Lina Hidalgo Storms Out

It should have been a good day for Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo. After narrowly surviving a bruising reelection campaign, the 31-year-old rising Democratic star had just won a second term as the chief executive of Texas’s most populous county. Her party had picked up a seat on the commissioners court, and she would now preside over a 4–1 supermajority, paving the way for the sweeping progressive agenda she had promised voters. But on January 2, 2023, as dozens of recently elected officials were sworn in at Houston’s NRG Center, Hidalgo was sitting in a black Chevy Tahoe parked outside, fuming over what she perceived as an insult.

Inside the convention hall, several hundred of the officials’ colleagues, friends, and family members had gathered to watch the swearing-in ceremony. The members of the commissioners court had been cautioned to save any remarks for the reception in order to avoid triggering the state’s Open Meetings Act, which requires prior public notice if a quorum of a governmental body is gathered to discuss business. But Hidalgo, who was on vacation in California while the event was being planned, was convinced that there was a plot to prevent her from speaking. “Somebody had decided they were going to railroad me,” she recently told me.

Determined to deliver a speech, Hidalgo had worked out a plan to crash the ceremony. As it neared its conclusion, she and one of her bodyguards climbed out of the Tahoe and made their way backstage. Pride Chorus Houston was wrapping up a spirited performance of Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” when the five-foot-two judge suddenly appeared at the lectern, startling audience members who were already filing out of the hall.

Shouting to be heard over the music, Hidalgo repeatedly demanded that the microphone be turned back on. Finally, the judge’s voice boomed out across the room. “Is it working, folks? Can you hear me in the back?” Hands trembling as she held her prepared remarks, Hidalgo launched into a speech. She complained that she had been “cut out of the program.”

“I think people are forgetting that I call things out as they are!” she yelled. “That’s why people support me. So don’t mess with me!” She spoke for nearly ten minutes. At one point she paused, apparently overcome with emotion. One of the newly sworn-in district judges walked over and gave her a long hug.

Three years later, Hidalgo, who has announced that she will not seek a third term, remains proud of her defiant entrance. “People wanted to hear from me,” she insisted when we talked in December. But several audience members told me that her diatribe cast a pall over what should have been a celebratory moment, foreshadowing three years of feuds, recriminations, and policy defeats. “The coalition that was behind her in 2022—labor, progressive donors, Democratic activists—they’re not behind her anymore,” said Lillie Schechter, the chair of the Harris County Democratic Party from 2017 to 2021. “The national funders who were really excited about her, they don’t seem to be behind her anymore.”

Many have portrayed Hidalgo’s fall from grace as the story of a naive idealist thwarted by state Republicans and Houston’s cynical political establishment. But over the course of interviews with more than a dozen of Hidalgo’s colleagues, staff members, and advisers, I heard a different story—of an ambitious politician who was undone not just by outside forces but by her own overbearing leadership style and reluctance to compromise. She also struggled with what she acknowledged was a mental health crisis.

After Hidalgo’s reelection, “there was this really strong hope that things would get better, that things would operate a bit more smoothly,” said one of her former staffers, who requested anonymity in order to speak freely. “And it came crashing down really quickly.”

In October I sat down across from Hidalgo in her expansive ninth-floor office overlooking downtown Houston. The judge wore a stylish pantsuit whose color matched her signature curly black hair. Early in her tenure, her bob attracted derisive comparisons to Dora the Explorer from her many haters on social media. Hidalgo is accustomed to being underestimated because of her appearance. “I’m younger than a lot of politicians, I’m a woman, and I don’t really fix my hair,” she said with a laugh. “I wish I were taller, and I’m just not . . . so whenever I walk into a new room, I try to very quickly demonstrate that I’m quick, and I’m smart, and you’re not going to play around.”

Even her critics tend to concede Hidalgo’s intelligence and drive. Born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1991, at the height of the country’s drug war, she grew up hearing stories from her grandfather about the killings of political dissidents. Her family fled to Peru when she was five, then went on to Mexico.

When Hidalgo was thirteen, her family moved to Texas, where her father, a mechanical engineer, had found a job at a recycling company. She attended Seven Lakes High School, in the Houston suburb of Katy, and then went to Stanford University to study political science—a choice inspired by her experiences growing up in politically dysfunctional countries. She earned her degree and her U.S. citizenship in the same year. After graduating, Hidalgo received a fellowship to work overseas before returning to Houston and volunteering for the Texas Civil Rights Project, a left-leaning legal advocacy group, where she met her future husband, attorney David James.

