The Li'l Abner Mobile Home Park sat at 11239 NW 4th Terrace in Sweetwater, and about 3,000 people lived there. Working families. Retirees. People who had put their life savings — some of them more than $100,000 — into homes that were called "mobile" but could not actually be moved off the little rented lots they sat on.
In November 2024 the owner announced the park was closing and everybody had to be out by the middle of May 2025. The buyout offer was $14,000 if you were gone by January 31, or $3,000 if you left before the end of April. About 200 residents sued to stop it. They lost. Last October, sheriff's deputies came with guns on their hips and carried out the evictions, and every TV station in South Florida filmed people crying outside houses they had spent their lives paying for.
All of that happened inside Florida's 28th Congressional District. Carlos Gimenez is the congressman for that district — Sweetwater and the entire Li'l Abner site are his.
He never said one public word about it.
He was not, however, uninvolved. On March 22, 2026, Florida Bulldog published the results of nearly a year of digging through public records, and what it found was $400,000 moving from the for-profit developer who cleared the park to the political committees of two Miami Republican congressmen who were quietly steering federal money to that developer's replacement project.
$150,000 of it went to Gimenez.
The order of events
This is the part to read slowly, because the dates are the story.
Early 2024. Gimenez cosponsored H.R. 6321, the PRICE Act, a bill about manufactured housing. Federal lobbying records show it was being pushed by Atlas Crossing, the Washington lobbying firm working for CREI Holdings — the company that owned Li'l Abner. The bill went nowhere.
May 8, 2024. Gimenez wrote to the leaders of a House appropriations housing subcommittee asking for federal money for CREI's Abner III development. That request went nowhere too, because Congress funded the government with a stopgap bill that year and no earmarks were handed out.
November 2024. CREI told the residents of Li'l Abner the park was closing.
April 10, 2025. Raul F. Rodriguez, the CEO of CREI Holdings, wrote a $150,000 check to the Gimenez Victory Committee. It is the only political contribution Rodriguez has ever made to Gimenez, before or since. It was twelve times larger than anything any other donor gave that committee.
May 23, 2025. Six weeks after the check cleared, Gimenez sent a second letter — this one to Appropriations Chair Tom Cole and ranking Democrat Rosa DeLauro — asking for money for the same Abner III project. Like the first letter, it did not name the project or the developer or say how much he wanted. His own congressional website says the ask was $10 million.
October 2025. The deputies came. The last residents were carried out.
February 3, 2026. Gimenez's letter paid off. Abner III was awarded $6 million in federal money.
Nobody has charged Gimenez with a crime, and the reporting does not allege one. What it lays out is a sequence.
Where the $150,000 actually went
A single person can only give a congressman's campaign account $6,600. A joint fundraising committee is the legal machinery that turns that $6,600 relationship into a $150,000 one — one big check, split among several committees, each up to its own limit.
Federal Election Commission records show the Gimenez Victory Committee moved the money out on June 30:
- $124,568 to the National Republican Congressional Committee, most of it into the party's legal proceedings account
- $26,177 to his campaign account, Carlos Gimenez for Congress
- $7,221 to his leadership PAC, Libertad
Add those up and you get nearly $158,000 — about $8,000 more than Rodriguez gave. Florida Bulldog notes that the FEC filings don't make clear why.
The form he signed
To request an earmark, a member of Congress has to certify in writing to the Appropriations Committee that he has no financial interest in it. Gimenez signed that certification.
He owns no piece of CREI, so on the narrow question the form asks, that was true. But the House Ethics Manual does not stop at the form. It says a campaign contribution isn't "generally" the kind of financial interest a member has to disavow — and then adds this:
"Nevertheless, a political contribution tied to an official action may raise other considerations. It is impermissible to solicit or accept a campaign contribution that is linked to any action taken or asked to be taken by a Member in the Member's official capacity – such as an earmark request that a member has made or been asked to make. Accepting a contribution under these circumstances may implicate the federal gift statute or the criminal provisions on illegal gratuities or bribery."
Asked about any of it, Gimenez's office did not respond to repeated phone calls and emails. Neither did Rodriguez.
The second earmark: taxpayers bought the cameras the developer had promised to buy
There is a second piece of federal money here, and it is the one that should make you sit up.
In February 2026 Gimenez also landed $1.05 million for a "Sweetwater policing equipment and safety project" — specifically a CCTV camera system and a license-plate reader system. He first asked for it back in 2024, around the same time as his first Abner III request, when no earmarks were awarded.
Here is why that matters. While CREI was trying to score "bonus points" to win other public money from Miami-Dade County to build Abner III, the company committed in writing to installing exactly that: an expensive CCTV system and a license-plate reader that would be compatible with the technology the city's police department uses.
So the developer made a written promise to install surveillance equipment in order to qualify for public subsidies — and the congressman who took its $150,000 went and got federal taxpayers to pay for a surveillance system of the same description in the same small city.
And who gets to live there?
For-profit companies aren't allowed to receive earmarks directly. Congress banned earmarks outright in 2011 after the corruption scandals of the 1990s and 2000s sent several members to prison, then quietly brought them back in 2021 under the friendlier name "community project funding." To route around the for-profit rule, Gimenez designated Miami-Dade's Housing and Community Development department to receive the $6 million, with CREI as the "subrecipient."
Abner III is an eight-story, 326-unit building the county calls affordable housing. Look at what "affordable" means here:
- 130 units (about 40%) are set aside for households earning up to 80% of the area median income — $87,000 for a family of four in Miami-Dade.
- 196 units (about 60%) go to households earning up to 120% of area median income — roughly $120,000 for two people, $146,000 for a family of four.
- 40% of the units are restricted to people 55 and older.
Those are not the rents of the people who were carried out of Li'l Abner with $3,000 in their pockets. This is housing priced for households making six figures, built on the ground where a community of working-class and elderly renters used to live, partly with federal money Gimenez requested in a letter that named neither the project nor the developer.
This keeps happening
Gimenez was not alone in this. His Miami colleague Mario Diaz-Balart took $250,000 from the same developer eleven days after the county publicly moved to release his $4 million earmark for the same project — the other half of the $400,000 Florida Bulldog traced.
And it isn't only Florida. In California, a 33-year Republican incumbent has spent two decades steering federal projects toward roads and bridges near real estate he personally owns, with the Los Angeles Times catching him at it in 2006 and again in 2024. The rules are loose enough that this happens in daylight, over and over, and nobody gets in trouble.
Five years, and this is the constituent service
Gimenez has represented this part of Miami-Dade in Congress since January 2021. He knows how to get on television — he does it constantly, on Cuba, on Iran, on socialism. He has gone on national TV to tell Americans to stop asking about the Epstein files, and he went on CNN to describe U.S. troops killed in Iran as "the nature of warfare."
For eleven months, while 3,000 of his own constituents were being pushed out of their homes in his own district — while it led the local news, while they sued and lost, while deputies showed up — the congressman had nothing to say.
He was writing letters. Just not to them.
Source
U.S. Reps. Gimenez, Diaz-Balart snag millions in HUD earmarks for Li'l Abner affordable housing developer, get huge contributions to their PACs — Dan Christensen and Cassidy Winegarden, Florida Bulldog, March 22, 2026. Photo: Li'l Abner residents at an August 2025 court hearing on their unsuccessful effort to block the evictions, NBC6 South Florida, via Florida Bulldog.
