On a Thursday in late August, Republican Speaker of the U.S. House Mike Johnson was on a campaign swing through a handful of key congressional districts in South Texas that will be critical to whether he keeps his job next year.
One of those stops was an early-afternoon rally for Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina at Tijerina’s new campaign headquarters in Laredo. Together, Tijerina, who is challenging longtime Democratic incumbent Henry Cuellar for Texas’ 28th Congressional District, and Johnson sounded the alarm about the creeping rise of socialists and communists in the Democratic Party.
“This isn’t your father’s Democratic Party,” said Johnson, a Louisiana native, as he reminisced about growing up surrounded by god-fearing, conservative Yellow Dog Democrats. In his own brief, unmemorable stump speech, Tijerina warned the crowd of about 100 attendees not to dismiss the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America as a “facade” and said that the Dems’ electoral strategy is to “divide and conquer.”
Nary a mention was made, however, of Tijerina’s opponent, Cuellar, who is a notoriously conservative member of his own party. The Republicans’ warnings in Laredo were not dissimilar to those Cuellar was making a few years back when he faced an insurgent primary challenge from a young progressive named Jessica Cisneros, backed by the Justice Democrats and a litany of other left-wing national groups. In two consecutive primary cycles, Cisneros came within a hair of ousting the powerful Laredo politician, who has throughout his roughly two decades in office staked out both an influential role on the House Appropriations Committee, which controls the nation’s pursestrings, and a reputation as an ideological pariah in his party—staunchly pro-oil and gas, pro-gun, anti-abortion, anti-union.
“You’ve got a for-profit group of a bunch of New York intellectuals that have never had the red dirt of South Texas on their boots, they probably don’t even have boots, coming in saying how this district should be represented … that’s just not going to fly,” Colin Strother, Cuellar’s sharp-elbowed former longtime political consultant said of Cisneros and the Justice Democrats during that first primary.
Cuellar survived those primary challenges only to become the target of a federal corruption investigation in which he was charged and indicted on multiple counts of bribery and abuse of power for an alleged scheme in which he took favorable legislative action in exchange for cash from an Azerbaijani state oil company and a Mexican bank. (Strother pled guilty for his role in the bribery scheme and struck a deal with the feds to inform on his former boss.)
The Laredo Democrat was temporarily stripped of his appropriations subcommittee chairmanship and on the verge of standing trial in a federal courthouse in Houston when Donald Trump was elected president again and, shortly after moving back into the White House, issuing a pardon of Cuellar, claiming the latter was politically targeted by President Joe Biden for criticizing Biden’s border policies. “Crooked Joe used the FBI and DOJ to ‘take out’ a member of his own Party after Highly Respected Congressman Henry Cuellar bravely spoke out against Open Borders,” Trump posted at the time. “Henry, I don’t know you, but you can sleep well tonight — Your nightmare is finally over!”
Cuellar and Tijerina campaign signs posted next to each other in Laredo (Justin Miller)
Trump apparently expected the Democrat—who despite his maverick leanings has repeatedly pledged staunch allegiance to his party—to then either bow out of office or switch parties. (After Cuellar did neither, the president eventually endorsed Tijerina, posting: “The fact that Henry Cuellar would be running against Donald J. Trump, and the Republican Party, seems to be a great act of disloyalty.”)
National Republicans, meanwhile, were seeding what they saw as newly fertile soil in the wake of Trump’s historic 2024 performance in the Hispanic-heavy swathes of South Texas—which included his narrowly carrying Webb County, typically as blue as the big sky, by a couple thousand votes.
Within weeks of those November elections, Tijerina, who himself was a quintessential conservative border Democrat in county office, signed on with a prominent national GOP political consulting firm called Axiom Strategies—which has worked for Ted Cruz’s campaigns and is currently running Ken Paxton’s Senate bid—and went on Fox News to declare himself a Republican.
“Over the years, I’ve watched the Democratic Party shift further and further to the left and leaving the values that I hold dear to my heart,” Tijerina said on Fox. “I’ve always been a conservative, and the radicalization of the national Democrats pushed me away a long time ago.”
Soon after, he made his intentions clear that he was running for the 28th. Republicans in Austin lent a hand by redrawing the congressional maps to reconfigure many of the South Texas districts, including Cuellar’s, to reflect Trump’s strength at the top of the ballot. The 28th was redrawn to remove the portion around San Antonio and extend along the border back into Hidalgo County and Maverick County. While the new boundaries made it more Hispanic and more heavily Trump-favored, it also actually improved the net margins for Democratic congressional candidates who were on the ballot.
“Of the five seats that Republicans changed to make more favorable, they basically did the least [in the 28th]. You could argue that they made it more favorable because the Trump vote went up but the combined congressional vote went down,” said Kyle Kondik, a national elections analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “There are all sorts of indications that the Trump ’24 Latino numbers are not going to come even close to replicating in ’26. Tijerina is a better challenger than [Cuellar saw] in ’24. But the environment is worse.”
Johnson called Tijerina the “poster child” for the strength of their midterm candidate slate. “I talk about Tano all around the country,” said Johnson, whose speech was littered with various Trump impressions, including comments on Tijerina’s muscular physique. “He’s straight out of central casting,” he said, mimicking Trump.
Indeed, the 52-year-old Tijerina is something of a MAGA dream. The brawny Latino rancher pulls off the South Texas cowboy aesthetic without a whiff of cosplay. He leans into humor and has a vibrant social media presence. It’s a stark contrast with Cuellar, who looks every bit his 70 years of age and whose campaign videos on social media are decidedly low-energy.
