After narrowly surviving the Texas GOP’s efforts to purge its moderates in the primary last year, U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-San Antonio) has a new plan to promote his centrist values on Capitol Hill.
Gonzales, 44, has regularly butted heads with Congress’ conservative wing, which exercised tremendous influence in D.C. after Republicans took control of the House in 2022.
When lawmakers returned after the November election, however, Gonzales took over chairing the GOP’s Congressional Hispanic Conference (CHC) — which added members as Hispanic voters swung hard toward the Republican Party.
Republicans have a razor-thin 218-214 majority in the House, setting the stage for Gonzales’ CHC to be a deciding factor in any legislative priorities they intend to pass without Democrats’ help.
“We’ve seen what [conservative groups] have been able to do as a bloc,” Gonzales said in a March 10 interview with the San Antonio Report. Going forward, “the Congressional Hispanic conference is going to have a seat at the table.”
Last month the CHC previewed that approach in a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), calling on Congressional Republicans to support President Donald Trump’s border security and immigration efforts, while also preserving elements of the social safety net — like SNAP food stamp benefits and Pell Grant funding for college students with financial need — that have been singled out for cuts in the GOP’s ongoing spending fight.
“Hispanic Americans stood with us because we stood up for them on the issues that matter,” eight of the CHC’s members said in the letter. “… They are closely watching to see if we will govern in a way that honors their values and delivers results.”
Though the 11-member CHC is still smaller than some of the other caucuses on the Hill, Gonzales said it still has plenty of potential to be influential.
The Trump administration is quite proud of the inroads its made with Hispanic voters, and Gonzales, who represents the largest stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border, was already recently invited to join Vice President J.D. Vance on a trip to Del Rio and Eagle Pass.
“A lot of people across all parties like to talk about the Hispanic vote. We actually are Hispanic members, and many of us are in Hispanic districts,” Gonzales said. “In my eyes, who better to be that voice than the person that’s actually in the seat?”
This week Gonzales sat down with the San Antonio Report to talk about his vision for the CHC chairmanship, the Republican Party’s evolving relationship with Hispanic voters and the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) spending cuts.
The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
San Antonio Report: Talk a little about your vision for the Congressional Hispanic Conference and its role during this moment in Washington.
U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales: These are Republican, Hispanic members in the House of Representatives, and there’s about a dozen of us. In the 119th Congress, one member equals 100 [because of the slim partisan divide]. Imagine what you can do with a dozen.
Our members are from all over the country — Florida, California, Oregon, Colorado, New York — but this is the first time there’s ever been a Texan that has been the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Conference. So I’m really, really excited about that.
My number one goal as chairman is to make sure that we have a seat at every table, on every discussion, not just when it comes to [border] security. Some of the things that are priorities to us are are making the [2017] tax cuts permanent, putting more in Americans’ pockets … and growing the economy.
The Republican Party has a prime opportunity to make some drastic changes to the government for the betterment of a lot of people, but we have to get it right.
We’ve got to make sure that we’re cutting the waste, but we’re also protecting the programs that work and the people that essentially helped get us elected. In many cases, it was Hispanic Americans, it was people in rural communities.
SAR: Where do you personally turn for good data about what motivated Hispanic voters in this past election?
Gonzales: I look at who the successful members [of Congress] are and what they’ve done. Honestly, it’s not a Texas thing. It’s not a Florida thing. It’s across the country. In many cases, it’s kitchen table issues.
People want to be safe. They want their children to be more prosperous than they were. They want to be healthy. They want to have access to quality health care. They want more money in their pockets. They’re tired of getting taxed to death. And then, they’re a lot like a lot of other Americans who are going, “Hey, what about me?”
I’ve seen that, particularly in my district, over the last several years as the border crisis continued to get worse.
A lot of people in my district are very religious. [When it comes to helping migrants], people are saying, “I’ve given you my shirt, I’ve given you my pants. I’m giving my shoes. There’s nothing more to give.”
