In the Trump administration’s war on immigrants—adults and children alike—South Texas is a nexus.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have arrested 33,583 people in the San Antonio and Harlingen areas of responsibility between Trump’s first day in office and March 10 of this year, according to the agency’s data. In Minneapolis, three ICE agents who shot people have a Rio Grande Valley connection. The Department of Homeland Security plans to put hundreds of miles of buoys in the Rio Grande, 17 of those miles being in the Valley, to allegedly stop people from attempting to cross. Texas’ only licensed Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi court interpreter was detained in Harlingen’s airport in March, which also happens to be where ICE flies many of its deportees out of the United States.

And the Dilley detention center, officially the Dilley Immigration Processing Center or previously the South Texas Family Residential Center, which sits about an hour southwest of San Antonio, was reopened by the Trump administration after ICE (during the Biden administration) had closed it in 2024. Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, infamously detained in Minneapolis, were sent to and released from there earlier this year. 

Daniel Hatoum is a San Antonio-based senior supervising attorney for the Texas Civil Rights Project. The Texas Observer spoke with him in early June about family detention, how habeas corpus cases became de facto immigration law, Senate Bill 4, and what mass deportation does to society. 

TO: Dilley detention center has become a common name right now in the immigration news lexicon, but most people may not know what it is, besides its name and that Liam Ramos and his father were detained there. The Texas Civil Rights Project is part of an effort with the Texas Immigration Law Council called Operation Clear Out Dilley, which is an attempt to help release the 50 or so children in the facility. Can you describe who’s held there, and under what legal authority? What does daily life look like?

It’s a family detention facility, which means it’s a facility where parents and their children are held together. These types of facilities have been used because the detention of children is a very fraught exercise. Children could face additional harms that adults may not be subject to when it comes to detention. During the Bush administration, there was a concerted effort to try to detain families out of a fear that people might be coming over the border with children and using those children as a way to avoid detention. 

The first big family detention center is actually still a detention center today: It’s the Hutto Detention Facility in Taylor. There was a lot of litigation about that. The government did not do well in that litigation, and that facility ultimately had to stop detaining children. 

“When someone comes selling the idea of mass deportations, this is going to be the result.”

During the Obama administration, what ended up happening is that they implemented family detention as well to try to detain folks, and they opened two facilities, the Karnes family detention facility was the first one, they also opened the Berks [County] facility in Pennsylvania, which is very small, then they needed an even bigger facility, and that’s when Dilley was opened. That one holds the most amount of family detention beds that we’ve seen.

It’s a former natural gas camp that has all these trailers, so when you hear [Congressman] Joaquin Castro talk about it, I believe he refers to it as the “Dilley trailer prison.” That’s a pretty accurate description. … So, who’s there? Well, it’s parents and their children, but the age of the children doesn’t exempt them from detention there. So, tender-age children can go to family detention centers. Children who are infants can be in a family detention center. There have been high-profile cases of babies that have gone to family detention centers. Our client in the “Ms. Z” case, which we took on last year, was a six-year-old with a history of leukemia. 

Food is rotten in Dilley. There’s no other way to put it. That’s what’s happening. I guess the only other way to put it is worm-filled, because it’s often filled with worms. It’s not child-appropriate. Remember, when you have children who are as old as 16 months, 18 months, they have very specific food needs, and we’ve heard multiple reports from many folks in the detention facility that those needs were not met. 

The other thing that’s worth pointing out is that the American Academy of Pediatricians has indicated, since 1997, when the first big case about children’s detention came out, that any time in detention for a child is extremely harmful. It causes children to suffer; it creates long-term developmental problems. … Family detention center has this feedback [loop] where parents are put in a position of helplessness because they can’t get what their children need because the administration will not give them what they need, and the children are watching their parents be helpless, the parents are watching their children suffer and they’re only spiraling worse.

The administration has claimed all sorts of new authorities to detain people when it previously wouldn’t have … people who have received parole to be in the country, who received permission to be here, who were released on their own recognizance, who the government said, “You are not a flight risk, you are not a danger. We will not detain you,” and the government takes that back and says, “Actually, who cares? We’re going to detain you.”

So, under what authority? Their whims, and the fact that there are people in charge right now who think they can get away with it.

How did habeas corpus become the legal remedy sought out by people in detention centers? Before last year, there were few of these cases in federal courts. Now there are nearly 40,000 active habeas cases in the United States, 9,000 of which are in Texas. 

It used to be that if you came to the border, the authority that governed your detention was authority related to the border, and courts were really friendly about saying that you didn’t have access to what’s called a bond hearing. So if you came to the border, you asked for asylum, and they wanted to detain you, they could; that’s all there was to it. And we sort of accepted that lay of the land largely for reasons of national security. 

