The political ad hit television screens across South Texas like a closing argument. A uniformed officer, identified on screen as “Deputy Garcia” from Goliad County, stared into the camera and tore into Bobby Pulido, the Democratic challenger and Latin Grammy-winning singer, calling him “anti-cop” and accusing him of siding with criminals. The message was simple, visceral, and designed to make viewers trust the Republican congresswoman, Monica De La Cruz, because a man willing to risk his life wore a badge and stood beside her. But what viewers could not know, as The Post has learned, was that the man in that uniform was carrying something out of view: a recent employment record stained by allegations of sexual harassment and stalking. Deputy Zachary Garcia, it turns out, had been fired from the Wilson County Sheriff’s Office the previous year, after a female dispatcher ended their relationship and he reportedly refused to let go. The details, later unearthed by the local outlet the Hawk’s Eye, painted a troubling picture: dozens of phone calls in a two-day period, including ones with blocked caller ID; GPS data showing a marked patrol unit idling outside the woman’s home for over an hour; and his own admission that he had waited there while in uniform, despite no known calls in the area. An internal investigation also heard from a female supervisor who said that after she helped him carry groceries, he invited her inside, then encouraged her to come closer and sniff his cologne. Garcia denied that accusation, but the county concluded that he had committed sexual harassment against both women. The very authority his presence in the ad was meant to project now seemed hollow, a reminder that the people we elevate as symbols often carry complicated, troubling histories.
For a moment, Garcia was the perfect messenger for a campaign eager to paint Pulido as soft on crime. He was law enforcement, local, credible, and angry. But the backstory changed the optics entirely. Instead of an endorsement born of principle, the ad began to look like a political gamble with a man whose credibility had already been formally rejected by a previous employer. The timeline alone raised uncomfortable questions: De La Cruz’s campaign shot the ad in June, and public reports of Garcia’s past did not emerge until August, so the campaign could plausibly claim ignorance. But ignorance is not the same as vindication, and the image of a deputy who had allegedly used his patrol car to monitor an ex-girlfriend’s home now hung over the congresswoman’s message like a storm cloud. It also underscored how political operatives often seek out the most visually persuasive voices without digging deeply into the lives behind them. In this case, the voice belonged to a man who, according to records, had harassed a woman who merely wanted to move on. His own employer had decided that his behavior crossed a line. And yet, there he was, months later, being held up as a moral authority on who should represent South Texas in Congress.
The response from Goliad County came quickly and with a bristling defensiveness. Sheriff Roy Boyd did not hesitate to stand by his deputy, telling The Post that Garcia had been a valued member of the office since 2018 and a deputy since 2022, “well respected by our staff and local residents.” Boyd framed the criticism as partisan smearing, calling activists the ones attacking Garcia, and then aimed a much darker accusation at Pulido himself, invoking a child sex predator and a “corrupt celebrity.” The sheriff’s language was pointed: it was “unfortunate that partisan activists are smearing a man who risks his life to protect our community at the behest of a corrupt celebrity who endangered it by bringing a child sex predator around children and families.” He added, “We will not be intimidated,and we fully support Deputy Garcia’s First Amendment right to speak his mind.” It was a forceful, almost defiant defense, one that treated Garcia’s past as irrelevant to his right to endorse a candidate. But it also revealed how deeply the campaign had become intertwined with the darkest corners of both men’s lives. The sheriff’s rhetoric effectively transformed a local deputy’s employment record into a weapon in a larger cultural and political war, where loyalty matters more than scrutiny and where the worst allegations against an opponent are considered fair game. Whether Boyd knew all the details of Garcia’s dismissal is unclear, but his willingness to dismiss them as “smears” suggested a worldview in which the messenger’s past is less important than the target’s sins.
And in this case, the target had plenty of sins to answer for, at least in the eyes of the Republican campaign.
