Mexican American GOP lawmakers have been largely silent on MAGA’s sombrero memes this week.

President Donald Trump on Monday shared a video featuring House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Truth Social, using AI to depict Jeffries wearing a mustache and sombrero while mariachi music plays and Schumer trashes Democrats.

The president’s allies (including the official Republican Party) have gleefully seized on the absurd video, making and sharing their own memes of Democratic lawmakers in sombreros. Some Latino advocacy groups have condemned Trump for using stereotypes to demean Mexicans.

But most Mexican American Republicans in Congress—Representatives Brian Mast, Tony Gonzales, David Valadao, Juan Ciscomani, Monica De La Cruz, and Gabe Evans—have not addressed the memes publicly as of this writing Thursday afternoon.

Representative Anna Paulina Luna is the only Mexican American Republican to comment on the meme, and in fact, she can’t seem to stop. The Florida representative has even changed the profile picture on her congressional X account to a portrait of herself in a digitally added sombrero.

Luna dismissed “fake outrage” over the memes on Wednesday, and later told Fox News host Jesse Watters that the joke inspired her to purchase red sombreros for Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

On Wednesday evening, Luna shared a photoshopped picture of JD Vance donning a sombrero and mustache. On Thursday, she posted a photo of herself, Vance, and Jeffries in sombreros, asking her followers, “Who wore it better?”

On the Democratic side of the aisle, many members of Congress of Mexican descent have reacted to the memes.

Senator Alex Padilla and Representative Teresa Leger Fernández seized on the moment to criticize Trump’s childish posting habits and pin blame for the ongoing government shutdown on Republicans.

“Democrats came to the White House to keep the government open. The President answered with a racist AI video,” Padilla wrote on X. “Anyone searching for an answer on who owns this shutdown—look no further.”

Fernández accused Trump of “acting like a 6-year-old,” saying, “The problem is that when he acts like a 6-year-old, it’s not like you can just get mad at him and say, ‘Stop drawing mustaches on people.’ People will die because of their decisions.”

Representative Jimmy Gomez responded to the memes with an AI-generated movie poster featuring Donald Trump and the late notorious sex criminal—and former Trump associate—Jeffrey Epstein. “Every time Donald Trump puts up a racist AI generated video of Hakeem Jefferies or any of my colleagues, I’ll put [up] a new movie poster about Trump and Epstein,” he wrote.

Senator Ruben Gallego responded to Republican Senator Ted Cruz’s sombrero meme by highlighting the 2021 scandal in which the Texas senator took a trip to Cancún, Mexico, while a winter storm left millions of his constituents freezing without power and heat.

Posting an image of Cruz in the airport—with a photoshopped sombrero and mustache, of course—Gallego wrote, “Cancun Cruz knows a thing or two about Mexico and a lot about raising health care costs for 24 million Americans.”

The Department of Homeland Security blatantly lied about the victim of a recent shooting committed by an ICE agent during an immigration arrest in Chicago. 

Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, 38, was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Franklin Park during an attempted immigration detention. DHS claimed Villegas-Gonzalez had resisted arrest and dragged an officer for “a significant distance” with his car. Nearby surveillance footage revealed the agent fired two shots, and Villegas-Gonzalez died from his injuries later at a hospital.

But the agency’s justification of deadly force doesn’t quite add up. 

On September 19, DHS published a press release that claimed that Villegas-Gonzalez was “a criminal illegal alien with a history of reckless driving.” But apparently, that’s completely wrong: NBC News reported that he had no criminal history. Villegas-Gonzalez had pleaded guilty to four traffic violations, including speeding, the most recent of which was in 2013.

The federal press release also claimed that the ICE agent responsible for the shooting had been “seriously injured” in the line of duty. But bodycam videos from Franklin Park police officers shortly after the incident showed the ICE agent describing his injuries as “nothing major,” NBC News reported Monday. 

It’s not clear why ICE had targeted Villegas-Gonzalez in the first place. David J. Bier, the  immigration director for the Cato Institute, wrote on X that ICE had manufactured the incident through a needless traffic stop.

“ICE tried to grab him just after dropping off his two little kids at day care. There is no reason why this interaction needed to happen at all,” Bier wrote, adding, “Desperate people in desperate spots can make stupid decisions like this guy did. But ICE shouldn’t manufacture these situations either.”

Additionally, one witness speaking to the Chicago Sun-Times claimed that ICE’s account of the fatal shooting had been inaccurate, and questioned whether the incident would be properly investigated. Neither of the officers involved in the incident were wearing body cameras, even though policy requires they wear them “as soon as practicable at the beginning of an Enforcement Activity and deactivation when the activity is concluded.” 

A group of Democratic lawmakers, including Illinois Representatives Jesús “Chuy” García and Delia C. Ramirez, as well as Senators Dick Durbin, Richard Blumenthal, and Tammy Duckworth sent a letter Tuesday to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and ICE Director Todd Lyons demanding that DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari investigate the shooting. 

It’s not entirely surprising that ICE would pursue an arrest of someone with no criminal conviction, or that they would lie about it. A Cato Institute study from June found that 65 percent of ICE detainees since October 2024 had no criminal record, and 95 had no violent criminal convictions. 

DHS’s press release about Villegas-Gonzalez claimed that ICE law enforcement was facing a 1,000 percent increase in assaults against them, up from a nearly 700 percent increase in July. But considering that there were just 10 assaults against ICE agents during the same period last year, that........

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