But let’s say you entered the country, you lived in the country for six or seven years, or you’re released on your own recognizance, which happens a lot. … The Trump administration decided that all those people—those who made it in, who were working, who had built community ties—those people need to be arrested at alarming rates, but they can’t go ask an immigration judge about whether to release them on bond or bail. Our current version of the Immigration Nationality Act, prior to 2025, every person in that situation … they likely would have been bond eligible. That bond hearing would have been a very quick procedure, takes about a week.

Oftentimes, they have no criminal records, and we know the vast majority of people in detention have no criminal records, and the judge would go, ‘Okay, for $1,500, you can go about your life while your immigration case is litigated.”

Now, though, the administration said, “Actually, we have a new interpretation of all this.” … For example, you entered without inspection, you’ve been in the country for 20 years. We arrest you in that instance. We’re going to treat you like you never entered in the first place, like you have no community ties whatsoever. And we’re going to say you’re detained under a statute that has typically and historically been used for border enforcement, and that statute means that you have no right to ask to be out of detention. Since you can’t ask an [immigration judge] anymore for help, there’s only one place left to go, and that’s federal court, and the remedy in federal court when you want to get out of detention is habeas corpus. 

Now, general immigration practice has become habeas corpus. Because for your client to get out of detention, to fight their case out of detention, you have to win a habeas case in most instances. 

During the 2018 family separation crisis, there were several instances of the federal government not being able to track the children or parents, or both. Some families were separated for years, and there are still families that haven’t been reunited. With the Dilly detention center in mind, is there still a risk of that today?

When we have immigration detention and immigration arrests, mass deportation, the result of that is going to be parents without children and children without parents. That’s what’s going to happen. I think just generally, societally, we were told that only criminals will be arrested.

If we believed that at one point, which I really do think a lot of good-meaning folks did believe that, that has completely been dispelled. 

Family separation is happening en masse right now, just not in the zero-tolerance way that we saw happening … people getting lost, getting separated in the deportation system we have right now, which appears to be pure chaos. Folks are being sent to third countries without following the proper procedure, folks are getting dumped somewhere they’ve never lived before. Folks are getting sent to Mexico without permission or without clear oversight. Very easy to lose immigrants that way. It’s really hard to unring the bell, and that means families will be separated for prolonged periods of time, if not permanently.

Inside Dilley in 2019 (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Senate Bill 4, from 2023, is the Texas law that allows police officers to arrest people they suspect illegally crossed into the United States and that effectively creates a state deportation process. It’s now enforceable. Texas Civil Rights Project is one of the groups that sued to block SB 4 from becoming law, calling it unconstitutional for a state to enforce federal immigration law. How does being arrested by a Texas police officer complicate a person’s immigration case? 

It complicates it because it introduces a new law enforcement agency with its own mission and its own ends. When we do immigration law, it’s really administrative. It’s dealing with the Executive Office of Immigration Review—EOIR. It’s immigration courts, very specific rules. It’s dealing with ICE. ICE has very specific rules. There are ways to operate that are well settled and well trodden. 

Now we have a new law enforcement agency that has its own removal orders, has its own mission, has its own guidance that’s separate from the federal government, isn’t bound necessarily by the rules of the federal government, maybe not in the same way. For example, regulations that ICE might be bound to, [Texas] may think it doesn’t need to be bound to those, for whatever reason, and it’s harder to argue that they are. That’s going to create a level of chaos in handling immigration cases, and that chaos is almost always going to make it more difficult to help hardworking folks who are just trying to live and survive. 

Is there something more that folks should know about this current moment regarding immigration law and people in detention? 

I would like to reiterate one point, which is that this should be a lesson for us. When someone comes selling the idea of mass deportations, this is going to be the result: Families in detention cells, children in detention cells, families separated. I think that there’s a fantasy that if we just did immigration detention the “right way,” that families won’t be separated, that people would not suffer. 

The trade-off to accepting what I would call a fantasy is the suffering that we’re seeing right now. So I hope that if people in the future think about mass deportation, and whether they want to support that policy or not, they think back to the present moment, they think about the people who have died, they think about the children who’ve cried, they think about the folks who will never recover and ask themselves whether that is worth it.

The post A Texas Immigration Lawyer Breaks Down Family Detention, Habeas Corpus, and Senate Bill 4 appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Caldwell County Judge Hoppy Haden, a stout 63-year-old who sports a cowboy hat and a white handlebar mustache, is hoppin’ mad about the artificial intelligence-fueled data center boom in his backyard. 

