Bobby Pulido descended a staircase bedecked in flowers to face the quinceañara in her shimmering blue ball gown. Her magnificent hoop skirt swayed as the Tejano star-turned-South Texas Democratic congressional candidate launched into a rendition of “Hermoso Cariño.” It was Pulido’s second quince of four that night, part of a marathon run of birthdays, weddings, and even baptisms that have become the cornerstone of his campaign trail strategy. He finished with his hit song “Desvelado,” led the birthday girl by the hand around the dance floor, and gifted her a pink “Make Quinceañaras Great Again” hat.

After 30 years of performing across the United States and Mexico, the two-time Latin Grammy winner officially announced in September 2025 his bid to run for the 15th Congressional District, a newly remodeled majority-Latino South Texas district that’s anchored in McAllen and stretches north all the way to New Braunfels outside San Antonio. Republican Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz flipped that then-open seat back in 2022 and has held onto it in 2024 despite it being one of Dems’ top targets in the state.

The conservative Blue Dog Democrats PAC poured nearly $1 million into Pulido’s primary race, betting that the strength of his name recognition, cultural influence, and deep roots throughout the Rio Grande Valley would help to win back the seat after a Trump-fueled wave among Hispanic voters in 2024. In March, he easily defeated the more progressive yet little-known Ada Cuellar, an emergency physician with a law degree who largely self-funded her bid.

His slogan, “Not team red. Not team blue. Team you,” anchors Pulido as the Democrats’ familiar, moderate champion to reclaim the 15th from De La Cruz. He’s determined to podcast, sing, and dance his way to Congress, brushing off every scandal that seeks to poison his good-vibes campaign.

Bobby Pulido twirls the birthday girl at a quinceañara in Weslaco, Texas, the first of multiple campaign stops that night. (Photo by Eden Shamy)

De La Cruz is the first Republican and Latina to represent the district, thanks to GOP gerrymandering that set up her successful run in 2022 as the 15th was redrawn to be much redder, prompting the incumbent Democrat Vicente Gonzalez to move to a neighboring district. But, in Texas Republicans’ bid to deliver five more House seats to Trump in yet another round of redistricting last year, the district has since been redrawn yet again, putting her on relatively more uncertain ground.

“Eighty percent of that district she hasn’t represented in the last two two election cycles. They really don’t know her,” said Jon Taylor, a professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio. “She’s as much of a challenger—a non-incumbent—as an incumbent.”

Combined with Trump’s harsh immigration enforcement and recklessness with the economy, Taylor believes “this is a decidedly toss-up race.” In June, leaked audio from a De La Cruz fundraising event revealed that her own internal polling put her neck and neck with Pulido. “We ran the poll, and what we found was that I am up by only one point,” De La Cruz told the room, according to Punchbowl News. “One point. And I said, ‘Oh, sweet Lord Jesus.’ Right? That’s not good.

While he’s known as a prominent musical performer, Pulido is no stranger to politics. He grew up immersed in the Rio Grande Valley political scene; his uncle served as a county judge and Pulido participated in a prestigious civic leadership class as a boy. In the first episode of his Ranch Hall Podcast, Pulido said campaigning with Congressman Gonzalez in 2022 inspired his own decision to run. As a young man he dropped out of college at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, where he was pursuing a political science degree, to become a full-time musician. Now, he feels he’s picking up where he left off.

Pulido has staked himself out as a moderate-to-conservative Democrat, joining the ranks of South Texas Blue Dogs like his friend Gonzalez, who now represents the 34th District in the Valley, and Congressman Henry Cuellar in Laredo.

Republican Monica De La Cruz-Hernandez is running in the next general election for CD-15. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

“With all due respect to the previous Democratic candidate, she might have been a little too progressive for the district,” Taylor said of Michelle Vallejo, who ran and lost against De La Cruz in 2022 and 2024. “That is not the case with Bobby Pulido.”

Pulido’s podcast has featured a wide range of friends, politicians, and other influential figures in South Texas across the political divide. He connected with his friends from the Living Large Theater podcast over their shared cultural conservatism and distaste for young lefties. In the first Ranch Hall episode, Pulido criticized Biden for betraying his centrist reputation by surrounding himself “with a lot of young progressives that were ideologically molded in East and West Coast Ivy League schools.” He argued that South Texans have always supported Democrats because “there was never a progressive ideology” with those local politicians.

