On Monday, March 9, 2026, Juan Rodriguez stood outside the El Valle Detention Center in Raymondville, Texas, and watched a congresswoman walk a teenager out the gate.

The teenager was Antonio Gámez-Cuéllar, a McAllen high schooler who had been locked up for 12 days. The congresswoman was Monica De La Cruz.

Rodriguez was one of the demonstrators outside. He had a personal reason to be there: his fiancée is held in the same facility, with the same kind of immigration case, and he wanted to know whether anyone was coming for her.

"It's really unfair that only the chosen few get selected. She's in the exact same situation."

Why this case, and not the others

The Gámez-Cuéllar family's detention became a national story, and the details are why.

They were detained while doing what the government told them to do — showing up for a required check-in with immigration officials. And the brothers were members of an award-winning high school mariachi group that De La Cruz herself had invited to perform at the U.S. Capitol the previous summer.

So the congresswoman's own guests, from her own district, were taken by the agency her votes fund, for complying with a government instruction. After what the Texas Tribune described as "an intense public backlash," De La Cruz worked to get Antonio released from El Valle. A delegation of Democrats led by Rep. Joaquin Castro got the rest of his family out of the detention center in Dilley.

Then came the part that matters for everyone else in Texas's 15th District.

De La Cruz stopped short of pledging to make individual appeals for other detainees' release. She said her colleagues in Congress should work on "common sense" enforcement policies instead.

She declined the Texas Tribune's request for an interview.

Johanny Lacruz

Rodriguez's fiancée is Johanny Lacruz, 28, from Venezuela. Here is her record.

• She entered the United States legally in November 2023 at the Brownsville port of entry, with an asylum appointment secured through the government's CBP One app.
• In a sworn declaration reviewed by the Tribune, she wrote that she fled Venezuela after receiving threats over her political activism with Voluntad Popular, an opposition party.
• She holds a work permit valid until 2030.
• She has no criminal record. She had a job, a driver's license and filed her taxes.
• Her asylum hearing was scheduled for March.

On February 4, driving to San Antonio with Rodriguez, she stopped at the Border Patrol checkpoint in Falfurrias — a checkpoint more than 70 miles inside the border that anyone leaving the Rio Grande Valley by road has to pass through. She showed her work permit. An officer sent them to secondary inspection and took her into custody.

She was detained a month before the hearing she was waiting for. Rodriguez had planned to propose on Valentine's Day at the top of the Tower of the Americas.

"She never committed any crime. She had her driver's license. She had everything in line, all her ducks were in line — she had a job, she did her taxes and everything, everything, everything, and they detained her."

Since March, Rodriguez has been asking De La Cruz's office for help. He has also asked her Democratic opponent. Lacruz has been considering voluntary departure to Mexico — leaving the country rather than risk a removal order — so that they might eventually restart their lives somewhere else.

This is not an unlucky exception

Two numbers put the "chosen few" problem in perspective.

About 74% of people held in ICE detention have no criminal history, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which tracks immigration cases through public-records requests.

And detentions of people with no criminal record have risen 2,450% since Trump took office, according to the American Immigration Council.

Carlos M. Garcia, the immigration attorney who represented Gámez-Cuéllar, described the mechanism to the Tribune. ICE has been sending "call-in" letters telling people to appear earlier than their scheduled appointments — and arresting them when they show up.

"When they show up to their check-in, in compliance with this call-in letter, they are being detained. They're suffering the consequences of complying."

"I have not seen the number of call-in letters that have been sent out by ICE like this ever."

"Nobody is safe right now."

There is no version of this where a congresswoman can fix it one person at a time. There are thousands of Johanny Lacruzes and one Antonio Gámez-Cuéllar with a national news cycle behind him.

She paid for the machine

De La Cruz did not merely fail to stop this. She funded it, twice.

She voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 3, 2025, which poured money into the deportation campaign.

And on June 9, 2026 — three months after she walked Antonio Gámez-Cuéllar out of El Valle — she was one of the Republicans who passed S. 2, putting $70 billion into DHS, CBP and ICE by a margin of two votes. Not a single Republican voted no. At a two-vote margin, every yes was a deciding vote. The law's own summary says ICE's share pays for personnel, transportation, facilities, 287(g) agreements deputizing local police, and "operations by ICE to arrest certain unlawful aliens."

She had seen exactly what those arrests look like in her own district, up close, standing at the gate. Then she voted to buy four more years of them.

The election-year softening

De La Cruz's public position has moved as the enforcement has gotten less popular in South Texas.

By 2026 she was, according to the Texas Tribune, the only Republican from Texas to support a bipartisan immigration reform bill creating a seven-year pathway to legal status — not citizenship — for people in the country since 2020 who pass a criminal background check. She had also pitched a special visa for construction workers, after meeting with builders in her district who told her enforcement had wrecked their labor supply.

Her statement to the Tribune listed the bills she's filed:

"Fixing our broken immigration system is a top priority. Since I arrived in Congress, I have put forward policy solutions, including my Bracero Program 2.0 Act, my Fair Wages for Farm Workers, and my Texas Dreamer Work Authorization Act, to bridge the gap and bring stability to the immigration process."

Those proposals, the Tribune noted, "have gained little traction." One of them — her H-2A streamlining bill — would also cut wages for many of the farmworkers it covers.

That's the shape of it. The bills that would help people go nowhere. The bills that fund the arrests become law, with her vote, by two.

Her Democratic opponent and her Democratic colleagues called the El Valle appearance a political stunt. Whether it was or not, the test isn't what happened that Monday. It's what happens to the people with no news cameras.

Juan Rodriguez put the test plainly:

"If [she] is in the exact same boat that [Gámez-Cuéllar] was in but he can get out because he's famous but she can't get out because she's not famous, that's just unfortunate."

Source

Reported by Berenice Garcia for The Texas Tribune: With no ties to Congress, Texan wonders who will help fiancée in ICE custody (March 14, 2026). Photo: Chris Stokes for The Texas Tribune.