'South Texas will never be red again': Home builders warn GOP over Trump's immigration raids
Construction executives have held multiple meetings over the last month with the White House and Congress to discuss how immigration busts on job sites and in communities are scaring away employees, making it more expensive to build homes in a market desperate for new supply. Beyond the affordability issue, the executives made an electability argument, raising concerns to GOP leaders that support among Hispanic voters is eroding, particularly in regions that swung to Trump in 2024.
Hill Republicans have held separate meetings with White House officials to share their own electoral concerns.
This story is based on eight interviews with home builders, lawmakers and others familiar with the meetings.
“I told [lawmakers] straight up: South Texas will never be red again,” said Mario Guerrero, the CEO of the South Texas Builders Association, a Trump voter who traveled to Washington last week.
He urged the administration and lawmakers to ease up on enforcement at construction sites, warning that employees are afraid to go to work.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/14/south-texas-will-never-be-red-again-builders-warn-gop-over-trumps-immigration-raids-00781374
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Unlike outdated, racist preconceptions, the area from about 200 miles or so north of the US—Mexican border isn’t neatly divided into brown Mexican-descended people on the Mexican side of the border and Euro-Americans (and maybe a few token Afro-Americans) on the US side of the border: a more accurate description for the last couple of decades is that a MAJORITY of the folks on the US side of the border in that zone are of Mexican descent. And while racists might want to believe that the population shift is due to “ illegal immigration” 
, much of it is due to the fact that many Mexican-Americans are Catholics and have large families. (Just like Italian immigrants and Polish immigrants and Irish immigrants did generations ago). (It’s called natural increase!)
(Of course the continuing right- wing assault on family planning clinics hasn’t done much to discourage any unplanned pregnancies and more population increase).
Up to now, many Mexican-Americans were rather indifferent about national and local Texas politics, much to the despair of Texas progressives and Democrats. This may be changing, what with the Miller/MAGA rein of terror on immigrants and Mexican-Americans finding that Noem’s and Homan’s goons don’t take pains to distinguish between immigrants and brown-skinned American citizens who’ve been here for generations or even longer.
Considering that Latinos are not only a plurality in Texas as a whole and outnumber European-Americans these days, this might not work out so well for Texas Republicans still pulling out memes and actions from their grandfathers’ racist toolboxes.
This treaty, signed on February 2, 1848, ended the war between the United States and Mexico. By its terms, Mexico ceded 55 percent of its territory, including the present-day states California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. Mexico also relinquished all claims to Texas, and recognized the Rio Grande as the southern boundary with the United States.
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... When the Senate reluctantly ratified the treaty (by a vote of 34 to 14) on March 10, 1848, it removed Article X guaranteeing the protection of Mexican land grants. ... {This cost many Tex-Mexican landowners their property, which was taken over by rich (read: plantation-owning) white settlers. This left many of Texas' Hispanic citizens newly impovershed, and many never recovered. This despite that many fought beside the white settlers for independence, and towns in South TX are named in honor of these war heroes. The white settlers were mostly slaveholders, after all, and they didn't see much difference between black and brown
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https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/treaty-of-guadalupe-hidalgo
Always remember that there were a lot of brown "Mexicans" living in the Southwest before the US acquired it -- they never crossed the border, legally or illegally. The border crossed them -- and whose fault is that ?
(This map does NOT include Texas, which at the time extended up into present-day Wyoming.)