SAR: You’ve had a lot of disagreements with Congress’ border hawks about how to best secure the border and handle immigrants lacking permanent legal status. You were also recently tapped to spend some time on the border with White House officials. How do you see your role in national party that’s consumed with issues happening primarily in your district, that they may or may not fully understand?
Gonzales: I represent a district that’s larger than 30 states, over 800 miles of the southern border. I’m on the border constantly listening to folks. I can tell you the good, the bad, the ugly, what’s working, what’s not working.
It was great to be on Air Force Two with the vice president and the secretary of defense and director of national intelligence. It was productive to have these conversations. In my eyes, that’s the goal, to have a seat at the table.
I’m looking for solutions. I’m looking to separate illegal immigration from legal immigration. Illegal Immigration is bad. These convicted criminals, we should all be going after them with everything we have. Legal immigration is a positive thing.
The illegal immigration topic is very complex. It’s like an onion, and the deeper you go, the more complex it gets. Everybody wants to start at the end and work their way backwards. And guess where that’s gotten us? 30 years of absolutely nothing.
I try to start at the beginning, what is the lowest possible fruit that can keep us all on the same page? To me, it’s the focus on the convicted criminal illegal aliens. That’s someone who has gone through the court process has been convicted of a crime. If you can’t agree that that person needs to be deported, you can’t agree on all these other complex issues.
SAR: The Trump Administration has of course talked about going much further with mass deportations — something you suggested could be a turnoff to Hispanic voters. Do you worry that the administration’s first months might run off voters who are new to the Republican Party?
Gonzales: Late last year I reached out to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the data on how many convicted criminal illegal aliens are in our country. I got a four page response that detailed more than 662,000 convicted criminal illegal aliens in our country … that pool is going to take a lot of time, energy and resources to get done.
The biggest thing is we want to do a lot of things in a very short period of time. And if you know President Trump, he’s not a patient man.
I just want to make sure we’re methodical about how we’re doing it, that we’re going through and we’re indeed cutting out waste. We’re indeed cutting out fraud. And you’re separating the fraud and the waste from programs that actually work. You’re separating the people that are robbing us from the people that are counting on this for their survival and are productive hard working Americans.
That’s very much like how I try to separate legal and illegal immigration. Somebody doing it the right way, filling out all the paperwork, going through the process, should not be in the same line as a convicted murderer. We should focus on stopping the bad elements of it and encourage and prop up the good elements.
SAR: Do you think the Trump Administration is open to ideas that would expand legal immigration, like your bill to extend the work visa program from one year to three?
Gonzales: I think in Trump’s America, there is an opportunity for absolutely everything.
He himself has talked about “Dreamers” [undocumented migrants who were brought into the country as children]. During his previous administration he had talked about wanting to have a deal [on immigration reform].
Now, what does that look like? How do you get the details right? I think a lot of time, energy and nuance would go into it. But in my eyes, I envision a group like the Congressional Hispanic Conference being a part of that, having a seat at the table and nurturing it along.
SAR: You serve on the House Appropriations Committee, which makes the spending decisions for the federal government. What do you make of Elon Musk’s DOGE trying to take back money Congress has already appropriated from programs the administration doesn’t like?
Gonzales: Appropriations is the original DOGE, and the sooner appropriators can get back to doing our work, the better the country will be. We put in a lot of time and energy, literally, going line by line through every aspect of the government and saying what needs to be increased, what needs to be decreased.
We also clearly have sucked at it, because you read some of the DOGE reports and you’re going, “I can’t believe this is in there.” So we have a lot more work to do.
I want Congress to be strong. I want Congress to have a transparent, accurate conversation about how do we get rid of the waste, and still protect the programs that work, that so many Americans are relying on.
SAR: Do you see a world in which Texas is reimbursed by the federal government for some the border security efforts its paid for in recent years?
Gonzales: I could definitely see a world where Texans, who have paid literally billions of dollars to not only keep Texas safe, but a lot of Americans, are going to get reimbursed for it, and rightfully so.
It’s long overdue that we get reimbursed for some of these things. I think there’ll be an opportunity in the reconciliation package, and I’ve been advocating for that a lot. I think there’s a good chance that that makes it in there.