In the hope of pursuing a career in international development, Hidalgo applied and gained admission to a prestigious joint-degree program offered by Harvard Kennedy School and the New York University School of Law. But in November 2016, only a few months into her second year at Harvard, Donald Trump’s election scrambled her plans. Soon after he won office, she attended a talk by Univision anchorman Jorge Ramos, one of Trump’s frequent antagonists. “He had a meeting with those of us who were of Hispanic descent,” Hidalgo recalled. “I said, ‘What do we do now? We’re f—ed.’ And he said, ‘You need to figure it out. You’re at the Kennedy School.’ ”

Hidalgo asked herself how she could make a difference. “I was like, ‘What can I do to help protect American democracy?’ ” She decided to take a leave from graduate school to run for office. “And then it was a matter of, okay, which office?” One of her Harvard professors recommended running for a position that the incumbent had won by less than ten percentage points.

After surveying the available races, Hidalgo ignored that advice and entered the contest for county judge, the top position in Harris County. The incumbent had won by more than 65 points in 2014. She didn’t know much about the job. Its very name provokes confusion: The role has nothing to do with law courts, and you don’t have to be a lawyer to hold it. The county judge presides over the five-member commissioners court, which oversees budgets exceeding $5 billion. The judge also serves as the county’s director of emergency management, leading the response during severe-weather events and other disasters. Otherwise, the position comes with little direct power.

But as Hidalgo began researching the role, she saw an opportunity to set policy for one of America’s most important counties. With a population of around five million, Harris County is larger than 26 states and has a GDP of well more than $500 billion. Hidalgo had never so much as attended a commissioners court meeting (she says she had watched some virtually), but the office seemed ripe for the picking.

Despite the county’s growing Democratic tilt—Hillary Clinton beat Trump there by twelve points in 2016—the position was held by a moderate Republican, former state Representative Ed Emmett, who had been in office for more than a decade. He was up for reelection in 2018, yet, as in his prior campaign, no prominent Democrat had stepped up to challenge him. When Hidalgo’s sole primary opponent dropped out of the race shortly after entering, the 26-year-old graduate student found herself the county’s Democratic standard-bearer.

To Harris County insiders, the prospect of her dethroning Emmett seemed remote. The Republican had recently won bipartisan praise for steering the county through Hurricane Harvey and had secured an endorsement from prominent Democratic state Representative Garnet Coleman. “Everybody kept saying the race was not winnable,” Hidalgo told me. “People said, ‘He’s a [political] chameleon, he can’t be beat.’ ”

Hidalgo sought advice from an array of local politicos, including Democratic Commissioner Rodney Ellis, a longtime Houston power broker who, like Emmett, had served in the Texas Legislature. Ellis knew little about Hidalgo when they first met, in 2017. “I thought she was very interesting, very idealistic, very easy to talk to,” he told me. “But I thought it was going to be a real uphill battle.”

At her political events, which were often sparsely attended, Hidalgo argued that Emmett was behind the times on criminal-justice reform and flood control. But her inexperience showed. During a meeting with the editorial board of the Houston Chronicle, she declared that the county should create an online map showing whether residents lived in the floodplain. Such a map already existed.

A month before the election, the Chronicle issued a full-throated endorsement of Emmett, praising his nonpartisan leadership and calling him a “steadfast pillar in our state’s ongoing political gale.” The editorial board wrote that while Hidalgo had demonstrated a commitment to “caring about the most vulnerable among us,” she lacked government experience and showed a “disregard for the reality of how political relationships define the boundaries of possible policy.”

That assessment of Hidalgo’s weaknesses would prove prescient. But in a midterm dominated by anti-Trump backlash, Harris County voters seemed less interested in the names on their ballots than in sending a message to the president. In the final major Texas election that allowed straight-ticket
voting, around half a million county residents voted for Democrats all the way down the line. Although Emmett outperformed Ted Cruz, the Republican at the top of the ticket, he still lost to Hidalgo by 1.6 points. Even seven years later he struggles to process the defeat. “She had no life experience and no contacts in Harris County,” he told me. “She was in the right place at the right time.”

