organizations have prominently featured in their political ads a 2015 image of heavily tattooed MS-13 gang members photographed in an El Salvador prison by a British photographer. Those Republicans were slammed for using the misleading image and were even called out by the photographer himself, who said the images were “misused without his permission in what he called a racist effort:”

“‘I was offended,’ said London-based photographer Adam Hinton in an interview Wednesday. ‘I never gave permission. . . . The flyer is disgusting, racist and goes totally against anything I believe in.’”

But that didn’t stop Monica De La Cruz from featuring the same images in her new TV ad, stoking misleading and harmful stereotypes and wrongly implying that the photo was taken on the border. 

“Monica De La Cruz doesn’t have a record to run on in her floundering campaign, so she’s trying to win an election through fear-mongering and cheap, misleading political ads,” said DCCC spokesperson Monica Robinson. “Meanwhile, Democrats are focused on showing up for South Texas communities.”

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