This is the largest mass killing of trans people in recorded history and “constitutes a grave breach of international humanitarian law.” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz confirmed the strike was intentional without going into further detail.
In the Rio Grande Valley, bordering Mexico, ICE raids have emptied construction sites and restaurants. Recently turned Republicans are begin
In the Rio Grande Valley, bordering Mexico, ice raids have emptied construction sites and restaurants. Recently turned Republicans are beginning to have doubts.
By Rachel Monroe
July 7, 2025
Javier Villalobos, the mayor of McAllen, a city in the Rio Grande Valley, has noticed a change in his community in the past few weeks, after a series of ice raids across the region, which is situated in the southern tip of Texas. “You go to some subdivisions that are being constructed, and it’s empty. You go to Home Depot, and there’s nobody around there,” Villalobos told me. “It’s weird. It feels like ‘The Walking Dead.’ ”
The Valley, a longtime Democratic stronghold, has in recent years been used as evidence of Donald Trump and his maga movement’s appeal to nonwhite voters. In 2021, when Villalobos was elected, Republicans celebrated the win as a sign of good things to come. “Amazing news! McAllen, Texas is a major border town of 140,000 people. 85% Hispanic—and just elected a Republican mayor,” Steve Cortes, a former Trump adviser, posted on Twitter. “The macro realignment accelerates in South Texas, and elsewhere, as Hispanics rally to America First.” In last year’s Presidential election, Trump won every county in the Valley, including one where Hillary Clinton had beat him by forty points, in 2016. McAllen had the second-biggest shift in party share of any large city in the nation, trailing only Laredo, another Texas border community. “In the Rio Grande Valley, the Red Wave Makes Landfall,” the Texas Observer declared, calling the 2024 election a “bloodbath” and wondering whether Texas Democrats were “doomed.”
But Trump’s tariff policies have put economic strain on a region that’s heavily dependent on trade with Mexico. Then, in mid-June, Trump posted on Truth Social that, “by notice of this TRUTH,” ice officers were ordered to “do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.” In attempting to meet a quota of thousands of deportations a day, the Trump Administration has targeted cities run by Democrats, most notably Los Angeles. But Texas has not been spared, despite Governor Greg Abbott’s crucial role in helping to get Trump elected. McAllen is a city with roughly the same percentage of noncitizens as Los Angeles. Raids have been reported at night clubs, restaurants, and immigration hearings in the area. When I visited a popular flea-market complex, it was unusually subdued; it had been raided recently, a plant vender told me. Since then, he estimated, traffic had decreased by ninety per cent. The wide-reaching impact of the raids is making some Republicans concerned that, as Villalobos told me, “we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.”
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