A migrant services center in Mexico near the Texas border where pro-Joe Biden flyers recently were posted also was home to a display opposing Donald Trump in 2020.
The executive director of Resource Center Matamoros has denied any political involvement by the nongovernmental organization. However, new images obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, in collaboration with the Muckraker news site, suggest otherwise. (The Heritage Foundation founded The Daily Signal in 2014.)
“The [pro-Biden] flyers were not only on the walls of port-a-potties but also on a table inside the shelter,” Heritage’s Oversight Project posted on X. “This is backed up with a sworn statement, under penalty of perjury.”
The Oversight Project obtained the sworn statement from the person who initially discovered the vote-for-Biden flyers.
As The Daily Signal previously reported, the flyers posted at the migrant services center in Mexico across the border from Brownsville, Texas, told illegal aliens: “Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States.”
The Oversight Project’s new thread on X uses images that it says are from the migrant center, including a large, campaign-style poster for Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris that uses photos of them.
The images also include a balloon display from 2020, after Biden’s victory over Trump in the November presidential election, with the words “Bye Trump.”
During the 2020 campaign, Biden’s wife Jill Biden, now the nation’s first lady, visited an organization allied with Resource Center Matamoros and known as Team Brownsville.
RCM’s website also says its founder and executive director, Gaby Zavala, partnered last November with Mike Benavides of Team Brownsville to brief members of Congress about the humanitarian crisis at the Mexico-U.S. border in Texas.
Translated from Spanish, the flyers posted at Resource Center Matamoros in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas said: “Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States. We need another four years of his term to stay open.”
Several members of Congress expressed outrage about the partisan flyers.
Heritage’s Oversight Project notes that left-leaning media outlets attacked initial reports on the vote-for-Biden posters.
“Despite their best efforts, the entirety of legacy media has failed to discredit what we discovered on video,” the Oversight Project posted on X.
“They have relied on a denial from the founder of Matamoras Resource Center, Gaby Zavala (pictured below) and claimed translation issues with the flyer that would be unusual for a native Spanish speaker,” the Oversight Project said in the post. “What they missed is that Zavala is not a native Spanish speaker.”
The post goes on to explain why Zavala isn’t.
It’s not clear whether Resource Center Matamoros authorized the flyers or did anything to remove them from the shelter for migrants. Zavala didn’t respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal for this report or previous ones.
But, she told The Associated Press that her organization doesn’t know who made the vote-for-Biden flyers and “does not encourage immigrants to register to vote or cast ballots in the U.S.”
The flyers, first discovered by Muckraker and shared with the Oversight Project, were found throughout Resource Center Matamoros, including on the walls of portable toilets, a video shows.
RCM provides information about legal and social services available for those on the Mexican side of the border who seek asylum in the United States. The nongovernmental organization also lobbies U.S. and Mexican lawmakers.
RCM and Zavala’s Asylum Seekers network “conducted lobbying efforts, but do not appear in lobbying disclosure act databases with the House and Senate,” the Oversight Project posted on X. “Additionally, their filed 990s say they did not lobby.”
The city of Matamoros borders Brownsville, where Biden spoke in February about the crisis of illegal immigration at the southern border that has grown since he became president in January 2021.
