Will Hurd

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Will Hurd (2015)

William Ballard "Will" Hurd (* 19th August 1977 in San Antonio , Texas ) is an American politician of the Republican Party . Since January 2015 he has represented the 23rd congressional electoral district of the state of Texas in the US House of Representatives . He is no longer running for 2020.

education and profession

In 1995, Will Hurd graduated from John Marshall High School in San Antonio. He then studied computer science at Texas A&M University until 2000 . From 2000 to 2009 he worked in various functions for the CIA . He worked temporarily in Washington, DC , where he informed members of Congress , among other things . He was also operational for the CIA in Afghanistan , Pakistan and India . He then returned to Texas, where he worked for the strategic consultancy firm Crumpton Group .

Political career

In 2010, Hurd ran unsuccessfully in his party's primary election for Congress. In the 2014 election , Hurd was elected to the US House of Representatives in Washington in the 23rd  Congressional constituency of Texas. There he succeeded Democrat Pete Gallego on January 3, 2015 , whom he had beaten in the election. Re-elected in 2016 , he was seen as one of the Republican elected officials at risk in the 2018 election after Hillary Clinton narrowly won his constituency in the 2016 presidential election . Hurd, who voted with President Trump's line in Congress in more than 95 percent of the cases , oriented himself towards the political center during the election campaign. He criticized the Trump administration for its immigration policy, in particular the planned construction of a wall on the border with Mexico and the separation of illegally immigrated children from their parents . His constituency between El Paso and San Antonio covers over 1300 kilometers of the border region to Mexico on the Rio Grande ; 70 percent of the population are Latinos who tend to be politically Democratic.

Hurd won against Democrat Gina Ortiz Jones in November 2018 , but so narrowly by around a thousand votes ahead of 209,000 votes that Ortiz Jones did not admit defeat until two weeks after the election. In early August 2019, Hurd announced that he would not run again in the 2020 election. The mandate of the then only African American among the Republican MPs in the House of Representatives ends with the 116th Congress on January 3, 2021. Hurd announced that he would work in the private sector at the interface between technology and security policy.

Hurd has been a member of the Transatlantic Task Force of the German Marshall Fund and the Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt Foundation since 2019 .

Positions

After Donald Trump's summit in Helsinki with Russian President Vladimir Putin , Hurd was one of the sharpest internal party critics. In a guest post for the New York Times, he said, referring to his professional experience, that Trump was being manipulated by Putin. In mid-January 2019, he contradicted the president over the course of a several-week budget freeze that Trump had begun because of Congress's refusal to budget over $ 5 billion to build a border wall into Mexico. The humanitarian crisis, which Trump cited as the reason for the urgency of building the wall, is a myth.

Web links

Commons : Will Hurd  - collection of images, videos and audio files
  • Will Hurd at the Congress
  • Will Hurd in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)
  • Profile at National Journal (english)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Sanford Nowlin: Will Hurd's Playing to the Center in Texas' Most Competitive Congressional Race. But His Record Tells Another Story. In: San Antonio Current , July 18, 2018.
  2. ^ A b David Choi: Rep. Will Hurd, the only black Republican in the House, abruptly announces he's retiring. In: Business Insider , August 1, 2019.
  3. ^ Patrick Svitek: Democrat Gina Ortiz Jones concedes in close congressional race against Will Hurd. In: Texas Tribune , November 19, 2018.
  4. Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt Foundation and German Marshall Fund establish “Transatlantic Task Force”. Accessed April 27, 2020 (German).
  5. Will Hurd: Trump Is Being Manipulated by Putin. What should we do? In: The New York Times , July 19, 2018; Sonam Sheth: Prominent GOP congressman and former CIA agent says Trump is being manipulated by Putin. In: Business Insider , July 20, 2018.
  6. ^ Andy Kroll: Republican Congressman: Trump's Border Crisis Is a 'Myth'. In: Rolling Stone , January 18, 2019.