The politics here are not what you’d guess from the headline.
On July 29 in Pharr, Texas, the South Texas Builders Association and American Business Immigration Coalition Action gathered contractors, many of them Republicans, to demand that the federal government stop worksite immigration raids. STBA chairman Ronnie Cavazos told the room that lawmakers who won’t back worker protections “will lose” in the November midterms.
What the builders say is happening on their jobs
The association has spent months documenting the same pattern: workers stop showing up. Not deported, not detained, just absent. Crews that were fully staffed on Friday are short on Monday because word moved through a neighborhood. The result is labor shortages and schedule slippage on projects that were already tight.
That’s the mechanism worth understanding. Enforcement doesn’t have to touch a specific jobsite to affect it. The chilling effect radiates well past whatever site agents actually visit, and it reaches legal workers who live in mixed-status households.
The events behind the gathering
Earlier in July, Houston construction worker Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was fatally shot by an ICE officer. On July 16, federal agents raided the SouthShore Hotel construction site in Bemidji, Minnesota and detained seven people, the second construction-site raid in that city inside a month.
Massey Villarreal, CEO of Houston-based Precision Task Group and co-chairman of Comité de 100, called for work permits for long-term, law-abiding immigrants and for Dreamers. Reps. Henry Cuellar of Laredo and Vicente Gonzalez of McAllen attended. Rep. Monica De La Cruz of Edinburg did not, though she has previously said she would support legal status for construction workers.
The math nobody at the podium disputed
Construction is projected to need roughly 499,000 new workers in 2026, up from 439,000 in 2025. Nothing in the current pipeline of apprenticeships, high school programs or corporate training closes a gap that size on the timeline the data center and chip fab buildout is running on.
Employers who need those workers and voters who want enforcement are frequently the same people. That contradiction is now being argued out in Republican districts by Republican builders, which is a different fight than the one that has played out in Washington for twenty years.
Whether it changes any votes is a separate question.