Eric Flores isn’t another politician talking about the border from behind a desk in Washington. He was there. Boots on the ground, commanding troops, watching the chaos unfold in real time.
The Republican candidate challenging incumbent Democrat Vicente Gonzalez in Texas’s 34th Congressional District served as an operations officer during Operation Guardian Support back in 2017 and 2018. That was when President Trump made his first real push to secure the southern border, calling up troops because someone finally had to do something about the mess.
“I was an operations officer, essentially commanding troops on the border,” Flores explained during his appearance on Breitbart News Daily. “We launched the first 500 troops, myself and a senior lieutenant colonel.” The mission was straightforward but critical. Put more border patrol agents back where they belonged so they could actually do their jobs. The previous administration had pulled resources away from where they were desperately needed.
And when that surge happened, we needed bodies. Men and women in green securing the line because nobody else was going to do it.
What Flores witnessed opened his eyes to just how destructive broken policies can be. He later became a federal prosecutor and dismantled one of the largest human smuggling operations in South Texas. Think about that for a second. This wasn’t some small-time operation moving a handful of people across the Rio Grande. This was a transnational criminal organization with roots in Honduras, trafficking illegal aliens as far north as Boston.
They were exploiting every loophole in the book. Asylum claims, commercial airlines, you name it. These criminals had turned border violations into a business model, and business was booming under policies that treated our sovereignty like a suggestion rather than a law.
Flores estimates this single organization was smuggling somewhere between 1,000 and 2,500 illegal aliens every single month. Just one organization. Let that sink in while politicians in Washington talk about “comprehensive immigration reform” and “pathways to citizenship” as if we’re not dealing with an invasion.
His opponent, Vicente Gonzalez, actually said we needed to loosen up border security and allow people to come in more freely. More freely. As if 24 million illegal aliens flooding into this country wasn’t enough. As if American communities weren’t already bearing the cost of housing, healthcare, education, and crime that comes with unchecked migration.
The difference between Trump’s approach and Biden’s couldn’t be starker. Under Trump, resources flowed to the border. Troops showed up. Border Patrol agents could do their jobs without being turned into processing clerks for an endless stream of asylum seekers gaming the system. Under Biden? The floodgates opened, and every cartel, smuggler, and trafficker from Central America knew it.
Flores brings something to this race that most candidates simply don’t have. He’s seen the border crisis from multiple angles. As a soldier providing operational support. As a federal prosecutor taking down the criminal networks profiting from our porous border. And now as a candidate who understands that border security isn’t just about immigration policy. It’s about national security, public safety, and the rule of law.
Texas’s 34th District deserves someone who won’t parrot talking points crafted in some D.C. consultant’s office. They need someone who’s been there, who knows what works and what doesn’t, and who won’t back down when the usual suspects start screaming about compassion and diversity.
Compassion doesn’t mean letting criminal organizations exploit our asylum system to move thousands of people into our country illegally every month. It means protecting American citizens first, securing our border, and ensuring that immigration happens legally and in a way that serves our national interest.
Flores gets it because he’s lived it. That matters more than any campaign slogan ever could.
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