It’s true that South Texas has, both in the Texas Legislature and in Washington, been historically represented by relatively conservative Dems, though there have been growing attempts to unseat those incumbents in recent years. . In recent cycles, Cuellar, the most powerful and prominent of these South Texas pols, twice narrowly fended off primary challenges by Jessica Cisneros, a young progressive backed by the insurgent group Justice Democrats.

In May, Bernie-backed progressive Julio Salinas won the Democratic primary for Texas House District 41, squarely within Congressional District 15, against an establishment-backed moderate. Salinas will still need to defeat a Republican opponent in November in this competitive district.

Pulido and Gonzalez are among 13 Democrats who signed the Promise to America (PTA), a pledge to rebuild voter trust through a set of moderate principles: capitalism, safety, fiscal responsibility, effective government, and patriotism. Shortly after, a slate of candidates from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) won primaries in New York, igniting an intraparty feud between moderates and leftists. 

In an interview at his campaign headquarters in Pharr, Pulido said he felt uncomfortable with the ensuing social media battle between the DSA and the PTA bloc. “I still believe in what I signed,” Pulido said. “I just don’t believe in demonizing other people in my party. We’ve gotta work together.”

He believes that the current system needs reform to protect free markets and balance the budget. He wants to hold certain corporations and billionaires accountable—not with a wealth tax but by closing tax loopholes and strengthening antitrust laws. Pulido said his top priority is lowering healthcare costs, and he’s a strong supporter of the Break Up Big Medicine Act. While he does not support Medicare for All—a top priority of the party’s progressive wing—he said he would support lowering the eligible age from 65 to 55.

On foreign policy, Pulido said he was resolutely against Trump’s war on Iran, yet sounded aloof on the debate over the U.S providing arms and aid to Israel. “I don’t have as much information that a congressman is privy to,” Pulido said when asked where he stands on sending arms to Israel. “I just wish there was peace between the two, and I feel like I blame this administration for not being strong-willed enough.”

Pulido has largely focused his attacks on Congresswoman De La Cruz’s fealty to President Donald Trump and her support of his “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a budget package that radically increased ICE funding while cutting SNAP and health insurance benefits, which have thrown many Texans off the benefit and insurance rolls. Trump’s megabill also allocated funding for the construction of a border wall through the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge, which is in the district Neither De La Cruz nor Pulido have publicly commented on the matter. When asked by the Observer, Pulido responded, “I haven’t said anything about it, but I obviously oppose it.” De La Cruz did not respond to a request for comment.

Pulido said he is opposed to demilitarizing the border, but he believes that a secure immigration system can be achieved “without destroying families and our local economy in the process.” He has called out the “cruelty and corruption” of for-profit detention centers and immigration arrest quotas. Unlike Gonzalez and Cuellar, Pulido said he would not have approved the ICE funding back in January—just weeks after the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis. Pulido has publicly demanded the release of South Texans from migrant detention centers, including a Catholic nun and a youth mariachi group. (De La Cruz also joined calls for the release of Sister Letty Ugboaja.)

Meanwhile, the imperiled incumbent has slowly scaled up her attacks on Pulido. In March, she quipped that Pulido is more qualified to perform “at your niece’s quinceañera” than run for Congress. Pulido was quick to capitalize on the attention.

“A quinceañera isn’t just a pachanga, it’s a right of passage that brings family and neighbors together, and honestly, that’s exactly what this campaign is about,” Pulido said in a video on Facebook. He opened up an event page, which has received thousands of performance requests. Pulido said he’s managed to appear at over 50 quinces thus far. He spends weekends driving all around the Valley from one event to the next.

Democratic congressional Pulido performs his hit song “Desvelado” at the youth Creative Arts Studio at Valley View High School in Hidalgo, Texas. (Photo by Eden Shamy)

“I know for her and her friends, it was something special to have him here,” said Tiffany Tamez, whose daughter was also celebrating a quince. “But not only that, we know what it is that he’s standing for. He’s standing for family, he’s standing for us Hispanics.”

In recent months, Pulido has faced more serious accusations that he willfully ignored a former bandmate’s long criminal history. Frankie Caballero, who played off and on as Pulido’s accordionist for nearly 30 years, was imprisoned in 2014 for indecent sexual contact with an 8-year-old girl. Upon his release four years later, Caballero was welcomed back into the band. The story first broke in the right-wing tabloid New York Post and was quickly seized upon by his opponent.

