Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is leaning into a bubbling foreign policy dispute, accusing the Mexican government of violating a 1944 treaty requiring water shipments to U.S. farmers.
In an interview, Cruz advocated for his legislation placing sanctions on Mexico — including cutting U.S. aid by 15% — if the country continued to fail in its agreement to transport water to struggling south Texas farmers.
“South Texas farmers are removing thousands and thousands of acres from production,” Cruz told us. “Farm workers are losing their jobs.”
The issue has significantly escalated recently, resulting in the State Department’s announcement last week that it was withholding U.S. shipments of water to Mexico for the first time. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins is stepping in too, having traveled to the Rio Grande Valley last week to announce $280 million in block grant funding for Texas state officials to distribute to local farmers.
Cruz applauded Rollins’ efforts but insisted that “the real answer is not relief checks. The real answer is to get our damn water.”
At the heart of the matter is a 1944 treaty between the United States and Mexico, that requires Mexico to provide south Texas with 350,000 acre-feet of water per year over a five-year cycle. Per Cruz, the Mexican government “is badly in arrears” and “currently owes south Texas 1.3 million acre feet of water.”
In Cruz’s view, Mexican non-compliance with the treaty was allowed to flourish during the Biden administration “because Democrats simply didn’t give a damn about the south Texas farmers whose farms were going out of business.” But the Trump administration’s tough posture toward Mexico — ranging from tariffs to anti-fentanyl efforts to immigration — is welcome news to Republicans like Cruz.
“[Mexican] President Sheinbaum both respects and fears President Trump,” Cruz said. “I have every confidence Mexico is going to meet its treaty obligation, because if they do not, the Trump administration is going to utilize the leverage they have to force them to do so.”
Mum on Cornyn: At the end of our interview, we took the opportunity to get Cruz’s thoughts on a separate Texas issue: The burgeoning primary threat Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) faces from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Cruz wouldn’t answer whether he would stay out of the primary or get involved in some capacity, telling us he wanted to focus on the water dispute.
