PRESIDIO COUNTY — Presidio County Sheriff Danny Dominguez may have been blue by label for 28 years at his post, always running as a Democrat, but he waded into deep red last week as an official guest of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz at the State of the Union address to support the Republican and weigh in on border issues.
In an interview with The Big Bend Sentinel this week, Dominguez said he’s backing Cruz because the senator is not hiding the significant problems caused by recent waves of migrants crossing the border. “We’re talking about 11 million people that we don’t know,” Dominguez said, citing Cruz’s figure estimating how many migrants have come into the country in the past few years under Biden — 10.4 million. “They are living like hobos on the streets, and we’re paying for all this,” the sheriff said. “The government is forking out the money that comes from us.”
Dominguez appeared with Cruz in a video in Washington, D.C., before President Joe Biden’s address and in a campaign ad for the newly launched “Democrats for Cruz” in which he states: “I have 108 miles of border, and the last two years, border security has gone out of control. Texas can’t have a senator that doesn’t stand with law enforcement.”
Cruz is facing Democrat Colin Allred in the November General Election. On Tuesday, Allred participated in a press event for Democrats for Border Security Task Force, a coalition of members of Congress supporting the “Senate bipartisan border agreement,” legislation that would provide $118 billion in funding for border initiatives. The legislation would include money for more Border Patrol and U.S. Customs agents, additional judicial officers to process asylum claims, more detention facilities, and other assistance to cities dealing with an influx of migrants.
Cruz railed against the legislation and called it a “steaming pile of s- – -.” Dominguez agreed with Cruz that there are too many problems in the bill to support it.
Presidio County remains an outlier in the Texas political landscape. It’s solid blue with 66% of voters going for Biden over Trump in 2020. (Jeff Davis County went 60% for Trump, and Brewster County was more balanced with 51% for Trump.) Democratic voters outnumbered Republicans in the March 5 primaries 1,609 to 122. When former County Judge Cinderela Guevara switched from Democrat to Republican in 2022, she lost to current County Judge Joe Portillo 1,228 to 608. It’s no wonder Dominguez has followed suit of so many candidates by continuing to run as a Democrat; he recently ran unopposed in the Democratic primary, and with no Republican challengers in November, he will start his eighth term as sheriff.
Precinct 4 Presidio County Commissioner and Democrat David Beebe, who is active in Democratic politics, said Dominguez is just “echoing right-wing talking points,” and he knows the sheriff has always been on the side of Republicans. “I remember he had a Ted Cruz sign in his yard the last time [Cruz] ran,” he said. Bebee said the fact that you have to be a Democrat to win an election in the county means you sometimes end up with strange bedfellows. “Hey, if you want to be a Democrat in Presidio County, come on over. Republicans are welcome.”
Dominguez said the majority of the problems he encounters with migrants are from those who don’t turn themselves in for asylum processing — something mainly occurring in El Paso or south from Del Rio to the lower Rio Grande Valley — who then can become public safety concerns. Dominguez agreed with Cruz’s assessment of these “got-away” migrants as criminals, murderers, child molesters and rapists. “It’s true,” he said. “It’s happening more in some places than others … we don’t have that much here. I talk to my sheriffs on the border and they tell me that. Every bit of it is true.”
Unlike the high numbers of crossings from Del Rio to Brownsville, Border Patrol migrant encounters in the Big Bend Sector — which stretches from Sierra Blanca to Sanderson — have remained relatively flat over the past decade and even decreased 68% from a peak of 37,266 to 11,823 in the fiscal year ending September 30. Encounter numbers for the entire Southwest border, from California to Brownsville, between ports of entry, plummeted in January to near 2022 levels at 124,220, and 324 for the Big Bend Sector.
When he spoke to Cruz on video, Dominguez told the senator, “In the last three years, everything has dramatically changed. The influx of illegal aliens has started pouring into my county … not as bad as South Texas or El Paso, but we still have them. We can barely handle the ones we have. So that’s what I see, a lot of car chases, a lot of pursuits. We haven’t had any accidents, nothing major, thank God.”
Dominguez told The Sentinel that his office does not compile statistics on public safety offenses related to migration such as human smuggling, car chases or other crimes, because he doesn’t have the resources to do so.
In his video with the sheriff, Cruz also brought up the threat of terrorists from Hamas or Hezbollah crossing into the U.S. Dominguez said it was a concern in the Big Bend because of the remote stretches of the border not patrolled by law enforcement.
Beebe said it’s not unusual for Dominguez to back the current refrain from Republicans about an overwhelmed border — even if that is somewhere else on the border — because the county, and particularly the sheriff’s office, is benefitting greatly from state funding, like Operation Stonegarden grants, that provides additional money for equipment and overtime for officers. Presidio County has received about $1.4 million in Stonegarden grants to date and currently is applying for $250,000 more. Beebe said some of that money ends up wasted on high-tech equipment the county doesn’t need, but it allows for things like new trucks, all-terrain vehicles and overtime for deputies doing “interdiction” work by the border looking for drugs or migrant-related offenses. “Honestly, that helps our deputies make a better living,” he said.
Beebe said it’s unfortunate, though, that Dominguez gets to share his negative comments on migrants to a bigger audience, and migrants “have no political voice” in a culture of “fear” instilled by Republicans. Dominguez, he speculated, is following the pack of other border sheriffs decrying an invasion at the border. He did acknowledge that Dominguez knows his county and does a good job of taking care of it.
The sheriff said he believes Cruz has the interest of the people at heart, unlike other politicians who only “want the power.” “They don’t care about the people out there. They care about themselves.”
“I’m here to support somebody who I know is going to do something about this, and that is Ted Cruz here,” Dominguez said at the end of the video, motioning to the senator. “He called me. A Republican senator called me, a Democrat. Because [he] shares my values.”