LAS CRUCES — This land is sacred, says Rep. Xochitl Torres Small, looking out the window of a minivan at the vast desert that stretches across the U.S.-Mexico border. Tumbleweeds blow over the road; scattered clouds of opaque dust hang thick in the air. She has lived here, under the jagged shadow of the red Organ Mountains, almost her entire life.
The 34-year-old congresswoman from New Mexico’s 2nd District, Torres Small knows this place better than most. She was 9 years old when she first climbed “the Needle” — the highest point in the Organs — scrambling to hoist herself over the rocks as her dad identified plants and insects. She brought her friends to the same mountain range for her 12th birthday, showing them how to ford a river and spelunk a cave. Years later, it was where her husband proposed.
“All these very intimate moments are connected to the land,” she says. Torres Small has amber eyes and curly black hair, glossy from a fresh coat of serum — traits her dad says she inherited from her Native American great-grandmother. “You feel that spirit here.”
Since she was elected in November, Torres Small has driven these roads with more than a dozen different members of Congress. They come down, smartphone cameras at the ready, to tour Torres Small’s district: the epicenter of the fiercest political debate in the country, straddling 180 miles of the most remote stretches of the southern border. They want to see the wall, the detention centers. They ask about Jakelin Caal Maquin and Felipe Gómez Alonzo, the two migrant children who died, at ages 7 and 8, while in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection in December, after walking hundreds of miles through the desert.
Jakelin came into the country through Torres Small’s district; Felipe died there.
It hasn’t been easy for Torres Small, a moderate Democrat, to talk about immigration in a way that appeals to both sides of her solidly purple district: to the immigration advocates who accuse Border Patrol of actively contributing to the deaths of Jakelin and Felipe and to the agents who say they did everything they could to save them. On Capitol Hill, it can be even harder to have nuanced conversations about the border. Torres Small is one of only a handful of members who champion centrist immigration policies: more Border Patrol agents, but with a clearer asylum process. Walls in some places, but not all.
“The whole abolish ICE tagline … I don’t know when Democrats became a party of disorder,” Torres Small says. “If you don’t like the laws, let’s work to change them. But not enforcing them? That doesn’t make sense.”
In Congress, Torres Small has earned an important platform from which to direct discussion on the border. She is the only member from a border region to serve on the House Homeland Security Committee and is the chairwoman of the oversight, management and accountability subcommittee. In March, when she questioned then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristjen Nielsen at a hearing to address the Trump administration’s immigration policies, she was commended for her uniquely nonpartisan approach.
As President Donald Trump doubles down on border security as his signature political issue, Republicans are moving further right, and Democrats further left. Each pole is missing something important, Torres Small says. Could she be the one to chart the middle course?
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On a sunny day in late February, Torres Small has come home to lead her fourth congressional delegation at the border. She’s here to meet with Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, the newly elected member from El Paso, and Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee.
When she’s at home, constituents often ask why as one of six millennial congresswomen, she’s not more prominent in the news. Why does she have 671 Instagram followers, compared with her colleagues’ tens of thousands? You’re also a young, charismatic freshman woman in Congress, they’ll say. Why aren’t you out there with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
“They want to see me being a part of what’s going on in Washington. They want to be able to cheer me on.” Torres Small gets quiet, and glances toward the mountains, hazy in the…