Hidalgo’s victory attracted national attention. “A 27-year-old Latina stunned the political establishment,” The Atlantic declared. The New York Times and NBC News ran stories portraying her as a harbinger of Texas’s changing
demographics. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Harris County Republican Party dismissed the election as a fluke, calling Hidalgo “absolutely and indisputably unqualified for this position.”

Her detractors thought that she was a lightweight, her admirers that she was a generational leader. In time, she would prove both sides wrong.

By her own admission, Hidalgo faced a steep learning curve in her first months in office. She leaned heavily on her two fellow Democratic commissioners, Ellis and newly elected Adrian Garcia, a former sheriff and Houston City Council member. For the first time in decades the party would hold a majority on the court. During the transition, the three holed up in an office at the Esperson Building, in downtown Houston, to discuss policy and map out strategy.

The commissioners court had historically focused on the basics of governing a large urban county: law enforcement, infrastructure, and emergency management. But Hidalgo urged her colleagues to think bigger. Why couldn’t the court play a role in alleviating poverty? In providing early-childhood education? In promoting social justice? The commissioners put together an ambitious agenda aimed at aligning the county’s budget with their progressive values. “We had a good six weeks where the three of us were meeting almost every day,” Ellis said. “We got to be pretty close.” (Hidalgo recalls meeting only a few times.)

Taking office just a year and a half after Hurricane Harvey, Hidalgo made an early priority of disaster prevention. Harris County voters had recently approved a $2.5 billion bond, which had been championed by Emmett and was intended to fund flood-mitigation projects across greater Houston. But Hidalgo and her colleagues had their own ideas about how to spend the money. They developed a funding model that prioritized projects according to several factors including income, not just a property’s vulnerability to flooding.

The effort was praised by local progressives. But construction was delayed—seven years later, the county has completed only 214 of the 424 planned projects—and the changes created resentment in more affluent neighborhoods that also suffered from flooding. Former Houston City Council member Dave Martin, who represented the wealthy suburb of Kingwood, told The New York Times that the Democratic commissioners “want the money for their neighborhoods. They don’t care about ours.” Emmett told me that Hidalgo has neglected flood control in favor of her liberal social agenda.

Hidalgo was soon confronted with a series of other disasters, both natural and man-made. A few months after she took office, a massive explosion erupted at an industrial storage facility in the Houston suburb of Deer Park. The fire burned for three days, spewing a black cloud of hazardous chemicals that was visible for miles. To inform county residents, roughly one-third of whom speak Spanish at home, Hidalgo held a series of bilingual press conferences with local officials. She assured the public that the air was safe to breathe, reflecting the consensus among environmental officials at the time, although a study later found that residential neighborhoods close to the plant experienced elevated levels of benzene for more than two weeks after the fire.

For many Texans, these television appearances were their first introduction to Harris County’s new executive. Some viewers were apoplectic. “This is the United States,” declared Mark Tice, a Republican commissioner in neighboring Chambers County. “Speak English.” Tice later apologized for his remarks, but he wasn’t alone in his scorn. On social media, posters mocked the county judge’s youth, appearance, and ethnicity.

To Texas progressives, these attacks only served to bolster Hidalgo’s image as a pugnacious underdog standing up for marginalized communities. But her growing profile put Harris County in the crosshairs of state Republicans who were eager to clamp down on Democrat-controlled urban areas.

A pattern emerged. Harris County would unveil a new policy, only for state Republicans to strike it down. In 2019 the county reached a settlement in a class action lawsuit that required it to eliminate bail for most misdemeanor defendants. Hidalgo had campaigned on these reforms. In response, the Legislature passed laws requiring bail for a broader array of criminal offenses. (The settlement also infuriated Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, a tough-on-crime Democrat, sparking a long-running feud with Hidalgo.) In 2024 the commissioners rolled out a guaranteed-income pilot program that would provide $500 per month to low-income residents. State Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the county, and the commissioners decided to cancel it. Last November, Paxton sued the county again, this time for providing free legal assistance to immigrants, which he called “evil and wicked.”

