Monica De La Cruz has represented Texas's 15th District — a district that runs from the border at McAllen up toward San Antonio — since 2023. Three years in Congress is long enough to build a record. Here are three things South Texas should know about hers.

1. She sent $2.4 million of our money to a group whose founder was charged with stealing from fraud victims

De La Cruz secured a $2.4 million taxpayer-funded earmark for a South Texas nonprofit called the Angels of Love Advocacy Project. Its founder was a McAllen attorney named Della Fay Perez.

Days before Perez was supposed to appear at a press conference alongside the congresswoman, she was arrested. Federal prosecutors charged her with 11 counts of bank fraud and one count of conspiracy, accusing her of stealing roughly $461,000 in restitution checks — money that was supposed to go to victims of the $7 billion Ponzi scheme run by Stanford International Bank. In other words, people who had already been robbed once.

Here's the part that should bother you most. Perez wasn't a stranger to De La Cruz's operation. Between 2021 and 2023, she directed more than $2,700 to campaign committees tied to De La Cruz. A donor gave money to the congresswoman. The congresswoman steered millions in public money toward the donor's nonprofit.

De La Cruz's defense was that the application was "thoroughly vetted by the House of Representatives." That's the same as saying: don't blame me, blame the process. But she's the one who picked it.

2. She won't sit in a room with us

Good representatives hold town halls. Not scripted phone calls — actual rooms, with actual constituents, where anyone can raise a hand.

De La Cruz does the phone version. When she held a telephone town hall in March 2025, constituents and even reporters were parked in a queue and never got to ask their questions. One local advocate had to use his moment on the line just to beg her for a real one: "have an in-person town hall where we can have a respectful conversation."

She turned that down, saying her district is too big geographically. A political science professor interviewed for the same story put the cost of that plainly — do it long enough, and "people are going to get cynical and believe politicians are not representing them."

People in the Valley aren't waiting quietly. That same month, a group called Mothers for Democracy protested outside her McAllen office over her votes on Medicaid and food assistance — and asked her, again, to hold a town hall.

On the phone she also told constituents, about Medicaid: "We have not made any cuts." Months later she voted for Trump's budget bill, and the Joint Economic Committee now projects that 65,193 people in her district will lose health coverage.

3. Her own stepdaughter's father took her to court

This one is about character, and it comes straight from court records and the reporting of the Washington Post.

In November 2021, while De La Cruz was being promoted by national Republicans as a rising star, her estranged husband Johnny Hernandez accused her in divorce filings of "cruel and aggressive conduct" toward his 14-year-old daughter — including verbal abuse and pinching the child at church to stop her from crying instead of comforting her. He said that in August, De La Cruz had told him she would divorce him if he brought his daughter, who had at times been hospitalized, back home to live with them.

De La Cruz called the accusations "false" and asked for privacy.

The case went to a hearing anyway. In January 2022, a Hidalgo County judge ruled she had to keep living away from the family home until after the March primary. At that hearing, text messages were entered into the court record in which De La Cruz attacked her husband's daughter by name, using a four-letter expletive about the girl — and repeated it. When Hernandez wrote back that she couldn't mean it about his daughter, her answer was: "I mean every word."

She denied mistreating the girl. But the texts are in the record, and she was in court defending them.

One pattern, three examples

These aren't three unrelated stories. They're three versions of the same question: when Monica De La Cruz has to choose between the people of South Texas and her own campaign, which one wins?

A donor's nonprofit got the earmark. The town halls she'll hold are the ones where nobody can push back. And a court hearing over a 14-year-old was scheduled around a primary election. Three years in, that's not bad luck — it's a pattern, and it points in one direction every time.

In 2026, the 15th District gets to decide whether it's still the deal it wants.