A former spokesperson for District of Columbia (D.C.) Mayor Muriel Bowser has left the Democrats and joined the Republican Party, citing high levels of immigration and seeing people "struggling to make ends meet."
Victor Jimenez had served as lead public information officer at the Mayor's Office of Community Affairs and spoke to Fox News' Tucker Carlson on Wednesday about his decision.
Jimenez said he had voted for Republican Glenn Youngkin in the recent Virginia gubernatorial election in which Youngkin scored an upset victory against Democrat and former Governor Terry McAuliffe.
Carlson introduced Jimenez by showing a clip of him speaking to Telemundo in Spanish and saying: "I believe that Biden turned me into a Republican."
The Fox News host told Jimenez that switching parties was "not a small decision."
"It's not a small decision," Jimenez said, explaining he had been a public information officer at the Mayor's Office on Latino Affairs and then the Office on Community Affairs.
"I had to leave," Jimenez said, prompting Carlson to ask him why.
"The reason I switched parties is because of everything that's going on in the country right now," Jimenez said. "We see, you know, immigration through the roof right now and that's affecting a lot of Hispanic families in my home state of Virginia and those people who are already struggling with making ends meet."
"If you look at the southern border, we have people who - thousands of people who are just waiting there," Jimenez continued.
"And I'm not saying we don't have good people try to come into the country with good intentions, but we also have bad people coming into the country with bad intentions. People with illegal guns, with illegal drugs and people who are running from their law enforcement in their own country, so we don't know exactly what they're doing here."
Jimenez added that "Biden is completely destroying the economy right now and people can feel it in their pockets and in their communities," citing Hispanic communities in particular.
Carlson suggested that the White House believes anyone who speaks Spanish supports "open borders" and Jimenez replied by discussing his own heritage.
"Me, for example, being Hispanic and also Black, I should be Democrat by default," Jimenez said. "But I'm going against their narrative and I feel like right now everything is crumbling for the Democrats."
"We saw in Virginia a couple of weeks ago, the beginning of the end with the victory of Glenn Youngkin, which I voted for," Jimenez said. "And I feel in 2022 - next year - we're gonna see more of that."
Uncommon Knowledge
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About the writer
Darragh Roche is a U.S. News Reporter based in Limerick, Ireland. His focus is reporting on U.S. politics. He has ... Read more
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