What The Hell America!

SILVER CITY, NEW MEXICO — Over a year ago, Iris Nolasco moved back to her hometown to take a job as executive director of a food bank and community hub in Silver City, a mountain town in southern New Mexico that draws a mix of college students, artisans, nature lovers and retirees. 

For over 20 years, staff and volunteers for the organization, known as The Commons: Center for Food Security and Sustainability, have collected and distributed food donations to local residents, grown food on their property, and hosted classes and community dinners.

Nolasco began to notice changes last fall, before President Donald Trump’s election, when donations started to slow. The pantry, which had always been full and easy to restock, started to look sparse. 

Then came the cuts implemented by the Trump administration at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) targeting some of the food assistance programs the agency oversees. One such program, which buys items like dairy and meat products directly from farmers to distribute to food banks, lost $500 million for this year. Nolasco, who manages The Commons’ partnership with larger food banks that directly work with and distribute federal funds, said she’s experiencing the funding and supply issues “in a trickle.”

“Our meat freezers are empty. We have canned tuna. We have pouches of meat or stew and things like that to give out,” but the impact of the cuts, Nolasco said, “is already noticeable.”

Money is one of the challenges to keeping the pantry stocked. Another one is access.

“We’ve not had the same ability to get the quantity of food that we’ve had before with our food bank partners,” she said. “We have heard secondhand, from some of their drivers, that food is being stopped at the border, and so we’re not getting as much fresh produce and vegetables either.”

Immigration authorities also came to the organization once, trying to track down a volunteer. Nolasco and her community are now bracing for more impact as Trump’s administration stretches beyond a whirlwind first 100 days. 

“I think a lot of people are feeling that overwhelm and uncertainty,” she said. “I see that a lot in folks who come through our doors.”

New Mexico — including the 2nd Congressional District, which serves the southern half of the state, including Silver City — has emerged as a clear microcosm of how Trump’s policies have been reshaping the country since he took office on January 20.    

“New Mexico has one of the highest proportions of our population that works for the federal government, in addition to a population that utilizes government resources to survive,” said Rep. Melanie Stansbury, a Democrat who represents New Mexico’s 1st District. “We have hundreds of thousands of New Mexicans who are on Social Security, on Medicaid, food assistance, housing assistance, so people are genuinely frightened.”

New Mexico is also a political outlier —  a largely rural state that reliably votes Democratic, with levels of educational attainment below the national average and the state with the third highest poverty rate in the country. Of the 29 states where less than 35 percent of the population holds a college degree, it was the only one to back Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, according to the center-left think tank Third Way. 

Nearly 40 percent of New Mexicans get health care through Medicaid, which also covers 55 percent of births in the state, and one in five residents receive food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). In the 2nd Congressional District, over half of women and girls, 40 percent of women of reproductive age and around two-thirds of all children are covered by either Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), per an analysis by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. 

A perennial political battleground, the 2nd District encompasses a slice of the southern border, placing it at the epicenter of the Trump’s administration’s mass deportation agenda and its tariffs on foreign countries, like neighboring Mexico. It is represented by Rep. Gabe Vasquez, a Democrat who narrowly won reelection last year and spent the congressional recess holding town halls in his district and surveying constituents’ concerns and anxieties as Trump closed in on his first 100 days in office. 

“Folks don’t want to feel forgotten, and this current administration is not paying attention to rural communities like ours,” Vasquez said in an interview at a restaurant and brewery in downtown Silver City. “And then at the same time, with these volatile shifts in economic policy, whether it’s somebody’s retirement income or their Social Security benefits or their VA [Veterans Affairs] benefits, people are scared for their future. That’s just the reality of what rural New Mexicans are facing.” 

Vasquez, a former Las Cruces city council member, defeated former GOP Rep. Yvette Herrell in 2022 to flip the seat and became the first Democrat in nearly 50 years to win two consecutive terms in the district. He is one of just 13 House Democrats representing districts that Trump carried in 2024 and among an even smaller number whose districts are predominantly rural.