The race itself had already become a brutal, no-holds-barred fight, rated as a toss-up by the Cook Political Report. De La Cruz’s campaign had been trying to highlight Pulido’s old social media posts in which he complained about law enforcement, including one where he fumed that half the officers he encountered were courteous, even when ticketing him, but the others were “abusive a–holes.” To the campaign, that was evidence Pulido was fundamentally hostile to the men and women in uniform. But the congresswoman’s team went further, pointing to Pulido’s relationship with Frankie Caballero, his former longtime bandmate who had been convicted in 2014 of sexually assaulting an 8-year-old girl. The Post had previously reported that Pulido toured with Caballero after his four-year prison stint, and the campaign manager, James Shook, hammered the point home: “Congresswoman De La Cruz stands with the brave men and women who keep South Texas safe. Everything in that ad is true,” he said. “If Bobby Pulido doesn’t like cops calling him out for bringing a serial pedophile around little kids, then he shouldn’t have brought a serial pedophile around little kids.” The National Republican Congressional Committee’s spokesman, Christian Martinez, echoed the attack with even less restraint, calling Pulido a “depraved scumbag” and accusing him of calling officers “abusive assholes” while looking “the other way as his friend molested children.” It was a relentless barrage, designed to define Pulido as morally rotten before he could define himself.
Pulido’s team, predictably, fought back with equal ferocity. They vehemently disputed the characterization of his involvement with Caballero, insisting that “Bobby was never made aware of Caballero’s sex offender registration and would never knowingly associate with anyone with that kind of history.” In a statement, his campaign manager added, “Bobby extends his deepest sympathies and support to all of the victims involved.” But the counterattack did not stop at denial; it went on the offensive against De La Cruz herself, dragging her ex-husband, Juan Gabriel Hernandez, into the spotlight. Hernandez had been charged in 2022 with assault of a peace officer or judge and impeding breath or circulation, eventually pleading guilty to the assault charge and receiving five years of community supervision. Pulido’s ad seized on that record, citing Hernandez’s accusations against De La Cruz and claiming she had “a restraining order filed against her for child abuse.” The truth, as is often the case in divorce wars, was more complicated: there had been a temporary restraining order issued against De La Cruz during a bitter custody and property battle, one that featured a fight for control of her house. But that order had ended, and the court had never substantiated any of those abuse claims. Yet nuance rarely survives a thirty-second ad, and by the time the facts caught up with the accusation, the damage was already done. Voters were left to sort through competing narratives, each side cherry-picking the most damning details, each side insisting that its own sins were irrelevant because the other side’s sins were worse.
In the end, this is not really a story about a deputy’s past or a singer’s unfortunate associations; it is a story about what political campaigns are willing to do when an election is close enough to be decided by a few thousand votes. The ad featuring Garcia was a calculated attempt to weaponize one man’s badge against another man’s past, but it backfired into a broader cycle of accusation and counter-accusation. Now, voters in South Texas must decide whose history matters more: Pulido’s friendships and angry words about police, or De La Cruz’s decision to elevate a cop with a documented harassment recordand her own chaotic divorce history. There are no clean hands here, only degrees of stain, and the people caught in the middle are ordinary voters trying to figure out who actually represents their values. The deputy who stood in that ad, with his polished uniform and stern expression, may have believed every word he said, but his presence now raises more questions than it answers. The congresswoman who approved the ad may have genuinely believed she was standing with law enforcement, but the revelation forces voters to ask whether she vetted her messenger or simply borrowed his credibility. And Pulido, for all his protestations, must live with the fact that he once shared a stage with a man convicted of harming a child, no matter how sincerely he claims ignorance. Perhaps the only honest takeaway is that campaigns, like people, are messy, flawed, and capable of great self-deception. In a toss-up race, every attack ad is a kind of Rorschach test, revealing not just the target’s weaknesses, but the attacker’s desperation. And this time, the inkblot is tinged with the stories of women who accused a deputy of harassment, a child whose life was shattered by violence, and two politicians willing to use both as fuel for their ambitions. What remains, when the ads stop airing and the votes are counted, are the questions voters will have to live with: Does a candidate’s choice of allies define them?? Does a past mistake, however grave, disqualify someone from public service?? And in a race where every side has something to hide, how do we recognize the truth when we see it??