Tijerina was a high school baseball star in Laredo and was drafted into the Major Leagues. His career as a pitcher, however, fizzled out in the lower levels of the minor leagues. He returned to Laredo, playing some seasons for local independent pro teams. He wed a member of one of Webb County’s wealthiest families and, eventually, set his sights on running for the highest political office in town—county judge. Tijerina narrowly lost his first attempt in 2010, running on a platform that included improving county infrastructure, such as the local jail, and expanding green energy. He ran again in 2014, stressing his experience as a businessman in various industries, and won.
Cuellar in 2019 (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)
Cuellar is, in his own right, the head of a political dynasty in Laredo—though it may be a fading one. His sister, the former county tax assessor, lost a contested primary for a state House seat in 2024. His brother, the longtime county sheriff, is about to go on trial for federal corruption charges involving a COVID-related contracting scheme.
Tijerina’s aunt serves with him on the county court as a Democratic commissioner. His wife’s family has ties to GOP politics from before his party switch. According to federal disclosure filings, Tijerina is worth between $3 and $10 million, and his family has sprawling business interests that include a hemp farm that produces CBD products, a ranch, an oil and gas venture, and a real estate firm, according to the Texas Tribune.
Still, in his bid against Cuellar, Tijerina has tried to cast himself as an anti-establishment crusader. “I’m not a career politician. I’m an outsider, a businessman, but most importantly I’m a leader who delivers,” he said in one of his ads. In his campaign, Tijerina has sought to undermine what has long been Cuellar’s calling card in the district: bringing home the federal bacon.
“He comes around here with the checks, and he acts like he presents all this money to us. In reality, the cities and counties, 95 percent of those are grants, and we [the local governments] go out and get those grants,” Tijerina said in an interview with Spectrum News. “He has not done anything. He’s been a stumbling block for 21 years. It’s been a facade, so I think it’s time to change it now.”
Tijerina specifically claimed credit for delivering local initiatives, including an expansion of Meals on Wheels. (Cuellar and Tijerina appeared together at the groundbreaking for that project.)
In a recent campaign fundraising email, Cuellar shot back. “He’s taking credit for dollars that I delivered to our district: As a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, I fought in Washington to secure those federal dollars for senior meals. … My opponent just showed up for the press conference,” the email read.
The two have also sparred over local data center concerns, including rumors of a project involving a development controlled by the Walker family—the same wealthy family that Tijerina married into—which the Walkers have denied. Cuellar filed a “ratepayer bill of rights” aimed at protecting constituents from exorbitant energy costs from data centers.
In his own statement, Tijerina said: “We can lead in technology and still refuse to trade away the water, land, and affordable power our children will inherit. It’s disappointing to see some local officials, including my opponent, grandstanding on this issue when they haven’t taken any official action. South Texas deserves action, not political posturing.”
Neither Cuellar nor Tijerina’s campaigns responded to the Texas Observer’s interview requests.
Despite his very public legal troubles, Cuellar’s allies say he remains a stalwart elected official. In 2024, he was reelected over his Republican opponent by 5 points and outperformed Trump throughout his district.
Sylvia Bruni, the Webb County Democratic chair, said that local voters still trust Cuellar to deliver for their interests—despite the controversy over the indictment. “[The indictment] certainly created turmoil. And it certainly created a great deal of concern. But the bottom line is the alternative to have a Republican in that spot would be disastrous. We need to turn this around, not go back,” she told the Observer.
She also says that, at least in Webb County, the hullabaloo over South Texas turning red has been dramatically overblown. Trump won the county by just 2.2 percentage points—1,432 votes—and was the only Republican on the ballot to win in the county.
It was on that thin margin that Tijerina decided to take an opportunistic leap, she said. “As soon as Webb went ‘red’ … all of a sudden Tano sees the light.”
Bruni has been generally unimpressed with Tijerina’s tenure at the helm of the county. “I’ve never known him to represent anything. He’s a very attractive man. He takes advantage of that,” she said. She said that Trump’s narrow vote margin was bought with false promises of immediate reward and believes those who opted to take a chance on Trump have buyer’s remorse. “The Trump checks never came. But the tariffs came. The SNAP cuts. [ICE is] picking people left and right.”
Back at the Tijerina campaign launch event, Jose Salazar, who was elected GOP county chair in Webb in 2024, said that he doesn’t think the last election was just a flash in the pan for Republicans. Voters have grown tired of political parties and incumbents: “Being an incumbent is not necessarily the best thing for a race,” he told the Observer. “Henry Cuellar, he’s a great guy, I mean, he is a nice guy. But one of the things that Henry Cuellar has, he has many, many years in D.C. And I think that that has changed Henry Cuellar over time. People can identify with Tano Tijerina and the things he’s done here with the county.”
Laredoans, he said, are seeking change. “If you’re gonna vote for the same candidate that you’ve been voting for the past several election cycles, you’re going to expect mostly the same thing. I think that, ‘What do we have to lose with Judge Tano?’”
Beas, who would provide only that name and is a 24-year-old currently in between jobs, echoed that sentiment. He showed up for the event because he hopes Tijerina can win the seat and shake things up. He lingered along the back wall waiting for the event to start. “People don’t like to switch it up” in Laredo, he said, talking about longtime Democratic voters. But “it’s Cuellar’s time to go.” A lot of people his age in Laredo have given up on political parties and consider themselves to be more independent, he said, and Tijerina is emblematic of that impulse.
Still, as Cuellar has proven repeatedly, it’ll be hard to topple the most powerful politician in Laredo.
A poll by Texas Southern University, released soon after Tijerina’s campaign event, showed Cuellar leading Tijerina 45-34—with support from almost a quarter of 2024 Trump voters.
The post In Laredo, a County Judge and MAGA Convert Seeks to Topple Henry Cuellar appeared first on The Texas Observer.
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