Monica De La Cruz, the Republican congresswoman from South Texas, has a new campaign ad. In it, Stephanie Villarreal looks into the camera and says: "We reached out to Monica De La Cruz. She helped with my husband's immigration case."
Her husband, Juan Chavez Velasco, is a DACA recipient — one of the immigrants brought to the U.S. as children and allowed to work and stay here legally. According to the San Antonio Express-News, ICE arrested him earlier this year as he tried to visit their daughter in the neonatal intensive care unit.
It's a powerful ad. Here's what it leaves out.
One signature short
In Washington, there's a bill that would protect families like that one for good: the American Dream and Promise Act. It would give DACA recipients conditional permanent residence for 10 years and a path to citizenship. It would also let eligible people with Temporary Protected Status get green cards.
Republican leaders have refused to bring it up for a vote. So Rep. Sylvia Garcia, a Houston Democrat, started a discharge petition — a list that forces a House vote once a majority of members, 218, sign it.
It has 217 signatures.
Immigrant-rights groups and Democrats say De La Cruz has refused to be number 218.
"It's just one signature — if she wants to help DACA, the petition is just sitting there waiting for her to be #218," Garcia's chief of staff, Chris McCarthy, told the Express-News.
"If it is true that DACA is an issue that she deeply cares about, as we were told by her legislative team, and if it is true that she wants to be a champion for people with DACA, the Dream and Promise Act should have been a very simple sign-on for her," said Dani Marrero Hi of LUPE Votes, a group urging people to contact her and ask her to sign the petition.
Her excuse
De La Cruz's office didn't raise a single objection to what the bill actually does. It said she doesn't sign discharge petitions, as a general rule, and pointed to a different bill she cosponsors, the Dignity Act.
That excuse has a problem: both lead sponsors of the Dignity Act have already signed Garcia's petition. One of them is a Republican, Maria Elvira Salazar of Miami. The other is Democrat Veronica Escobar of El Paso. The two lead sponsors of the bill De La Cruz is hiding behind didn't think it was a reason to block a vote on this one.
And the Dignity Act isn't going anywhere on its own. We've reported that it has never had a hearing — it has sat untouched in a subcommittee since July 2025.
Her campaign manager, James Shook, said "no immigration bill has ever become law through a discharge petition, and Congresswoman De La Cruz believes DACA recipients deserve better than political games."
Signing the petition doesn't make a bill law. It forces the House to vote. A vote is exactly what DACA recipients haven't been able to get.
The ad doesn't say "DACA" or "Trump"
The Express-News points out that De La Cruz's ad never mentions DACA, never names President Trump, and never mentions the deportation crackdown that put Villarreal's husband in custody in the first place. When she posted it, she said she was fighting for "common sense immigration policies."
That matters, because De La Cruz helped pay for that crackdown. After reports that ICE was holding immigrants with no criminal convictions, she still voted with Republicans to keep funding the agency's operation, the paper reports. We've written about how she voted for the $70 billion that funds the arrests, then intervened in a single famous case and wouldn't promise to do the same for anyone else.
De La Cruz has said ICE should go after violent criminals. Under Trump's immigration enforcement, the Express-News reports, DACA recipients have become exceedingly vulnerable — and dozens have already been deported.
Her Democratic opponent, Bobby Pulido, summed up the pattern: "You go vote for it and then you say, 'Oh this is not right. I'm not for this.'"
Why it matters in her district
De La Cruz represents Texas's 15th District in the Rio Grande Valley. The race is close: the Cook Political Report recently moved it from "Lean R" to "Toss Up," according to the Express-News.
She is asking those voters to re-elect her by showing them one family she helped. A House vote on protecting every DACA recipient is one signature away — and she won't add hers.
The bottom line
Monica De La Cruz is running a campaign ad built around a DACA family she helped, while refusing to become the 218th and final signature on a petition that would force a House vote on protecting DACA recipients. Her office raised no objection to the bill itself, both authors of the alternative she points to have already signed it, and she voted to keep funding the agency that arrested the man in her ad.
Source
- Advocates call out Monica De La Cruz for refusing to back DACA bill — San Antonio Express-News