Like so many other rural Republican county officials across the state, Haden is staring down several energy- and water-sucking data center projects that he and other county officials have very few powers to constrain. “By the time I hear about it, [developers have] already bought their land, so it’s not like they’re asking our permission to show up,” Haden told the Texas Observer. “So that’s frustrating, right? But I can’t do anything about that, so I’m trying to do something about things that I can do.”

The open pastures of rural Caldwell County, situated between Austin and San Antonio, are poised for at least four new data center developments. One of the largest developments is a 3,000-acre tech compound from the Denver-based data center developer Tract, which chose its site in Caldwell specifically for its access to the Permian Highway gas pipeline and to nearby transmission lines, according to the Caldwell/Hays Examiner. A New York-based data firm called Edged is planning another major data center on 330 acres near the county’s fracked gas plant. 

The developments are among the more than 400 proposed data centers that are rapidly proliferating around Texas, and which collectively could, per the state’s power grid provider, quadruple electricity demand by 2032, and could consume as much as 161 billion gallons of water this year, according to the Houston Advanced Research Center. That’s in addition to the projects’ other well-publicized scourges, like light and noise pollution, heat, habitat loss, higher utility rates, greenhouse gas emissions, and potential health effects.

All this has Judge Haden walking a tight rope between current state law, which grants counties next-to-no zoning authority, and angry citizens who have banded together under the banner of the nonpartisan Caldwell Data Center Action Team (DCAT) to demand the county do whatever it can to stop or delay the developments for as long as possible. In some ways, Haden exemplifies the the ruling Republican Party’s divide over Texas’ data center boom, caught between unabashed champions like Governor Greg Abbott and grassroots conservatives pushing for an approach that seeks maximal local control, such as a countywide moratorium on data center development along the lines of what Hill County commissioners originally passed in May.

The policy debate thus far has exposed deeper tensions within the party as GOP state leaders have for years engaged in an expanding war on local control—aimed at big blue cities—in favor of state supremacy. But that ideological shift now has local Republicans finding that they, too, have fallen prey to that crusade. 

So far, Haden and other county officials are choosing a middle lane between these political poles. Two days after Hill County commissioners passed their data center moratorium, Caldwell County commissioners took a more moderate action by unanimously passing a resolution calling on the state to grant counties greater land-use authorities to rein in data centers. The resolution also calls for independent environmental assessments and for developers to disclose their energy, water, and infrastructure impacts before they can proceed.

Haden is also working with his county’s state legislators, Republican state Representative Stan Gerdes and Democratic state Senator Judith Zaffirini, to draft legislation that would do just that. Haden says his draft bill would grant counties the ability to impose certain land-use requirements on data centers within county subdivision ordinances. This would allow county officials to impose a range of limits on data center projects, including clear limits on potable water use, stormwater use, and wastewater discharge, forcing the data centers to use more efficient closed-loop water cooling systems with non-potable water and “dark sky” lighting, among other stipulations.

“This is not a property rights bill. I’m not asking for [developers] to be able to come or not to come. What I am asking is to be able to regulate our national natural resources if they arrive here,” Haden told the Observer.

Right now, Haden says, counties can only impose such requirements as part of a development agreement that would grant developers lucrative tax abatements or reinvestment zones. For now, Haden says, the county is granting tax abatements as a means of leverage in order to ensure data centers follow basic rules—sparking ire among many of his constituents in the process. 

(Photo illustration by Texas Observer)

Haden said Gerdes, who did not respond to the Observer’s request to comment, agreed to help carry the bill during an annual meeting with local county judges in his district. Data centers dominated the discussion.

Later that week, on May 22, Judge Haden joined Zaffirini, her staff, and local activists from Caldwell DCAT and the San Marcos-based Data Center Action Coalition in a community center in Luling to discuss potential state legislation. Zaffirini told the Observer she was open to supporting Haden’s bill. “I’m very interested in [the county’s] proposals, and we’ll pursue them and we’ll vet them in the process,” she said. 

The Laredo-based senator told the local constituents that she’s a strong proponent of local control, and counseled those in attendance to engage the regulatory powers at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and Public Utilities Commission and testify at the Legislature’s upcoming committee hearings.  

In turn, local activists urged Zaffirini and Haden to back a moratorium similar to Hill County’s, arguing that the data center projects are being rushed into construction while they wait for legislative and regulatory process to play out.

Haden’s draft bill is one of several pieces of legislation focused on data centers, a topic that will be a central issue for the GOP-controlled legislature when it returns to session in January. Earlier this year, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick directed state senators to focus on the issue in several interim committee hearings scheduled this summer that will weigh data centers’ economic benefits against the projects’ vast resource costs to local communities. One issue he’s zeroed in on is the possibility of eliminating state sales tax exemptions for data centers, which are reportedly costing the state at least $1 billion a year.

