Texas Republican Candidates Are Stuck Walking a Line on Immigration

DALLAS — The Trump administration’s surge of immigration agents across the country is complicating the nascent campaigns of Texas Republicans hoping to join Congress next year.

They’re now faced with juggling the Republican Party’s hard-line stance on unauthorized immigration with the increasing unpopularity of President Donald Trump’s deportation campaigns. And with a large Latino population in many Texas districts, many candidates are trying to walk that line without alienating voters.

“I think we need a strong border,” said John Lujan, a Texas state representative who’s running in a newly drawn congressional seat. “But the other thing that really bothers me is that some of the people that are here that have been great citizens — family, history, businesses — we can’t just throw those people over.”

Anyone in the country illegally who has committed a crime should be deported, he said, but “the people that are doing well, we need to make sure that we have a pathway for them. I’m not saying a freebie, put some fines on there, but have something in place for them.”

Abraham Enriquez, who’s running to replace retiring Rep. Jodey Arrington, said he believes people mistakenly conflate border security and immigration reform.

“Border security and immigration reform can be two separate things,” Enriquez said. “And one, I believe that every Texan, regardless of what you have, an ‘R’ or a ‘D,’ and how you vote, we all know we must secure our borders.” But immigration reform, he said, “gets a little bit tricky as to what type of Hispanic kind of Texan you’re talking to.”

Enriquez said he believes that talking about immigration reform, at times, “doesn’t help when, you know, Republicans don’t have a cohesive message around what that means for us.”

He still said he doesn’t think immigration will be a big problem for his party in the midterms — at least as long as it nails down an answer on “what’s next.”

“President Trump came out pretty strong on how his stances are with the Dreamers, with ag and construction and hospitality workers, there just wasn’t a rally behind what next,” he said. “So if we as a party have the ‘what next’ answered, then that’s kind of a bulletproof policy point.”

This is something Rep. Maria Salazar of Florida has warned Republicans about. She has repeatedly said that if Republicans don’t build a cohesive immigration plan and act on it, they are going to lose Hispanic and Latino voters.

“Today we are watching it unfold in real time. Hispanics are leaving the GOP in large numbers, and pretending otherwise won’t fix it,” she said on X this week. “As Republicans, we must reverse course and act now.”

Others, though, have taken a much more party-line approach, advocating for the deportations to continue as is.

“I think we need to finish the job,” Ryan Binkley, a candidate in a newly drawn Dallas and Fort Worth area seat, told NOTUS. “We need to work with ICE and do that to secure our country and have legal immigration.”

He said there are “a lot of different visas” that the country still needs, “but we need to put the American worker first.”

Tom Sell, who’s also running to replace Arrington, said Trump’s immigration and border security efforts have “been a blessing to everyone” in Texas and should be a sign for other states to cooperate with immigration officials.

“It’s unfortunate, and I wish people would learn from what was accomplished on the southern border when we cooperate with law enforcement officers,” Sell said. “It’s been a remarkable success, and I think people in Texas are proud of that.”