Texas Republicans seized on Hidalgo—a young, left-wing Latina—as their perfect foil. At the 2022 funeral of a Harris County deputy, according to Hidalgo, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick told the judge to “sit down and shut up.” Michael Berry, a right-wing Houston radio host, dubbed the judge Comandante Hidalgo. Senator John Cornyn called her a “crooked progressive.” The Houston Landing described such attacks as symptoms of “Hidalgo Derangement Syndrome.”

Throughout the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the battle between
Hidalgo and the state escalated. To her supporters, Hidalgo’s assertive leadership during the public health emergency marked her finest moment. To her opponents, the crisis seemed to reveal the judge’s drive for power and her intolerance of dissent. At the time, few realized the toll that the pandemic took on Hidalgo’s mental health. Behind the iron resolve she showed in public, the county judge was privately struggling.

Hidalgo was one of the first Texas officials to recognize the looming threat of a pandemic. As COVID-19 began to spread across the country in March 2020 she sought advice from Dow Constantine, her counterpart in King County, Washington, where some of the first U.S. cases of the virus had been confirmed. She also called Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, who had overseen the response to an Ebola outbreak in 2014. Jenkins told Hidalgo to ask her public health department for its pandemic plan. When Hidalgo finally tracked it down, she was stunned by its lack of detail. “It was like, ‘Figure out a plan for county employees. Figure out a policy for the public.’ Stuff like that.”

She assembled an informal advisory council led by University of Texas Health Science Center epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina. On March 3, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, the city’s largest annual event, kicked off at NRG Stadium. The twenty-day spectacle was expected to attract around 2.5 million people. Hidalgo assured locals that “the overall risk of COVID-19 to the general public within our counties remains low at this time.”

On the second day of the rodeo, a resident of Fort Bend County, south of Houston, tested positive for the virus. He had recently returned from a river cruise in Egypt and was the area’s first confirmed case of COVID-19. “That was the ‘oh s—’ moment,” said Rafael Lemaitre, Hidalgo’s communications director at the time. “We realized that this was going to take up the rest of our working days for the foreseeable future.” On March 11, Hidalgo and Houston’s mayor, Sylvester Turner, made the joint decision to shut down the rodeo. It was one of the first major American events to be canceled, making national news.

At first, Hidalgo and Governor Greg Abbott appeared to be in lockstep regarding virus response. Eight days after the rodeo announcement, Abbott issued an executive order closing schools, bars, and gyms. Five days later, Hidalgo closed all nonessential businesses and ordered Harris County residents to stay home. Abbott quickly followed suit by ordering a statewide lockdown. Hidalgo’s April 22 mask mandate was followed by a similar order from Abbott in July. “She had spoken to Governor Abbott before, with storms and things like that,” Lemaitre recalled. “They’d have cordial conversations, and he would ask if she needed anything. They put politics aside.”

That comity collapsed during the 2020 presidential race. To keep voters safe, Hidalgo and county clerk Chris Hollins announced plans to mail every resident an absentee ballot, to place ballot drop boxes across the county, and to keep some polling places open 24 hours a day. But with Trump complaining about a rigged contest, Paxton sued the county, charging that the effort “undermines our election security and integrity.” State judges ultimately limited Harris County to a single drop box and curtailed its attempt to mail out ballots.

In March 2021, as the pandemic response became increasingly polarized, the governor lifted his mask mandate and his order limiting occupancy for businesses. He followed that with orders barring local mask mandates and vaccine requirements. Meanwhile, Hidalgo held the line. Even as local infection rates started to decline, she kept the county between moderate and severe levels of readiness until February 2022, citing the risk of the virus’s omicron variant. Ultimately around 11,700 people in Harris County died of COVID-19, a fatality rate of some 230 residents per 100,000—significantly lower than the state’s overall rate of roughly 300 per 100,000. Hidalgo’s aggressive response to the pandemic earned her regular appearances on MSNBC, further enhancing her national profile. 

It also led to the greatest crisis of her tenure. In February 2021, Harris County requested bids for a contract to promote vaccines to communities in which inoculation rates were lagging. After evaluating the proposals, the court voted 4–1 to award an $11 million contract to Elevate Strategies, a data and analytics firm that was run out of owner Felicity Pereyra’s apartment.

Pereyra, a former Democratic strategist, had briefly worked on the unsuccessful 2015 mayoral campaign of Garcia, the Harris County commissioner. Elevate won the contract over a roughly $7 million bid from the University of Texas Health Science Center—even though a county committee had assigned a higher score to the UT bid in a preliminary evaluation. Hidalgo would later argue that UT had botched a previous contract, while Elevate had successfully executed a county-funded campaign to encourage participation in the 2020 census.

