By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
Civil rights attorney Rochelle Garza, the Democratic Party nominee for Texas Attorney General, campaigned in Del Rio Saturday.
Garza joined the Beto O’Rourke Drive For Texas campaign at an event at Doc Holliday’s to speak to Val Verde County voters.
“I’m a fellow fronteriza, and I’m running against criminally-indicted Ken Paxton. He has been under criminal indictment for seven years without trial. That would not happen if it were any one of us,” Garza told supporters at the event, adding that Paxton attempted to overturn the 2020 election “using the power of his office and our tax dollars.”
“He is under FBI investigation for bribery. He is corrupt, and he is dangerous for Texas and democracy,” Garza said, as a chant of “throw him out” began among the crowd.
Garza told the crowd she is also a new mother.
“I want to make sure that my daughter grows up in a country and in a state where she can decide for herself her own future. That she can marry whomever she loves. That she is not afraid to go to school, and I am not afraid to send her. Fierce madres, that’s who we are,” Garza said.
She told the audience members “to vote in this election as if your family’s life depended on it.”
After the event, Garza sat down with the 830 Times to speak directly to local voters.
“I decided to run because I’m a civil rights attorney. I’m a fifth-generation Tejana from Brownsville. I’m a mom, and I’m tired of having somebody in office that doesn’t care about our families and our children’s futures,” Garza said.
“(Texas Attorney General) Ken Paxton is criminally indicted and he has been abusing the power of his office to harm our families, and it’s time that we get him out of office,” she added.
Garza said the attorney general should be “the people’s attorney.”
“We should be concerned about uplifting Texas families by being for everyday people. That means doing all the bread-and-butter issues like collecting child support, making sure that consumers are protected, having accountability for what happened with the power grid failure is a huge thing that we should be doing,” she said.
“Everyone is seeing in their bills that their energy costs are really high and that’s because we don’t have an attorney general that is fighting for us. So those will be my priorities, making sure that we are addressing all of the things that underpin a healthy family because that’s what really matters to most of us,” Garza added.
Asked why the people of Val Verde County should vote for her, Garza said, “I think the people of Val Verde County should vote for me because I care. I’m a mom. I’m somebody who’s from a really beautiful but struggling community, so I know what it’s like to come from a working family, to live paycheck-to-paycheck, to have student debt, and I think it’s really important that we have representation that understands those things and is looking toward addressing those issues instead of what we’ve got right now with Ken Paxton.”
“Ken Paxton is engaging in these culture wars and political actions to consolidate his own power at our expense, at the expense of everyday Texans, and I don’t want to put up with that anymore, and I don’t think anyone from any county in Texas should put up with that,” she added.
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