| Higher gas prices, higher grocery bills, and fewer customers are throwing South Texas’ economy into free fall and forcing workers to leave South Texas in order to afford their day to day lives.
From small business owners to taxi drivers and everyone in between, workers in South Texas are being forced to make impossible decisions in order to put food on the table and keep a roof over their family’s head.
Even Texans who previously voted for Donald Trump are expressing buyer’s remorse.
And every single South Texas Republican candidate endorsed this catastrophic cost-raising agenda.
REMINDER: This latest reporting comes as Latino voters abandon Republicans in droves due to their string of broken promises and failure to address the cost of living crisis.
DCCC Spokesperson Madison Andrus:
“South Texas families are paying the price for Republicans’ failures while Tano Tijerina, Monica De La Cruz, Carlos De La Cruz, and Eric Flores party it up in Dallas with their rich donors. This November, voters are going to reject Republicans’ cost-raising agenda and send Henry Cuellar, Vicente Gonzalez, Bobby Pulido, and Johnny Garcia to Congress to actually work to make life more affordable for Texans.”
READ MORE HERE:
The Telegraph: Americans commute from Mexico to avoid Trump’s cost-of-living crisis
- Yvette Rita, a 24-year-old shop assistant, was working the stock room in the back of the store on a sleepy Saturday afternoon in August. “It’s been bad for the past couple years,” she said. “But it’s been really difficult recently with the price of bills, groceries and everything. I’ve had to move back to Mexico.”
- Roughly 40 per cent of all US-Mexico trade passes through Laredo each year, meaning the border city should have a thriving pit-stop economy – and until recently, it did. But Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and a cost-of-living crisis have pushed prices so high that some of its 281,000 residents are moving to the other side of the tracks.
- Ms Rita, like many in Laredo, now works in the US but commutes back to her family in Mexico. Wages remain higher in the Lone Star state, but rent and groceries are far cheaper across the border. “My husband and two-year-old daughter live over there,” she said, gesturing towards the Rio Grande a few hundred metres away. “It hasn’t been easy.”
- An American citizen too, the Texas A&M University student now drives an hour to work each day from her mother’s house over the border. “The prices are a little bit cheaper over there. If I were to live here, it wouldn’t be enough. Rent is pretty high,” she said. “I think it’s pretty expensive already – and it’s getting even more expensive.”
- Laredo residents repeatedly cite petrol as the most expensive item on their everyday shopping list, and some blame Mr Trump’s war in Iran for raising the price at the pump.
- Jesus Alvarado, 57, who has been driving taxis since he was a teenager, points the finger squarely at Mr Trump. “Before the war, prices were already high, but now gas is just so expensive,” he said, speaking through the open window of his silver minivan. “I mean, I voted for Trump. But who wants a war? The way prices have gone up has put people off.”
- Mr Alvarado is one of many people in Laredo who helped Mr Trump win the surrounding county in 2024, but is probably going to vote for the Democrats in the midterms. “I’m not happy with Trump,” he put it bluntly, noting that the US president had failed to keep his promise to bring down inflation.
- Quique Pantoja, 59, who runs a bar in Laredo right opposite a Rio Grande border crossing, said business had shrunk about 35 per cent. “It kind of started last year, not as soon as Trump got into office, but maybe five, six months later,” he said. Fewer trucks passing through mean fewer customers for the bar, which opens at 12pm during the week to target lunchtime traffic.
- ICE arrests have only deterred would-be Mexican tourists further. “Social media is so powerful, and if you start looking on social media, people are saying: ‘Oh, they got this person at Walmart. They got this person over here,’ so they kind of think twice about going out on the streets,” Mr Pantoja said. “Absolutely, I regret voting for Trump… It seems like every day there’s something going on.”
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