Ogg, the Democratic DA who had clashed with Hidalgo over bail reform, asked the Texas Rangers to open a criminal investigation into potential bid rigging. They discovered communication between Pereyra and senior members of Hidalgo’s staff before the county issued its request for proposals, which prosecutors alleged may have given Elevate an unfair advantage. They also found text messages from Hidalgo’s staffers denigrating UT’s bid. “We need to slam the door shut on UT and move on,” chief of staff Alex Triantaphyllis had texted a colleague.

In 2022, Ogg secured indictments against Triantaphyllis and two other staffers on charges of record tampering and misuse of official information. “It was like a bomb went off in the office,” Lemaitre said. Hidalgo, who was in the midst of her reelection campaign against well-funded Republican nominee Alexandra del Moral Mealer, accused the district attorney of pursuing a political vendetta.

Rather than throwing her staffers under the bus, as many public officials might have, Hidalgo gave a series of interviews to defend them and deny the allegations. She said she expected Ogg to indict her next. “I had to be prepared for a knock on the door in the middle of the night,” she told me. “I had a dress that I could easily throw on, I had some lipstick, and I had a list of things to grab.”

She was never indicted. After Ogg lost her 2024 reelection campaign, she referred the criminal cases to Paxton, who ultimately dropped all the charges against Hidalgo’s staff members. Triantaphyllis, who had hired former Paxton defense attorney Dan Cogdell, accepted a pretrial intervention deal that required him to complete ten hours of community service. He did not admit any wrongdoing.

Staff members told me that they appreciated Hidalgo’s loyalty but noticed that her behavior grew increasingly erratic under the strain of the criminal investigation and the reelection bid. She started spending less time in the office, canceled campaign events, and regularly criticized subordinates. “People were having breakdowns just trying to get through the day with her,” the staffer who requested anonymity said.

Hidalgo acknowledged that she could be a tough manager, explaining that many of her staff members were inexperienced. “I was demanding, and they would need it,” she told me. “I would get frustrated. So when your boss is disappointed in everything you do, that’s not a good feeling.”

Though Hidalgo prevailed over Mealer, she won by less than two points. (By comparison, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Beto O’Rourke won Harris County by more than nine.) In a grateful but at times combative victory speech, Hidalgo lashed out at Ogg and slammed unnamed Democratic politicians she accused of abandoning her campaign. “There were some elected officials that weren’t there because they didn’t think it was convenient—those in my own party that wouldn’t do an ad for me, that wouldn’t have a fundraiser, that wouldn’t help me when it got tough,” she said. “And, oh, I remember who they are.”

Hidalgo’s attack on fellow Democrats, followed a couple of months later by her unscheduled speech at the swearing-in ceremony, set the tone for an even more acrimonious second term. Now presiding over a supermajority on the commissioners court, the judge seemed to eschew the collaborative approach that had marked the beginning of her tenure. Instead she appeared to interpret her narrow victory as a mandate to pursue even more ambitious policies.

She was ready to lead. Her Democratic colleagues were increasingly unwilling to follow.

Immediately after her reelection, Hidalgo seemed poised to wield unchecked power. During her first term, the two Republican county commissioners successfully blocked a proposed tax rate by boycotting meetings and denying the court a quorum. In 2021 the court voted along party lines to adopt a redistricting plan aimed at giving Democrats a boycott-proof supermajority. In the 2022 election a redrawn district was won by Lesley Briones, a Yale-educated lawyer from a middle-class Laredo family. Hidalgo had voted to appoint Briones as a civil court judge in 2019. As a young, progressive Latina, she seemed like she would be a natural ally to Hidalgo.

But the new commissioner was not, in the county judge’s view, the team player she’d expected. Hidalgo came to believe that Briones was part of the plot to keep her from speaking at the swearing-in ceremony. Briones’s office also poached many of the judge’s top staff. Hidalgo seemed to view these moves as a betrayal. “My top regret [is] believing somebody’s words when they told me they were committed to community and . . . truth, and appointing that person as a judge,” Hidalgo said during September budget discussions. “And then redrawing a district for that person so they could win.” She later announced her support for a primary challenge to Briones.