De La Cruz accused Pulido of knowingly endangering children by bringing Caballero to perform on tour and at a middle school benefit. Pulido has vigorously denied that he knew anything about the accordionist’s sex crimes, stating that because the accordion player was a contract worker, they never conducted a background check on Caballero. He wrote off the scandal as politically motivated. “I think it’s desperation. She’s in a Trump +18 district, and it wasn’t even supposed to be close,” Pulido told the Observer.

But the headlines have kept on coming. Opposition operatives and news outlets have been digging up decade-old tweets, revealing comments that ranged from suggestive and crude to outright slurs. Pulido responded with a statement on Monday that played most of it off as humor and mistranslation. “Clickbait is a hell of a drug,” he said. “Some of those old tweets, they went too far. That’s my bad, and I’ve apologized.”

Still, for many Tejanos, Pulido remains a cultural icon and a musical inspiration. On July 17, the local Creative Arts Studio hosted an homage to Pulido at Valley View High School in Hidalgo. Kids dressed like vaqueros and played accordions, squeezing out the recognizable melodies of Pulido’s famous tunes. He joined the young musicians on stage and bestowed them with some advice. “Music is heart,” Pulido told the students in Spanish. “You have to do this for the love of music. Don’t do things just to be famous.”

Tamez said it’s that type of humility that makes Pulido a great candidate and ambassador for the community. “I’ve known Bobby’s music since I was probably in diapers,” she said. “He’s using his fame in a positive way, and he’s still a down-to-earth, humble guy.”

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Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted with permission from How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention, out from Haymarket Books this July.

The Prison-Immigration Knot

By the late 1980s, thanks to over a decade of laws criminalizing immigrants and expanding the camp system, prison and immigration detention industries were operating by their own economic logics. Even in the face of recessions, the prison industry kept growing. Immigration detention was seen by the Reagan administration as “recession-proof.” For private corporations like CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America), founded in 1983, immigration de­tention was a financial lifeline. Federal contracts insulated companies from state budget crises and guaranteed steady revenue streams.

Detention was sold as both a law-and-order necessity and an economic opportunity, welding together the rac­ist politics of the drug war with the rise of private prisons. Communities hollowed out by deindustrialization wel­comed detention centers as employers of last resort. Local politicians who couldn’t secure new factories or union jobs instead competed for prisons and INS contracts. Officials in Port Isabel, Texas, for instance, saw the expansion of what was known as El Corralón, or “the big corral,” as a way to cash in on Reagan’s willingness to lock up asylum seekers.

But if Reagan set the foundation, the Clinton admin­istration built the superstructure. Clinton rode into office pledging to be tough not only on crime but also on im­migrants. Governor of Arkansas at the time of the Mariel boatlift, he was furious at the Jimmy Carter administration for detaining migrants at an Arkansas camp. The political backlash had been costly for him, and his resentment carried into his presidency. Clinton’s 1994 crime bill funneled bil­lions into prison construction and policing, while his 1996 immigration laws fundamentally reshaped the landscape of enforcement. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Pen­alty Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (both of 1996) expanded the categories of deportable offenses, introduced mandatory detention for a wide range of crimes (including minor and decades-old convictions), and sharply curtailed judicial discretion. The antiterrorism law, ostensibly in response to the most home-grown of terror acts (especially the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by white nationalist Timothy McVeigh), in fact focused on purported threats coming from abroad. The law changed the detention of many migrants from discretionary to mandatory, allowing migrants to be detained for up to two years before seeing an immigration judge.

How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention

The 1996 laws, the “aggravated felony” category intro­duced in 1988, and the expansion of INS camps like Krome in Miami and Port Isabel in Texas marked the complete in­sertion of immigration detention into the American carceral state. Now, the same logic that incarcerated millions of Black Americans under mandatory minimums and three-strikes laws also ensnared migrants—justified by the same political rhetoric of danger, disorder, and deterrence. Both carceral outgrowths served the same economic interests of private prison companies and, purportedly, struggling rural econo­mies. And both entrenched a culture of disposability, where human beings were warehoused in the name of public safety. The expansion of the immigration camp system was rapid and dramatic. In 1994, there were fewer than 7,000 im­migrants in detention on any given day. By 2001, the INS was detaining an average of 19,500 noncitizens daily, with nearly 190,000 detained over the course of that fiscal year. And while the expansion was sold to localities as an economic windfall, the promise was empty. Researchers Amy Glasmeier and Tracey Farrigan compared fifty-five rural counties with prisons constructed between 1985 and 1995 to simi­lar counties without prisons. They found “little evidence of prisons fostering economic growth especially in persistently poor communities.” As the “century of the camp” began to sunset, the prison industrial complex had become a catchall political solution.