The federal spending cuts, coupled with Republicans’ plans to pass a massive tax and spending cut package, could be “the nail on the head for killing the rural community,” Vasquez said, due to rural communities’ reliance on federal programs. 

Southern New Mexico falls more under the radar than the more well-known destinations in the state like Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Taos — and its residents like it that way. The mountains carve a landscape that encompasses thousands of square miles of protected land and forests and is defined by sweeping desert vistas that stretch as far as the eye can see. At his town hall in Las Cruces, Vasquez joked that in Washington, “they all think that Texas is somehow connected to Arizona.”    

“I know the New Mexican dream and that is that I have a house, a truck and a dog,” Vasquez told the crowd. “It took me a while to get there, but that is truly one of the things that separates us from the rest of the country, is that we are happy to live our lifestyles. We are very comfortable in our own skin. We embrace our culture. We embrace being a border state.”

For the area’s residents, passing through Customs and Border Protection checkpoints is as routine as the ferocious dust storms that rip across farms and highways. 

But now, Southern New Mexico’s residents and community leaders are weathering a different kind of storm — one originating in Washington, D.C. Vasquez won his election in November by over four percentage points as Trump carried the district by less than two points. Now, he’s forcefully pushing back against what he sees as Trump’s overreaches. 

“Americans made a choice. They elected this president. But you know what? They didn’t elect a dictator,” Vasquez said to raucous applause at his town hall in Las Cruces.  

While many in the district split their tickets for Trump and Vasquez, the crowds at his town halls in Las Cruces and Silver City skewed liberal, older and highly civically engaged. 

People at both town halls were overwhelmingly supportive of Vasquez. They expressed lots of anxiety about the potential impact of Trump’s second term on their lives and the community. They shared concerns about federal job cuts, immigration and local issues like forest management and water resources, critical in this part of the state that’s mostly under extreme drought conditions as peak wildfire season approaches. Multiple constituents asked him what they could do now beyond waiting a long 18 months to vote in the 2026 midterm elections. 

Former Democratic state Rep. Bill McCamley stood outside the entrance to Vasquez’s Las Cruces town hall, handing out pro-Vasquez signs he had printed on cardstock. McCamley, who ran for Congress in the district in 2008 and for a statewide office in 2010, said the anxious energy on the left reminds him of the Tea Party movement that swept the right to power downballot during President Barack Obama’s administration. 

McCamley, whose father served for 25 years in the U.S. Army, said he’s worried about firings at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Albuquerque, which has been targeted by cuts. Amid cancellations of student visas and rising deportations, he’s also concerned for the foreign graduate students with whom he plays recreational soccer. 

In those small, tight-knit communities throughout the district, almost everyone knows someone or has a friend who has a friend who has been fired from a federal job, furloughed from a nonprofit that receives federal funds or lost a federally funded research grant. Residents are worried about the impacts of federal layoffs, particularly in the U.S. Forest Service and the firefighters it hires to mitigate wildfires in areas like the Gila National Forest, on the edge of Silver City, and the potential impact on tourism from reduced staffing and hours in national parks within the state. 

New Mexico’s 2nd District has been impacted by the elimination of at least 23 federal grants and leases, per the Center for American Progress. However, the full scope of the firings in the state’s federal workforce remains unclear. Both Vasquez and Stansbury — the top Democrat on the House Subcommittee on Delivering Government Efficiency, whose acronym is a deliberate match to the Department of Government Efficiency, a Trump initiative known as DOGE — said they’ve had difficulty nailing down an accurate tally of the firings. 

“This administration has been incredibly opaque in the way that they have decided to communicate with our office in regards to the scope of the federal firings and funding cuts,” Vasquez said. “We hear it directly from constituents, and the ones that we do hear it from are scared about any potential retributions for speaking out.”  

In addition to slashing government programs, Trump ran a campaign blaming and demonizing immigrants for a range of social ills and pledged to ramp up border security and execute mass deportations. That agenda is making its mark in the community. At his town halls, Vasquez fielded questions and concerns about deportations, immigration raids and the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man whom the Trump administration admits to have mistakenly sent to an El Salvadoran prison. 