According to The Texas Tribune, state Representative Cody Vasut, who represents a rural-ish district in coastal Brazoria County, has vowed to bring a bill that would return regulatory control over data centers to counties next session. He filed the bill last session, but it languished in committee. State Representative Helen Kerwin, a rural Republican from Glen Rose, also called on the governor to support a statewide moratorium until the necessary environmental studies can be completed, while soon-to-be state Senator David Cook has said he plans to bring a bill that would also give counties new powers to regulate data centers.  

The outgoing Republican Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, too, has called for a statewide moratorium, questioning the benefits of continued tax incentives and subsidies for data center developers. “We must not surrender our resources to global corporations without asking hard questions about the costs to Texas families, farmers, ranchers, and property owners,” Miller wrote.

Caldwell County Judge Haden is running out of patience and has called on Abbott to call a special legislative session specifically to address data center regulation. “Governor Abbott could call [a special session] tomorrow. He has chosen not to. I mean, for God sakes, we have special sessions over who can use which restroom, but we don’t have a special session for this,” Haden said just before voting to pass the county’s resolution supporting data center regulation. 

Meanwhile, Governor Abbott, who has received more than $2 million from the AI industry, fully embraces the data center boom—exemplified by his high-profile photo op last November with Google CEO Sundar Pichai welcoming three new data centers in West Texas and selling the state as a new AI hub. “This is a Texas-sized investment in the future of our great state,” Abbott said. “Texas is the epicenter of AI development, where companies can pair innovation with expanding energy.”

Other influential Republican legislators, including state Senator Paul Bettencourt, are applying a now-familiar GOP line at the Capitol—statewide uniformity over local control—to the data center debate. “These should be statewide, top-down guidelines. You can’t have 254 different counties and 1,000 cities all coming up with different answers. Stuff would never get built,” he told the Tribune.

When Hood County considered enacting its own data center moratorium last month, Bettencourt wrote a letter to state Attorney General Ken Paxton warning that counties had no constitutional or statutory power to enact such a development pause and threatened state legal action if it did so. The county commissioner’s court then voted to kill the pause on several proposed projects. 

Hill County, which proceeded with its pause, voted on June 4 to renege on its moratorium after being slammed with a $100 million lawsuit from the industry. The county could potentially face another suit by the state for exceeding its authority in passing the original moratorium. 

Susie Carter, a Caldwell DCAT member and former Hays County Commissioner, who owns 120 acres adjacent to Virginia-based Powerhouse’s 500-acre data center development in Caldwell County, is among the conservative Republicans calling on GOP leaders to back state or local moratoriums. 

Carter told the Observer she hopes that calls for a statewide pause from state leaders like Sid Miller might influence Judge Haden and Caldwell commissioners to pursue a similar moratorium to Hill County’s—but so far, Haden told the Observer, that’s something he isn’t willing to do.

“We need to quit approving [data centers], and we need to call a moratorium, or a pause, statewide to let people come to understand what really is involved with them,” Carter said.

The post Data Center Boom Exposes GOP Faultlines over Local Control appeared first on The Texas Observer.

On May 24, 2022, a Border Patrol Tactical Unit fatally shot 18-year-old Salvador Ramos inside a classroom in Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, 77 minutes after Ramos had entered the building to commit the third-deadliest school shooting in American history. Ramos, a former student at Robb, had purchased two high-powered rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition just days before he killed 19 students and two teachers. In the aftermath, several victims’ families pushed for gun control at the state level. Their efforts failed in Austin, but they won the support of Republican Congressman Tony Gonzales, who voted for the first federal gun-control legislation enacted in two decades. 

Now, four long years later, those families and the rest of their southwest Texas city of 15,000 may soon be represented in the U.S. House by a gunmaker, Second Amendment absolutist, and edgy YouTube personality by the name of Brandon Herrera. A man who has discussed, on camera, the relative merits of mass killers using the sort of rifle deployed in Uvalde rather than other weaponry; spread memes associated with an extremist movement; and rationalized or made light of lethal violence against people with certain political beliefs.

Also known as the “AK Guy”—a reference to his penchant for the Avtomat Kalashnikova (AK) rifle platform—the bearded 30-year-old is a celebrity in an online gun culture that has emerged on platforms including YouTube, where “gunfluencers” like him have amassed millions of followers through firearm reviews, meme roundups, gun-history content, and Second Amendment commentary. A relative newcomer to politics, Herrera first ran for office in the 2024 GOP primary against Gonzales, citing the latter’s vote for modest gun control as inspiration, as Herrera himself has said he’d oppose any new firearms restrictions, including red flag laws. He cast Gonzales then as an out-of-touch, too-moderate incumbent and forced him into a runoff, which Gonzales narrowly won. 

