‘It Clears The Sky': After Trump Pardon and Bucking His Party, Cuellar Looks to 2026

ZAPATA, TEXAS — Rep. Henry Cuellar said he is relieved.

The longtime House Democrat faced charges in 2024 that he bribed a foreign government and acted as a foreign agent. But President Donald Trump pardoned Cuellar and his wife, who was also charged, in December. He resumed seniority status in the caucus, and he says the abrupt shift in fortunes gives him the upper hand in the tough race to keep his seat in the midterm elections.

“It clears the sky, and the skies on the road ahead,” he told NOTUS. “We’re going to win this race.”

The unexpected legal reprieve by the president served as a best case scenario for Cuellar, a centrist who frequently breaks with his party, but holds a district that Trump won by seven percentage points in the 2024 election. Trump’s influence and popularity in South Texas after the 2024 election made national Republicans hopeful they can flip Cuellar’s district, as well as others near the border

Unlike the vast majority of his Democratic colleagues, Cuellar regularly works with Republicans on border patrol and security, most recently siding with Republicans on the Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill he helped negotiate.

Cuellar has maintained his stronghold in South Texas because of his approach to immigration and border security, which are major job creators in his region. He rebukes those in his party who called to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saying that’s too far left of where the party should be.

“I always outperform Democrats in my district, national and state by a lot,” Cuellar said.

His hold in Laredo, his hometown that is the largest city in the district he represents, is stronger than any Republican who has run against him could match and has relieved Democrats who want the majority back in November.

“He has faced down challenge after challenge and come out on top by a comfortable margin every time, and he remains one of the most dedicated and respected public servants in South Texas,” Madison Andrus, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s spokesperson, said in a statement. “Anyone attempting to go head-to-head with Congressman Cuellar should probably touch grass and come back to reality because he’s not going anywhere.”

Cuellar is in the middle of the one of the biggest legislative fights this year. He helped negotiate and voted for DHS funding that Democrats are fighting to change in the wake of a partial shutdown. And once again, he is navigating tensions between the different factions of his caucus who want different outcomes, now that the the House approved a short term funding patch for the department.

“Border communities want to have law and order, but still respect the immigrants’ rights,” Cuellar told NOTUS explaining his position. “A lot of people, they don’t understand the border because they don’t want to have open borders. There are a lot of people that work for Border Patrol that are Hispanics. In fact, in the border communities and small communities, some of the best paying jobs are with the federal government.”

Cuellar is part of a shrinking wing of centrist Democrats who try to work with Republicans on policy issues. He believes the Abolish ICE movement is not the proper stance for Democrats.

“I disagree with him, absolutely,” Rep. Delia Ramirez, a progressive from Illinois, said. “And in this moment, it is tone deaf to believe that we’re going to continue to use the same 1990s, or even policies from the conversation of 2017, 2018, to meet this moment,” she told NOTUS.

Ramirez added: “The reality is that the system itself is absolutely rotten from the inside out, and there is no reform, certainly not the reforms he’s talking about, that are going to change what’s happening to people every day in the community.”

Lawmakers from both parties were taken aback by Trump’s decision to pardon Cuellar when the president announced it on social media in December. Cuellar told NOTUS he did not see it coming.

In the end, it was Cuellar’s daughters’ letter to Trump that won him over. The president shared in a post on X of the Nov. 12 letter requesting clemency for their parents, who suggested in the letter their dad’s “independence and honesty” on border policy “may have contributed to how this case began.”

“A reporter had asked to make a comment on that,” Cuellar told NOTUS. “I remember I was walking to my office. I took my phone out from meeting to meeting, I saw that, and I said, ‘Let me read this once and twice. Can you send it to me?’ Well, they sent it to me. I had to read it once or twice.” When asked whether Trump pardoned him because he thought he was going to switch to the Republican Party, Cuellar said, “You’ve got to ask him.”

Cuellar had zero intention of becoming a Republican, noting that he did not know why Trump may have assumed that. When Cuellar made clear he was not switching parties, Trump aired his frustrations on X and endorsed the top GOP candidate running against him, Tano Tijerina. The president also made clear that he had no regrets about pardoning Cuellar.

“I don’t know why, but the fact that Henry Cuellar would be running against Donald J. Trump, and the Republican Party, seems to be a great act of disloyalty and, perhaps more importantly, the act of a fool,” Trump wrote in a Jan. 6 Truth Social post. “Knowing everything and, if I had to do it again, I would do the exact same thing.”

Weeks later, the Department of Justice charged Martin Cuellar, the congressman’s brother and the sheriff for Webb County, for allegedly using public funds to run a fraudulent for-profit disinfecting business during the COVID-19 pandemic. He has denied all wrongdoing. Cuellar and his siblings have ties to power in the counties they represent.

The House GOP’s campaign committee is making an issue out of his prior legal issues and those related to his family.

“Out of touch Henry Cuellar is a self-serving career politician who’s spent years delivering nothing for his district while consistently voting to make life more expensive and communities less safe,” Christian Martinez, spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee said. “In Congress, Tano Tijerina will fight for Texans by focusing on opportunity, security, and the American Dream.”

Cuellar is welcomed with open arms in his district. He ignores efforts by Republicans to paint him as out of touch. At an address for the Laredo city mayor last week, Cuellar was seated toward the front alongside local officials. Earlier in the day, he presented federal funds to Zapata County sheriffs for a border security operation. And in the afternoon, he appeared alongside a city council official and a local pastor to discuss the humane holding of migrant families on the South Texas border.

Cuellar’s district was redrawn by Republicans in 2025 to include parts of South Texas that were previously included after the 2020 redistricting, parts in Rep. Vicente Gonzalez’s district, which borders Cuellar’s.

“I have no doubt Henry is going to win,” Gonzalez, a South Texan Democrat, told NOTUS. “South Texas will be taking a hard blue turn this cycle.”