People involved in local organizing and activism said they’re afraid of having their electronic devices seized at the border. Worse, they fear being removed without the ability to contact family members, as has happened to 48 people in New Mexico who were caught up in a series of immigration raids in March and remain unaccounted for. Janna Mintz, an attendee at Vasquez’s town hall in Silver City, cited a late February incident in which Customs and Border Protection agents stopped and boarded a school bus full of Las Cruces high school students on their way to a swim meet.

“We are in dire straits,” Mintz said. 

One day in mid-March, an agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) showed up at The Commons in plainclothes in search of a volunteer who wasn’t there at the time, Nolasco said. 

“I was really caught off guard,” she recalled. 

The ICE agent “asked repeatedly” for the person, said Nolasco, who said she held firm in her refusal to give out their information. The agent then asked to search The Commons’ property, Nolasco said. She said no. 

The agent left and hasn’t been back since, Nolasco said. But the visit sent a chill through her staff and volunteers. 

“This is not a criminal. This is not someone who’s done anything wrong. This is somebody who gives back to their community in multiple ways, and has been here since they were a child,” Nolasco said of the volunteer ICE was looking for. “And so it didn’t make sense. And then it was like, ‘OK, what do we do next?’ And I think there was just a lot of, ‘Is this person OK?’ It was just upsetting for everybody.”

Back in Vasquez’s Silver City town hall, Angela Salaiz said the first 100 days of Trump have felt like four years already and that “she’s not looking forward” to seeing how his administration continues to unfold. 

“It’s April, but it feels like it should be 2028,” she said. 

Caterina Di Palma, an acupuncturist, said she worried that Trump would try to seek a third term in office, which is prohibited by the 22nd Amendment, though Trump and some of his advisors have teased the idea. 

“We live in a fascist country,” she said. “I don’t see a way back.” 

The morning after the town hall in Las Cruces, Vasquez began his day addressing a group of soon-to-be-graduating seniors assembled in the gym at the high school in Deming, 35 miles north of the Mexico border. He then stopped at a local health clinic about five minutes away, operated by Presbyterian Medical Services. Rural health clinics, which already struggle to recruit providers and operate on tight margins, are set to be particularly hard hit if Congress cuts Medicaid funding or seeks to limit eligibility to the program as House Speaker Mike Johnson has suggested.  

From there, Vasquez visited Lordsburg, a small town of less than 2,500 in New Mexico’s boot heel, and its sole grocery store, Saucedo’s Super Market. Vasquez’s constituent services team had helped its owner and manager, Patrick Saucedo, fix a problem with the grocery store’s authorization to accept SNAP benefits, which was critical to its business.  

Like Nolasco, Saucedo takes his responsibility to feed and serve his community seriously. Without Saucedo’s, residents of Lordsburg would have to drive at least an hour to either Deming or Silver City for groceries and other basic necessities. 

While his SNAP issue was fixed, Saucedo said he is now being impacted by Trump’s tariffs on agricultural products from Mexico and other Central American countries.

“We can already tell that prices on produce itself have gone up,” Saucedo said. “People don’t always necessarily see that it’s a tariff thing, they think it’s us and that can affect our business, just as an overall picture. I definitely already see it, and I am fearful that they might continue to go up.”

In Silver City, Nolasco is heartened by how her community has stepped up to help The Commons navigate uncertain times. Despite all the challenges on the horizon, it’s “amazing,” she said, that there are 35 to 40 community members who regularly volunteer on top of their 40-hour workweeks. 

At the same time, she and other community leaders are bracing for donors pulling back from charitable giving and potential Trump-led attacks on the tax-exempt status of nonprofit groups. And she still sees stark political divides in the community that are now bearing real-life consequences. 

“We don’t, obviously, discriminate against anybody for any reason, including politics, which isn’t productive,” she said. “But I have seen folks who probably were on the other side and are in the food pantry line, and I know that they’re being negatively impacted. And I just hope there’s some realization that this wasn’t good for anyone.”