Vowing to “finish what we started,” Herrera announced in August 2025 that he would challenge Gonzales a second time. Again, Herrera forced Gonzales into a runoff, but this time, an explosive scandal was brewing around the incumbent congressman, who’d had an affair with a staffer who later committed suicide by self-immolation. Under pressure from House leadership, Gonzales suspended his reelection campaign soon after the March primary, clearing the path to the nomination for Herrera, and, in April, Gonzales resigned. That sets up a special election, the timing of which is set by Governor Greg Abbott.

Herrera in Somerset in February (AP Photo/Brenda Bazán)

Now endorsed by major Republicans, including President Donald Trump, Herrera promotes an “America First” platform centered on gun-rights absolutism, antiabortion policy, border security, term limits, opposition to (some) foreign wars, and tax cuts. Despite his self-described libertarian leanings, he has largely aligned with the hard-right faction of the Republican party on most issues—including the Trump administration’s immigration agenda and “qualified support” for military action in Iran.

The district that Gonzales represented for three terms and Herrera now seeks to claim is Texas’ 23rd, the state’s largest by area, stretching from El Paso to San Antonio. It used to be Texas’ swingiest U.S. House seat, until Republicans redrew it firmly into their column at the outset of this decade. The district, which changed little in the most recent round of Trump-mandated gerrymandering, is 60 percent Hispanic and plus-15 for Trump based on the November 2024 election.

On the Democratic side, voters in March nominated Katy Padilla Stout, a lawyer and former schoolteacher from San Antonio running on economic affordability, healthcare access, reproductive rights, voting rights, climate, gun safety, opposition to a Big Bend border wall (Herrera opposes this too), and the proliferation of data centers. As Republicans seek to wring another five House seats out of Texas in their desperate bid to hold on to the chamber in November, the 23rd wasn’t a district they planned on worrying about.

But now, both sides see a battleground. Polling shows that Democrats have an edge nationally (pending the outcomes of an ongoing nationwide redistricting war), and a majority of Hispanic voters disapprove of Trump. And, in the 23rd, the GOP finds itself running a neophyte with a colorful past rather than an incumbent Navy veteran. Herrera himself has even said that he may be trailing, while Stout has seen an influx of campaign donations. 

“Brandon Herrera is probably the exact opposite of the type of candidate that most people want going into a competitive race in this election,” said Matt Angle, a longtime Democratic strategist and the director of the Lone Star Project. “His campaign is not about anything that people really care about.”

University of Texas at San Antonio political scientist Jon Taylor echoed the sentiment that Herrera’s nomination has created an opening for Democrats if they’re willing to invest. 

“Stout has at least a puncher’s chance, if not better,” Taylor said. “Brandon Herrera is so radical compared to other candidates that there is an opening. … She is building a grassroots effort and a get-out-the-vote effort. It’s just simply a case of this race seems to still be a little bit under the radar.”

As the contest unfolds, Herrera is facing renewed scrutiny on his influencer past, which, according to the Texas Observer’s review of Herrera’s online footprint, includes patterns that have gone largely unnoticed: dissemination of memes associated with the “Boogaloo” movement that advocates for a second American Civil War and has inspired acts of terrorism; rationalization of and joking about violent deaths of people whose politics he describes as communist; and sanitization of the Confederacy’s stance on slavery—in addition to his discussion of the comparative accuracy of weapons used in mass shootings.

Herrera and his campaign manager, Kimmie Gonzalez, did not ultimately agree to an interview for this story, despite initially agreeing to set one up when asked in-person at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March. 

“Brandon has no association with [the Boogaloo movement] or any group like that and condemns political violence,” Gonzalez said in an emailed statement. “Especially violence inspired by lies told by left-wing journalists that has resulted in the murder of Charlie Kirk and multiple assassination attempts on President Trump.”

Born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and raised in a military family, Herrera began making YouTube videos and building guns as a teenager in Fayetteville, where he was active in a local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. In since-deleted videos from a little more than a decade ago, Herrera—who has described himself as being of Mexican and German descent—wore a shirt referencing the group with a Confederate flag as he described the Civil War as both the “war of Northern aggression” and “the war for Southern independence.” According to Jewish Insider, he remained active with the organization until at least 2019.

Herrera launched his current YouTube channel in 2014, and he formed his own gun-manufacturing business, The AK Guy Inc., the following year. He briefly studied prelaw at Campbell University in North Carolina before dropping out in 2016. By the end of 2018, his YouTube channel had more than 33,000 followers. His first big breakout came the following year, when one of his videos—about how AK owners are more masculine than AR owners—reached millions of views and his follower count surged to 100,000. In 2020, as his viewership further multiplied, he relocated to the San Antonio area (he’s currently registered to vote in a far northwest part of the city, near Boerne), where other YouTube gunfluencers with whom Herrera collaborates live. Within a year, his channel had more than 1 million followers. 