The course was set in the 1990s, but, as they did for so much else, the September 11, 2001, attacks marked another key inflection point for immigration camps. In one of the first immigration enforcement moves after the towers fell, INS Acting Deputy Commissioner Peter Michael Becraft imple­mented a new parole policy targeting Haitian asylum seek­ers: No Haitian could be paroled out of detention without direct approval from INS headquarters in Washington, even if they had proven their eligibility for asylum. As migrant justice organizer Silky Shah tells me, “Anti-Black racism is the underlying component of the rise of these anti-immi-grant systems.” 9/11 also prompted the creation of the De­partment of Homeland Security and its subagency ICE.

Many such senseless, vindictive, and downright racist policies would follow, such as the PATRIOT Act, allowing for indefinite detention, or the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which mandated ICE in­crease detention capacity by eight thousand per year from 2006 to 2010.

From the inception of his administration in 2000, George W. Bush oversaw a massive expansion of border mil­itarization, including hundreds of miles of border barriers and doubling the number of Border Patrol agents. The vilification, scapegoating, surveillance, and arrests of Muslims, in particular, presaged the open revilement cast on Haitians and other darker-skinned migrants during the Trump administra­tion. At the same time, looking at either the Clinton presi­dency before Bush or Obama’s presidency after highlights the bipartisan reliance on criminalization of migrants and on the camp. In 2009, Democratic Senator Robert Byrd from West Virginia introduced a clause in the DHS Appropriations Bill that the department “shall maintain a level of not less than 33,400 detention beds.” In 2012, that “bed quota,” as it be­came known, was raised to 34,000. The federal government pays out contracts for those beds—via the so-called “guaranteed minimum” clauses—whether they’re filled or not.

On the state level, Arizona, followed by both Georgia and Alabama, led the way in 2010 by trying to make unau­thorized migration not only a federal crime but also a state violation. The hypocrisy of crackdown culture continued: All three states passed harsh anti-immigrant laws at the same time they courted ICE contracts to open new detention cen­ters, meaning local jurisdictions increasingly depended on detaining the very people they wanted out.

The experience of detention in Georgia’s Irwin County highlights the local effects of that dependency. What had been a US Marshals facility in the rural county in the early 1990s had shut down. In 2004, a private company re­opened the facility to serve as an overflow lockup, detain­ing people from other counties. With the economy in Irwin struggling—a drought and a lack of migrant agricultural workers were making things worse—in 2007, the county passed a $55 million bond package to expand the prison. They were hoping to attract federal agencies in the deten­tion business and turn the prison into the county’s lifeline. It didn’t quite work. There simply wasn’t enough revenue, and by 2011, after another change in ownership, the facility was nearly a million dollars behind on its taxes. As reported in The Nation, Hazel McCranie, president of the Ocilla-Irwin Chamber of Commerce, told local officials: “You’ve got to go out and get a contract with ICE. That’s your salvation.” 

To entice ICE, the joint owners of the prison, with the support of members of Congress and former Senator Johnny Isakson, offered a deal: Instead of spending the typical $60, $90, or sometimes over $160 per day to lock a person up, ICE could cage someone in the Irwin camp for only for­ty-five dollars a day. ICE soon began transferring people from Alabama’s Etowah jail (where, as we saw in the intro­duction, Juan was locked up for almost five years) to Irwin.

In January 2011, four people locked inside the Irwin camp went on hunger strike and were sent to solitary con­finement as punishment. One detained person held in the Irwin camp, Florent Firmin Kalonji Kalala, told reporters, “We’re fed like dogs.” He added: “I just feel humiliated—that’s the feeling I have every day.”

Years later, the county’s moral and financial compro­mise deepened. In 2020, reporter José Olivares and I broke a story about Irwin that made international headlines: Besides dangerously lax protocols amid the COVID-19 pandemic, an ICE-contracted doctor who treated patients at Irwin was multiply accused of performing invasive, nonconsensual, and unnecessary gynecological surgeries. We spoke with one woman, Yuridia, who was held in the camp and went to see the doctor after suffering lower abdominal cramps. With­out proper explanation, she was soon on the operating table. It wasn’t until she was deported to Mexico that, still suffering the after-effects of the surgery, she learned she had had her uterus removed.