The judge was also clashing with Commissioner Adrian Garcia. Because he had used his campaign funds to help pay for the swearing-in ceremony, Hidalgo blamed him—along with Pat Strong, a veteran Democratic strategist who had organized the event—for the decision to ban speeches. (Briones and Garcia declined to comment for this story. Strong called Hidalgo’s allegation of a plot to keep her from speaking “completely untrue.”)

Garcia, a former Houston police officer, had built a reputation as a political centrist. During Hidalgo’s first term, he had mostly voted with his Democratic colleagues. When Briones joined the court, he seized the opportunity to form a moderate voting bloc. 

As she watched her power slip away, Hidalgo’s frustrations with her colleagues spilled into public view. At a commissioners court meeting in June 2023, Hidalgo called out Garcia for talking over her. “You take a liking to interrupting the women, so let me finish,” she snapped. At the same meeting, she accused the other commissioners of being in league with Ogg. “I don’t know what the f— she’s threatened you with,” she said. She refused to apologize for the profanity, accusing her Republican critics of having a different standard for women.

Around this time, Hidalgo told me, her long-standing mental health struggles reached a crisis point. “I started getting really suicidal,” she said. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to live like this. It feels horrible.’ ” A few weeks after the meeting where she used profanity, Hidalgo flew to Ohio and checked herself into the Lindner Center of Hope, a nationally renowned mental health treatment facility. 

“It was not a difficult decision,” Hidalgo recalled. “As soon as my psychiatrist said there was a spot for me at the Lindner Center, I felt like, ‘Thank God, I’m going to survive.’ ” Hidalgo’s staff, exhausted from her mood swings, overwhelmingly supported the decision. The treatment was paid for by a friend and by her longtime boyfriend, David James, who was working as a personal injury and civil rights attorney.

In a letter to Harris County residents announcing that she was taking a temporary leave, Hidalgo wrote that she had been diagnosed with clinical
depression. Ellis, the longest-tenured member of the body, would preside over the court in her absence. Her public acknowledgement of the treatment won praise from most local officials.

The support wasn’t universal, however: In September, Mealer published an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle calling on the judge to either get back to work or resign. Michael Berry, the right-wing radio host, reportedly criticized the “puppeteers who installed her into a position that frightened her and led her to this.”

Hidalgo received seven weeks of treatment at Lindner, which she told me included daily classes on dealing with shame. “You know, the Brené Brown thing,” she said. Those meetings helped her shut out the constant drumbeat of criticism from Republicans. “So actually, it doesn’t touch me when people say these things. It’s like, yeah, whatever, call me unhinged.”

When she returned to Houston, in October 2024, she began attending therapy sessions every Thursday afternoon. She and James got married that December at Amanpulo, a luxury resort on a private island in the Philippines. The wedding was featured in Vogue, with glamour shots of Hidalgo posing in two bridal gowns, one designed by Romona Keveža and one by Chloe Dao.

Back in office, Hidalgo quickly resumed sparring with her colleagues. In late 2024 the court decided to move its regular meetings from Tuesday to Thursday, a reaction to staffers’ complaints that they had been forced to work weekends. Hidalgo opposed the move, pointing out that it would conflict with her therapy sessions. This issue came to a head in May 2025 when Hidalgo asked that her colleagues hold a vote until she got back from an appointment. They balked. “If we lose an hour without doing anything productive, it really disrupts my schedule,” Garcia said. Hidalgo accused him of picking on her because of her illness. “People can see your behavior, and frankly, I think it’s embarrassing,” she said.

Even to some of Hidalgo’s supporters, it was the judge’s behavior that had become embarrassing—and counterproductive. After all, she needed votes from Garcia and Briones to achieve her policy goals. “If she would take half the amount of energy she’s using to fight Democrats and point it toward Republicans, I think she would be more successful,” said Lillie Schechter, the former county-party chair.

I asked Hidalgo what she hoped to accomplish by attacking her colleagues. “There’s time for compromise, and there’s time for advocacy,” she said. “Advocacy will get you places sometimes. Not always. But if it’s about telling the truth and being labeled whatever, I’m going to go with the truth. And I think that’s why I have the support of the people.”