“The algorithms have rewarded Herrera videos and his use of rhetoric that appeals to specific online in-groups,” said Taylor Lorenz, a journalist who has long covered internet culture and publishes the newsletter User Mag. “But I’m not sure if it’s politically expedient.”

Herrera’s early YouTube content was largely apolitical: gun reviews, updates on his development of the “AK-50,” and travelogues. Over time, Herrera sought to be more humorous, including with a parody music video of Eminem’s “Without Me.” Then, in 2019, the tone began to shift. 

Following several shootings that year, Herrera said in a video—titled “Mass Shootings: An Unpopular Opinion”—that “With these terrible mass shootings that have happened for a good little while, you should be really glad that some of these people are using guns to do this,” arguing specifically that AR-style rifles are “pinpoint instruments” of violence compared to trucks or bombs. “Sorry for the dark video, guys. … Every time something like this happens, I think about doing it, and then I think better of it, but hopefully this was valuable,” he concluded.

In an emailed statement to the Observer, Padilla Stout called the comments “simply unfathomable coming from someone running to represent a district that includes the community of Uvalde.”

After the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Herrera’s videos increasingly provided a window into his political views, social media diet, and the sensibilities of his audience. Couched in plausibly deniable “dark humor,” he began to spotlight memes about the pandemic, political violence, and the “Boogaloo” movement—a loosely organized far-right trend whose adherents, referred to as “Boogaloo Bois,” espouse pro-gun, anti-government, and accelerationist sentiments in preparation for a hypothetical second American Civil War, which they call the “boogaloo” or other derived nicknames.

“Today, we’re going over a topic that you guys have wanted us to talk about for a very long time,” Herrera said in a January 2020 meme review video. “This … is the Virginia Boogaloo special. I don’t even know if we could say Boogaloo anymore. Apparently the [Anti-Defamation League] says that that is a hate word, to which I reply: It’s only a hate word if they lose.”

The Boogaloo movement emerged from online message board culture around 2012, gained significant traction in 2019, and appeared on the streets in early 2020. Boogaloo Bois—often identifiable by their Hawaiian shirts, military fatigues, and distinct insignia or flags—attended a January 2020 gun-rights rally in Richmond, Virginia, and protests against COVID precautions across the country. 

“I know I’m one of the people that talks about all the Boogaloo memes,” Herrera said in a March 2020 video. “This is humor, guys. Just try to settle down on things that could actually be, like, actual actionable threats on real people. Please don’t go to jail. I don’t get any of your views from jail. But now that I’ve thrown that disclaimer out there … back to the boogaloo memes.”

Following the murder of George Floyd in May of that year, a 26-year-old Boogaloo Boi from Texas named Ivan Harrison Hunter traveled to Minneapolis, where he shot 13 rounds at a police station and helped set it ablaze. Two hours later, Hunter texted Steven Carillo, an active-duty Air Force staff sergeant and fellow Boogaloo adherent in California, to “go for police buildings.” Carillo then carried out two ambush-style attacks against security officers and law enforcement officers in California, killing two. At least 36 Boogaloo members were arrested in 2020 for various acts of terrorism, attempts to incite riots, and a scheme to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. 

Herrera’s last video on the topic, titled “STOP SIMPING FOR COMMUNISTS,” came in August 2020 after the killing of Garrett Foster, who was shot during an interaction with a driver while openly carrying a rifle during a Black Lives Matter protest in Austin. Foster, who did not fire his weapon, was a Libertarian Party member who had reportedly made Boogaloo-coded posts on social media, leading Herrera to critique the meme’s spread beyond its origin. 

“For some people, [Boogaloo is] just a joke and we like wearing Hawaiian shirts and plate carriers and shooting things on the weekends,” Herrera said. “On a philosophical level, it’s more of a stance against government tyranny. … For some reason, it seems to have transformed online into a bunch of angsty teenagers who are simping for communists and want to shoot cops.”

Herrera later said he believes that the lives of communists “don’t count.”

Herrera reading and displaying a meme mocking Foster’s killing (YouTube screenshot)

This was the start of a pattern in Herrera’s videos about political violence: dehumanizing certain people and treating lethal violence against leftists or protesters as darkly comic, deserved, or at least understandable.