Once exposed, the conditions prompted international outcry, lawsuits, and a Senate investigation, while giving more fuel to people inside and out fighting to shut down the camp. In 2021, ICE announced it was closing the Irwin camp. Then, just as we’ve seen time and again with other camps that aren’t demolished or turned into something new, in 2025 the Trump administration announced its reopening. Steady source of tax revenue, reliable employer, wholesome community partner the camp is not.

Much of the camp infrastructure we see today was es­tablished in the Obama years. In 2014, as more families, mostly from Central America, fled violence and poverty and headed toward the United States, the Obama administration—following the encrusted playbook first written in the nineteenth century to try to dispel the Chinese—reverted to using detention as an attempted means of deterrence. First they reoutfitted a law enforcement training site in Artesia, New Mexico; then, they opened the 2,400-bed South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, to lock up moth­ers and their children. In 2015 I spent a week in and out of the camp in Dilley—then one of the largest detention camps in the country—frequently referred to as a “baby jail.”

Though school-age kids attended classes inside Dilley and had ready access to milk and apples—adding a thin ve­neer of humanism to the camp—the atmosphere was starkly punitive. Many of the children I met had colds or coughs. Medical attention was slow and, according to women I in­terviewed, sick kids were regularly told by medical staff sim­ply to drink water. This was the same tap water that a cook at a local drive-thru taco shop told me not to drink “cuz of the oil”—a reference to the fact that residents in and around Dilley were concerned about fracking wastewater contam­inating their groundwater. Many of the kids had trouble sleeping, and women I spoke with reported that their chil­dren were depressed and not eating. One told me that her 11-year-old boy had lost more than ten pounds since coming to Dilley. “We are creating a mental health crisis,” one attor­ney representing the moms and kids, and working to shut the place down, said. “These kids are going to have PTSD and need serious therapy.”

The same year, in 2014, the Obama administration also opened an ICE staging facility in Alexandria, Louisiana:a camp with an airport, allowing for more efficient deporta­tions. As Nora Ahmed, the director of ACLU Louisiana, ex­plained to me, the facility was “really what allowed Obama to become the deporter-in-chief.” (In the Trump era, the cruel efficiency of the Obama administration’s camp-airport infrastructure has proven incredibly useful.)

Protests, hunger strikes, shutdown campaigns—all of it pushed the Obama administration to issue cosmetic changes and scale back some of the most dehumanizing excesses of the camp system. While Dilley was finally shuttered in 2024, the following year the Trump administration announced it was reopening it. A few months later, a legal complaint de­tailed how young children held in the Dilley family camp, sometimes for months, did not have reliable access to clean drinking water, soap, or shampoo. The echoes of 2015— nearly identical human rights complaints coming out of the same camp—were clamorous. Parents and their young children reported sleep deprivation due to lights being on 24/7 and a lack of emergency medical attention for kids in acute medical distress. One 11-year-old girl wrote to her at­torneys, “Sometimes I see kids who are sad. Most of the kids don’t play because they are afraid.” One nine-year-old boy regressed so severely he could no longer control his bowel movements and had to start using diapers.

Kids who don’t play, diapers on nine-year-olds—this is Clinton, Obama, and Biden’s immigration policy legacy: building out the camp infrastructure to humiliate, starve, abuse, and lay the groundwork for their virulently anti-immigrant successors.

And yet there are ways—long established and newly dusted off, storied and hardly recognized—to push back.

It can start with simply questioning the legitimacy of the camps.

A fascinating 1993 Department of Justice report, Reso­lution of Prison Riots, mentioned Cuban migrants protesting their detention and included a section called “Breakdown of Legitimacy of Imprisoning Criteria,” which notes: “We observe that most inmates most of the time accept as legitimate the imprisonment of their fellow inmates. They may protest their own con­viction or sentence but, at the same time, be­lieve that the other inmates are guilty of crimes, deserve prison sentences, and ought not to be discharged en masse. In uncommon periods in history, however, these beliefs may be challenged. Once it is held that the criteria for imprisonment are arbitrary, it is a short step to the belief that rebellion is justified.”

In other words, if we recognize the arbitrariness of imprison­ing people because of where they are from or where they have moved, we begin to see through the illusion of the camp. We are in such an “uncommon” period now. We can see through the illusion, and we can take that short step toward rebellion against the camp.

The post Excerpt: How to Close a Camp appeared first on The Texas Observer.