Hidalgo does appear to remain popular within her party. A July 2025
University of Houston poll found that 66 percent of Harris County Democrats have a favorable opinion of her. But the judge’s growing isolation on the commissioners court resulted in a series of high-profile policy defeats. 

Her political weakness was on full display during last year’s budget negotiations. The court was faced with replacing the $915 million windfall that the county received in 2021 through President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act. The commissioners court had used the money to fund dozens of initiatives, including building public housing, providing financial assistance to poor families, hiring extra judges, and improving health care.

The court had also allotted $150 million to launch an early-childhood education pilot program, one of Hidalgo’s top priorities. She called one component of the program, which funded around eight hundred preschool spots for children between the ages of zero and four, “an absolute game changer.” Tom Ramsey, the sole Republican on the commissioners court, warned that ARPA money would run out in 2026, after which the county would have to find a new funding source. Hidalgo dismissed his concern, confident that the court would find a way to keep the program going once the initial funding proved that it worked.

But late last summer, with the county facing a large deficit, a majority of the commissioners voted to cut county services by as much as 10 percent per department. The loss of ARPA money put the early-childhood education program at risk. Unless the court found an alternate funding source, the initiatives would shut down by the end of 2026. Hidalgo hired former lobbyist Jesse Ayala, who had experience in education policy, to help her team keep the program alive. They determined that the best shot at funding it was by asking Harris County residents to approve a modest property tax increase in the November election. But to put the referendum on the ballot, she’d first need to secure a majority vote from the commissioners court by early August.

Throughout the spring and summer, Ayala worked with Hidalgo’s staff to craft a proposal aimed at winning the support of at least two other commissioners. Hidalgo had originally hoped not just to save the program but to expand it. Ayala and other advisers persuaded her to jettison that more ambitious plan in favor of saving the core components: preschool spots for low-income children, funding for educators, and after-school and summer programs.

Ayala said Hidalgo did not consult her fellow commissioners about the proposal. “I think there was a sense of [her] trying to maintain ownership of this policy area and have it be a legacy issue,” he told me. He speculated that Hidalgo, perhaps having already decided not to run for reelection, wanted to cap off her time in office with a signature victory. Collaborating with the other commissioners, he said, would have meant sharing the credit. (Hidalgo’s team said the judge did consult with Commissioner Ellis, and that she could not speak directly with the other commissioners without violating the Open Meetings Act. They said her staff met with other aides to collaborate on the proposal in her stead.)

Some commissioners said they first learned about the plan on July 16, when Hidalgo gave an interview to ABC 13 proposing a property tax increase that would cost voters an extra $10 per $100,000 of home value. Hidalgo’s office then issued the commissioners a three-page proposal, but in place of monetary figures there were X’s next to several budget items. It seemed like a rush job.

Garcia told the news site Chron that he had “zero conversation” with Hidalgo about the plan. “This is not the way you do it,” he said. “Just because the judge thinks she has an idea and thinks we ought to fall in line with it—that’s not government.” Ramsey also rejected the proposal. This meant Hidalgo would need the votes of both Ellis and Briones to take the proposal to voters.

On August 7, the deadline to approve the ballot initiative, the commissioners court met to vote on the idea. Hidalgo’s office had arranged for several dozen children from the early-education program to attend the meeting, hoping that their presence would persuade her colleagues to support the plan. The children and their chaperones took up several rows in the packed meeting room. 

When the agenda item came up, Ramsey announced his opposition to putting the initiative on the ballot. Garcia indicated that he was also against the measure. Ellis had previously told Hidalgo that he would vote yes only if it looked like it was going to pass. That left Briones with the deciding vote. As she began to state her decision, Hidalgo abruptly interjected.

“Kids, come on down!” Hidalgo said. “Let’s see if she says yes or no. Come on down over here. Come on, come on, come on. Because this is not about politics, this is about kids!”

Pandemonium erupted. Some audience members began whooping and clapping. The kids stayed in their seats. “Judge Hidalgo, part of education is respect,” Briones said, raising her voice to be heard over the noise. “This is in breach of the decorum rules. I have the floor to speak, and I deserve to be able to speak without being interrupted.”

After a parliamentarian reminded Hidalgo of the court’s rules against public demonstrations and excess noise, Briones announced that she would be voting no. “This proposal is two weeks old,” she said. Before passing a comparable plan in Travis County, she explained, commissioners there “spent two years working with subject matter experts.”