In a subsequent video, Herrera made similar statements about Kyle Rittenhouse, who’d then recently killed two men during unrest at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. “Good luck, kid. You minted some good commies,” Herrera said in a video, clarifying: “I am not encouraging anybody to go get themselves into some shit. … It’s not worth it.” 

During Rittenhouse’s criminal trial, Herrera replied jokingly to an X user who asked whether Rittenhouse would “get off” of the charges: “I mean I’d get off on stacking felonious commies too.”

Herrera’s embrace of Rittenhouse corresponded with his increasing involvement in politics. In 2021, he gave a pro-gun speech at the annual convention of Young Americans for Liberty (YAL), a libertarian student activist organization based in Austin, and in 2022, Herrera and Rittenhouse shot machine guns from a helicopter in a National Rifle Association video. Meanwhile, Herrera continued to publish videos that would later draw controversy. 

In one 2022 video about the MP-40, a World War II-era German submachine gun, Herrera goose-stepped in Nazi uniform to a Nazi marching song and described the firearm as “the original ghetto blaster.” In another, from 2023, about a rifle associated with Rhodesia—a brief-lived white-supremacist state in Africa— Herrera expressed affinity for the defeated Rhodesians: “Long story short, the side that was sympathetic with communism won, and now Zimbabwe doesn’t have food.” Rhodesia has become a totem for extremist white supremacists, including the Charleston, South Carolina, church shooter.

Luke Baumgartner, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told the Observer that Herrera’s tongue-in-cheek delivery shouldn’t alleviate concern.

“Guys like him have been using the ‘It’s only jokes’ and ‘edgy’ line as a way of masking what they really believe,” Baumgartner said. “Richard Spencer summed it up when he told people in the alt-right to ‘hide their power levels.’ If Herrera is flirting with admiring the SS, Rhodesian light infantry, and the Confederacy, it tells me he’s a semi-closeted white supremacist.”

Herrera (middle) (YouTube screenshot)

Herrera has dismissed such criticism as bad-faith smear attempts. “According to the left, they think I’m apparently the brown face of white supremacy,” Herrera wrote on X. 

Hispanic ancestry and identity are not mutually exclusive with white supremacy, as shown by the prominent neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes and the Allen mall shooter, Mauricio Garcia, among others.

The Observer found no evidence that Herrera has explicitly advocated racist political ideas, fascism, or neo-Nazism. But, beyond his many ostensible jokes, Herrera has earnestly expressed views on the Civil War that tend toward the historical revisionism associated with the Lost Cause Myth, which sanitizes the Confederacy and valorizes Confederate leaders and symbols.

In February 2023, Herrera falsely stated in posts on X that “The Confederacy already had a provision with a plan to phase out slavery in their constitution” and that “[The] war didn’t actually become about slavery until 2 years into it.” (The Confederacy in fact seceded to protect slavery, and the institution was shielded in its constitution.)

Four months after that post, signaling a growing political engagement, Herrera testified in a congressional hearing about limiting the powers of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the agency that regulates the firearms he promotes. 

Two months after testifying at the ATF hearing, Herrera again spoke at the annual YAL conference, where he announced his first congressional campaign, which counted Rittenhouse as a volunteer. 

Herrera saw an opening: Gonzales had recently been sanctioned by the state Republican Party over his votes to protect same-sex marriage and enact those modest gun reforms after the Uvalde mass shooting, and major GOP donors were pushing to purge more-moderate Republicans from office. Having voted for a commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection, Gonzales was also left running without the backing of Trump.

Herrera’s first entry into electoral politics didn’t dull the edginess of his YouTube content. 

In November 2023, Herrera published a video about an incident in Panama where a man fatally shot climate protesters who were blocking a roadway. The video description states that the victims “got their carbon reduced” and promotes links to his merch store and a chance to win a spot at a gun-range day.

“While not a clean shooting, these guys are definitely the winners of the ‘fuck around and find out’ award,” Herrera said, clarifying: “Lethal force against unarmed people that are not posing an active threat to you, it’s not OK; however, if I needed to defend myself in a protest, well… I’m putting together a team.”

Despite scrutiny of his online history, and despite being vastly outraised, Herrera forced his opponent into a runoff. Gonzales then called Herrera a “known neo-Nazi” in an interview with CNN, which Herrera referred to as the congressman “cry[ing] to his liberal friends about me.” Gonzales prevailed by just a few hundred votes. 

Following his loss, Herrera spoke at the 2024 YAL convention, where he used terminally online language popular among anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. “I know it’s easy to take the black pill and assume that nothing we do ever makes a difference, that George Soros and his lizard kids are going to make us eat the bugs and live in the pod and marry the gay frogs,” he said. “But God’s honest truth is that the people in this room … genuinely have the power to shape the direction of this country.”

