Biden's Failures Drop In on Doña Ana

They are coming to explain affordability to us.

Sunday, Sept. 13, Las Cruces. Pete Buttigieg headlines a rally with Deb Haaland and Rep. Gabe Vasquez. The billing: "lower costs, better opportunities, safer communities."

Lower costs. Safer communities. Delivered in the only congressional district holding every mile of New Mexico's border, by two people who sat in the Biden cabinet for all four years and did absolutely nothing to mitigate years of historic illegal immigration and devaluing the dollar.

Here is what those four years cost you.

The receipts

• Consumer prices rose 21.5% from January 2021 to January 2025. In the four years before, they rose 7.8%.
• Gasoline rose 31%.
• Wages rose 19.9% against those prices. Real hourly earnings fell 1.3% over four years. You got a raise and went backward.
• A New Mexico minimum-wage worker needs 69 hours a week for a one-bedroom at fair market rent.
• Las Cruces minimum wage: $13.01.
• New Mexico overdose deaths in 2021: 1,052. A rate of 51.6 per 100,000 — sixth worst in America. The fentanyl death rate that year ran 9.25 times the 2017 rate.
• Southwest border encounters, Biden fiscal 2022: 2,206,436 — the highest since the Border Patrol began counting in 1960.
• Southwest border encounters, Trump fiscal 2025: 237,538 — the lowest since 1970.

Same border. Same laws. Different management.

What they were telling you while it happened

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, under oath and on camera:

• March 2021: "The border is secure and the border is not open."
• May 2022: Asked directly whether he was testifying that the southwest border is secure — "Yes, I am."
• April 2023: Retreats from the legal standard for operational control, says he applies "a lens of reasonableness."
• January 2025: On his way out the door — the border is "more secure than it was at the end of 2019."

Two point two million in a single year. Nobody in that cabinet said a word.

Four no votes

Ask the Rep Vasquez, who will share that stage, what he has done about your costs and your safety.

Federal law now exempts up to $25,000 in tips from income tax for workers earning under $150,000, up to $12,500 in overtime, and adds a $6,000 deduction for seniors. Real money for a server in Las Cruces, a nurse pulling doubles in Deming, a roughneck running overtime in Eddy County.

Gabe Vasquez voted no. Twice — in May 2025, and again on final passage that July, when not one House Democrat voted yes and not one was absent.

In January 2025, 46 House Democrats voted for final passage of the Laken Riley Act, requiring detention of unauthorized immigrants charged with theft, assaulting police, or crimes causing death or serious injury.

Vasquez voted no for safety. Twice.

In April 2025 he told a friendly crowd that some people said voting against it would take courage. "I did," he said. "I voted against it." They cheered.

Four no votes on paychecks and public safety. Now a rally about lower costs and safer communities.

What "lowering costs" means to them

Not letting you keep your money.

New Mexico still taxes the transaction itself — gross receipts at 4.875% before local add-ons, a levy every business in Deming and Lordsburg passes straight to the customer because it has no choice.

Their version of affordability is a program. Ask how the programs are going. The Legislature's own Finance Committee found homelessness rose in Las Cruces, Albuquerque and Santa Fe after roughly $500 million in state housing investment across three years. Half a billion dollars, worse outcome.

And in April, that same committee counted 32,000 young New Mexicans neither working nor in school.

Thirty-two thousand of our own kids on the sidelines. And the closing argument for Democrats in this district is a former transportation secretary from Indiana that claims bridges are racist.

Their record, in their own words

Buttigieg, April 2021, on what needed fixing in American transportation: "There is racism physically built into some of our highways." He returned to the theme that November at the White House podium, describing an underpass built too low for a bus carrying Black and Puerto Rican children as design that "obviously reflects racism."

Meanwhile 2.2 million people crossed the southern border in a single year. His one recorded contribution to that debate was endorsing "a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants."

Haaland. On May 18, 2026, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that Interior's Bureau of Indian Education broke federal civil rights law — Title VII — by unlawfully discriminating against three employees. Their offense: asking for a religious exemption from the COVID vaccine mandate. They offered to mask and test instead. Interior summarily denied them, claimed accommodation was an undue hardship, and could not prove it. The commission ordered the denials reversed and compensation determined.

Her lockdowns. Her department. Her watch. Religious conviction overruled by an agency that then lost in front of a federal commission.

That is the leadership experience both of them are running on.

Sunday's only question

Twenty-one and a half percent. Two point two million. Fifty-one point six per hundred thousand. Sixty-nine hours a week. Four no votes.

Both candidates on that stage want New Mexico to hire them on the strength of how they governed in that cabinet. Don't forget to hold them accountable for what many refer to as the largest civil rights violation in New Mexico history with COVID combined with the largest border incursion on record.

Will they govern the same way?