05/02/2024
Texas U.S. Senate candidate stumps in Alpine
By Alberto Tomas Halpern
ALPINE - Texas State Senator Roland Gutierrez made a campaign stop in Far West Texas this week in his Democratic Party primary bid to unseat Republican U.S. Senator Ted Cruz. Gutierrez is considered one of the frontrunners in the race, which includes a total of nine candidates, including U.S. Congressman Colin Allred of Dallas.
During a campaign appearance at the Hampton Inn in Alpine on Sunday evening, Gutierrez offered the crowd of 15 residents a stark warning about the current state of affairs: “We’re in real deep s**t if Donald Trump wins and Ted Cruz.” Audience members nodded in agreement.
Gutierrez’s 14-county state senate district encompasses a portion of Brewster County and runs east to Bexar County and San Antonio. The district includes the city of Uvalde, the site of the Texas’ deadliest school massacre on May 24, 2022 when 19 children and two teachers were murdered. He said the shooting and aftermath is what prompted him to run for U.S. Senate.
Prior to the Alpine campaign event, Gutierrez sat down with Frontera News to discuss his campaign efforts and answer policy questions. He was quick to criticize Allred, the other frontrunner in the race. “He’s Republican-lite, though he calls it moderate,” Gutierrez said, billing himself as the most progressive candidate in the race. Frontera News has reached out to Allred for an interview.
Allred, a former professional football player, has outraised Gutierrez by millions, but Gutierrez maintains his campaign is a “lean machine” that is focusing on canvassing voters, mail outreach, digital campaigning, and good old boot leather. “I’ve made more than 130 campaign stops,” Gutierrez said, “This takes energy and gumption.”
Gutierrez was also quick to take on Cruz and Republican leadership in the state. “Texas is broken and they broke it,” he said, adding that healthcare, education, immigration, and border security have eroded after 30 years of Republican control in Texas. “We’re broken but we can fix these things. Our governor and these MAGA nuts are wasting our money,” he said.
A large policy priority of Gutierrez includes comprehensive immigration reform. Currently, the state of Texas has set up razor wire along parts of the border with Mexico, in defiance of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling requiring it to be removed. “This is treasonous,” Gutierrez said of Republican Governor Greg Abbott. “He’s a joke who has used zero metrics from Operation Lone Star,” the governor’s $10 billion effort to address mass migration along the Texas-Mexico border using the Department of Public Safety and the Texas National Guard.
As an immigration attorney who has served two decades in both houses of the Texas Legislature, Gutierrez has a robust plan for immigration and border reform. This includes allowing DREAMers - children brought to the United States by undocumented parents - full citizenship; residency for undocumented workers currently in the United States; and replacing the H-2A and H-2B temporary work visas with more permanent solutions. These are “visas that are not conducive to a workforce,” Gutierrez said. “The vast majority of people coming to this country are job-seekers. By focusing on the root problem of migration and reconstructing the systematic processing of arriving immigrants, we decrease illegal migration into the United States, de-escalate tension and violence at the border and meet the needs of the labor market.”
Ultimately, Gutierrez says Republicans remain fixated on immigration and border politics to steer the public’s attention from other major issues like healthcare and education. “They don’t want to fix immigration. They want to scare the s**t out of us,” he said.
Gutierrez said reproductive freedom for women was another major policy priority, saying that Congress should codify a woman’s right to an abortion, stop abortion prosecution, and protect abortion rights from anti-abortion litigation. “They’d rather have women in shackles than have reproductive freedom,” he said of Republican and Christian nationalist actors.
While there are a number of critical national issues, it was the Uvalde school shooting that cemented his interest in seeking federal office. In the aftermath of the shooting, Gutierrez led initiatives introducing state legislation to help shooting victims sue the government and hold local and state law enforcement accountable during the 77 minutes in which officers didn’t confront the 18-year-old shooter. “Cowards,” he called the law enforcement officers at the scene.
“I support law enforcement 100 percent, but under no circumstances should they have [allowed] what happened on that day,” Gutierrez said during a press conference at the state capitol. “They failed these children for 77 minutes for a lack of leadership — under no circumstances should they be allowed to walk away and not compensate people. There’s no amount of money that’s going to bring back their children. But there should be justice, so today’s about justice.”
Gutierrez, a gun-owner himself, said he does support an assault weapon ban, Extreme Risk Protective Orders to remove weapons from people in danger to themselves and others, and raising the age to purchase a firearm.
His voice cracked as he described watching and listening to the families of shooting victims wail after learning their children had been killed. He said he watched hours of police body camera footage of the Robb Elementary shooting and aftermath. “Those images haunt me still today,” he said.
