Since Trump’s inauguration, ICE has arrested over 50,000 people in the agency’s Harlingen and San Antonio sectors, called an “Area of Responsibility” (AOR) by the agency, according to arrest data acquired by the Data Deportation Project. Around 20,000 of those people were in ICE’s Harlingen AOR, which covers most of the Rio Grande Valley.
The people in South Texas have seen this as betrayal, whether by the GOP or by their neighbors who voted for them. This was an affront against the electorate that, for years, local, state, and national GOP factions have looked at as the greatest coalition to get—an untapped bastion of anti-establishment sentiment after years of disinvestment by the Democratic Party. That anger could fit somewhat inside of a playbook of the anti-government screeds from the Republican soapbox, and, briefly, it did work. Because the core of their messages over these last election cycles was simple: Democrats have abandoned you, but you now have a place to go.
But for an electorate that votes based more on class and industry ties and, sometimes, solely for the personality–a legacy of the region’s boss rule politics and the strength of Blue Dog Democrat figures in the region–it is not so surprising to see what happened in South Texas on Tuesday night. Put another way, South Texans voted against policies that harmed them or their livelihoods, not necessarily for the Democratic Party, which campaigned on alleviating that pain.
Inundated by ICE and Rising Costs of Living, South Texas Returns Home to Democrats
(www.texasobserver.org)