“Education is truth telling,” Hidalgo interrupted. “Don’t give kids this example of making things up. [Our program] has been going on for four years.”

“Excuse me, children are here. So you should please try to be respectful and focus on the work,” Briones continued. “The truth is, this half-baked proposal does not have robust stakeholder engagement, does not have a detailed program, does not have a detailed budget.”

Hidalgo repeatedly broke in to cite an eighty-page evaluation, which she said showed that the program had been running successfully for four years. Then she grew more belligerent, badgering Briones and egging on the children to approach the dais. At 11:51 a.m., nine minutes before the deadline for putting a question on the ballot, the judge abruptly called a ten-minute break and left the room. When court resumed, her seat was empty. Hidalgo briefly returned that afternoon, then departed for therapy. While she was gone, Briones, Garcia, and Ramsey voted to formally censure the judge for her disruptions. (Ellis, Hidalgo’s staunchest ally, was the lone “no” vote.)

On X, the Harris County Republican Party called Hidalgo’s display “unhinged” and wrote that “she’s spiraling and Harris County is paying the price.” Ayala told the Chronicle that he was “blindsided” by the judge’s tactics. “It’s one thing for [the kids] to be a visual; it’s another thing for them to be a prop,” he said. Ayala stopped going into work after the meeting and was eventually fired.

Hidalgo refused to let the matter go. Rather than take responsibility for the botched rollout of the proposed ballot initiative, she continued excoriating her fellow commissioners for allegedly putting politics above the education of children. In a series of social media posts, she dubbed Briones, Garcia, and Ramsey the “GOP Three” and the “Three Callous Commissioners.” She took out a full-page ad in the Chronicle rebutting criticisms of her proposal.

Some of Hidalgo’s longtime supporters recoiled from her behavior. “There’s a lot of unnecessary drama that does detract from the hard work that’s being done on a daily basis by the Democratic supermajority,” said Mike Doyle, chair of the Harris County Democratic Party. Even before the commissioners court debacle, Hidalgo was “already in a precarious spot with her support in the community,” said Francisco Sanchez, who worked under Hidalgo in the county’s office of emergency management. “And that was the final straw.”

Just over a month after her failure, Hidalgo announced that she would not run for reelection in 2026. Her last day in office will be in early January. She framed the decision as the fulfillment of a promise to serve only two terms.

With the possible exception of Ellis, none of Hidalgo’s fellow commissioners appear sorry to see her go. Ramsey told me that he maintains good relationships with everyone on the court except for her. “Commissioner Ellis and I rarely vote the same way on anything, and we get along great.” Hidalgo’s decision not to seek reelection was “an appropriate end to a very bizarre period in Harris County,” he said.

Since her announcement, Hidalgo has been absent from court multiple times. In September she left a meeting early to attend a concert of music by film composer Hans Zimmer. The next month she embarked on a ten-day trade mission to Japan and Taiwan.

On December 1, the one-year anniversary of her wedding, Hidalgo announced on Instagram that she and James had separated. “My friends and my family were like, ‘Nobody needs to know anything,’ ” she told me a couple of weeks later. “But when somebody asks me how my marriage is doing, am I going to say, ‘Good’? Like, there is no marriage. So I had to just put it out there.” She declined to comment on the reasons behind the separation.

Hidalgo has been cagey about discussing what she’ll do after she leaves office. She rejects the idea that her political career is over. “I want to run again in the future,” she said. “I really love the job. I don’t love commissioners court these days, but that’s it.” 

She seems determined to have a say in her replacement. In December, Hidalgo attacked former Houston Mayor Annise Parker, one of the two front-runners for the Democratic nomination, calling her “Kim Ogg 2.0” and describing her as “another individual who runs on the Democratic ticket and governs as a Republican.”

During my interview at Hidalgo’s office, I asked why she continues to litigate past fights rather than move on to the next one. She seemed exasperated by the question but briefly dropped her defenses to offer a rare hint of regret. “Maybe in retrospect it was like, man, that was not a great idea,” she said. “Obviously I make mistakes like everybody. But what I have found works for me is to follow my values at any given time.”  

---

This article originally appeared in the March 2026 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “Lina Hidalgo Storms Out.” Subscribe today.