New polling shows that border security and immigration are the top two most important issues for Texas voters, and Democratic Rep. Colin Allred — who is running to challenge Republican Sen. Ted Cruz this fall — has taken notice.
Allred is following in the footsteps of other Democrats like Tom Suozzi, trying to move to the right on immigration and border security and using the issue to attack Republicans. Suozzi’s special election win in February has seemingly given other Democrats permission to pivot even as progressives fret that a rightward turn isn’t a winning strategy.
The turn for Allred has been striking. Before defeating GOP Rep. Pete Sessions in an upset in 2018, he called the border wall “racist” at a forum earlier that year, something that a pro-Cruz super PAC has already highlighted on social media. But ahead of his general election against Cruz, Allred has allied himself with moderates like Texas’ Henry Cuellar, who has advocated for tougher border security for decades. Allred and Cuellar, along with Vicente Gonzalez, were among a handful of Democrats who voted in favor of a GOP resolution condemning President Joe Biden’s handling of the border in January.
Progressives like Roland Gutierrez, a state senator from South Texas who ran against Allred in the primary, said that “we don’t need Democrats throwing our president under the bus” in a statement following Allred’s vote.
Josh Stewart, a spokesperson for Allred’s campaign, said that Allred supports a more comprehensive immigration deal along with border security, like the one negotiated and swiftly killed in the Senate, and pointed to remarks he made in a press conference with Cuellar and other moderate Democrats in which they called themselves Democrats for Border Security.
Allred said that he was “sick and tired of politicians talking about the problem, about the crisis that we are experiencing at our border but being unwilling to actually solve it. The cynicism of saying that I don’t want to pass a package that will help us address a problem because I want to run on that in November is unacceptable to Texans and to folks in border communities.”
While he reiterated his call for a comprehensive bill to solve the immigration problem, Allred pointed first to how the bipartisan Senate bill would have provided $20 billion in resources to secure the border and how funds would be used to hire more Customs and Border Protection personnel.
Allred is a co-sponsor of the bipartisan Dignity Act authored by fellow Texas Democrat Veronica Escobar and Florida Republican Maria Salazar. His support for the bipartisan Senate bill is in stark contrast with Cruz’s position, who took credit for killing the bill on his podcast. In the episode, Cruz said the bill “does not fix the problem of our open borders. It does not fix the problem of the chaos of the southern border and the invasion that Joe Biden has caused, and in significant ways, it makes it worse.”
In a statement to NOTUS, Cruz spokesperson Macarena Martinez said, “Securing the border is Senator Cruz’s top priority. His record is clear, he has been the leading fighter for a secure border and has worked day in and day out to pressure the Biden administration to close the border and protect Texas. Conversely, Colin Allred has been a consistent vote for Joe Biden and his open borders agenda.”
Senator Chris Murphy, the lead Democratic negotiator on the Senate immigration bill, issued a memo in February arguing that Republicans’ refusal to accept any compromise on immigration left an opening for Democrats to go on offense. Other campaigns have followed suit.
While Allred and other Democrats are eager to show that their shift in tone on immigration is a winning strategy, that may be easier said than done in a big border state like Texas.
“[Talking about immigration] is a huge benefit to Republicans because it splits the Democratic Party down the middle and divides them between progressives who want to see the Biden administration actually doing less on border security and moderates doing more on border security,” said Rice University professor Mark P. Jones. “You already see Allred trying to distance himself from Biden and his policies. It is going to be much harder to do that when voters go into a ballot box and see Allred right below Biden and [Kamala] Harris.”
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Ryan Hernández is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.