Herrera continued to produce YouTube content, including a review of a second Nazi-era firearm, reenactments of historical assassinations, and tests of the guns used in attempts on President Trump’s life (though he declined to re-create the assassination of far-right influencer Charlie Kirk). He also made increasingly critical videos about the ATF while gunning, unsuccessfully, to be appointed director of the bureau, which he said he wants to abolish. 

Last August, the same month that he was praised by a mass shooter in Minneapolis, Herrera announced his rematch against Gonzales at the annual Gun Owners of America summit. Gonzales had earned Trump’s backing this time around, and the incumbent might have been in the clear—until the San Antonio Express-News confirmed initial reporting by Current Revolt about the congressman’s affair. Herrera pounced, hammering Gonzales online, and the Youtube star, now enjoying more than 4 million followers, narrowly bested Gonzales in the March primary and soon secured the nomination when the incumbent bowed out. As of early June, Abbott had not announced the timing of a special election to fill the seat.

(AP Photo/Brenda Bazán)

Jesse Rizo, board president of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District and uncle to 9-year-old Jackie Cazares who was killed at Robb Elementary, told the Observer he was dismayed that a gun-rights absolutist could be Uvalde’s congressional representative. 

“If I was having a conversation with somebody that’s thinking about voting for Herrera or for somebody that extreme, I would caution that person,” Rizo said. “You never know when it’s going to affect you.”

As the GOP establishment, including Trump, has increasingly embraced Herrera, at least one conservative Jewish group that once called him a “goose-stepping extremist” has decided to sit out the fight. In its place, Democratic PACs and politicians have used Herrera’s controversial content as fuel for attacks. In March, the Democratic House Majority PAC resurfaced Herrera’s Nazi submachine gun video, leading Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut to accuse Herrera of being “an open Nazi enthusiast.” That same month, media outlets and liberal influencers highlighted a podcast clip in which Herrera said he owned a 1939 edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Herrera and his campaign have defended his content on X, describing it as “funny as hell,” while saying he is not anti-Semitic and that he actually intended to mock Nazis. 

“The accusations against Brandon Herrera are bizarre, desperate, and false,” Herrera’s campaign manager said in a statement to Politico in March. “Brandon has never done or said anything antisemitic, and he has earned the support of leaders in the Jewish community. In Brandon’s work as a historical firearms educator, he has simulated the execution and poisoning of Adolf Hitler. The misleading clip about Brandon’s rare book collection omits his comments ridiculing and condemning Hitler’s book.”

Throughout his career as an edgy conservative gunfluencer, Herrera has walked the line between sincerity and irony while maintaining some distance from political extremists. Now under the national spotlight, he seems to be further tempering his image. In a March Washington Post article, he distanced himself from prior remarks about the Confederacy, saying that the “war of Northern aggression” was a “historic term” but that “nowadays we call it the American Civil War.” 

Yet, even as he distanced himself from one extremist view, he took one step closer to another extremist group.

During the 2026 Conservative Political Action Conference in Grapevine, where he was a featured speaker, Herrera also spoke at a private satellite event held by the Republicans for National Renewal (RNR). Months earlier, Arizona GOP lawmakers had dropped out of an RNR event after they were informed that the group’s leaders had respectively hosted a podcast with a member of a white nationalist group and attended a 2024 conference hosted by Fuentes. That didn’t stop Herrera from speaking at the event, where he was introduced as a “RINO hunter.” Herrera’s campaign manager told the Observer in her May statement that Herrera “has no affiliation or knowledge of the group.” 

Whether Herrera’s most controversial choices will hurt his chances in November remains to be seen. As the El Paso Herald-Post editorial board wrote in April, assuming that his track record will render him unelectable may be a misreading of the electorate. “In many parts of Texas, these types of displays do not necessarily disqualify a candidate,” the board wrote. “In fact, in this particular case, they might even serve to signal ideological alignment and mobilize voters on Herrera’s behalf.”

Still, there’s reason to believe Herrera could be the first Republican to lose District 23 since 2012. House Dems believe they are within striking distance, as shown in an April Democratic-aligned poll, and Herrera himself has agreed.

“You always have to fight like you’re behind,” he said at the RNR event. “Right now, based on how the midterms are looking, we might actually be behind.”

With favorable winds at her back, Padilla Stout, Herrera’s Democratic counterpart, believes she can flip enough votes to win.

“Every day, I talk to Republican and independent-minded voters who say they could never vote for a candidate as extremist as Brandon Herrera,” Padilla Stout said in her written statement.  “They know that Brandon is a one-issue internet celebrity who is only interested in expanding his national platform and getting more YouTube views. He is not interested in the real issues that are facing families like mine and others across this district.”

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