Residents of Kyle,
Effective October 3, 2026, I am resigning from Kyle City Council.
This decision has not been made easily and carries enormous grief.
Public service has shaped my life for as long as I can remember. As a child, I experienced frequent injustice and vowed from an early age that I would dedicate my life to fixing the system any way I could. I shaped my life around becoming the public servant I needed as a child. This purpose guided what I studied, where I worked, what internships and volunteer opportunities I pursued and even, as a teenager, what parts of my life I put online because I understood that the internet would follow me.
As a councilwoman, I have used every ounce of courage I had to deliver tangible results for residents:
• We created Kyle’s first anti-displacement study and framework because growth should not mean pushing longtime residents out of the community. We changed our master planning process to prioritize historically underinvested neighborhoods when future infrastructure funds are allocated. I fought to bring public restrooms and changing stations to Mary Kyle Hartson Park.
• We eliminated City Council credit cards. I fought against spending roughly half a million dollars in road-bond money relitigating engineering and traffic studies that have now led to 12-18 month delays and increased costs. I voted against more than $13 million in proposed artificial intelligence (AI) mass-surveillance technology and forced a citywide conversation about privacy and the role of surveillance in public safety.
• During the fiscal year 2027 budget process, I proposed and fought for amendments to fund the Kyle Public Library, so they did not have to reduce hours and programs, fund long-delayed Moreno Street drainage improvements first identified in 2015 and invest in needed eastside infrastructure.
• I traveled to Washington, D.C., and met with members of our congressional delegation and Senate offices as part of the effort to secure $24.4 million in federal funding to address the train stopping at Center Street and Marketplace Avenue — an issue that affects mobility, emergency access and daily life in the heart of our city.
• I proposed to amend our procurement practices to give veteran-owned businesses a stronger opportunity to compete for city contracts because supporting veterans should include creating real economic opportunity after they come home.
• I fought for sidewalks, safer school crossings and the Vybe Trail because everyone should be able to move safely through Kyle without depending on a car. I fought for the city to host a Pride event in 2027 because how a city invests its resources reflects its values.
• And for the first time in Kyle’s history, a council member fought for workers’ rights to be included in the city’s Strategic Plan because the people building and maintaining this community should have a place in its priorities.
There is a cynical, reductionist idea that those who badly want to hold public office should not be the ones to serve — I disagree. I have spent over two decades trying to become good enough, prepared enough and disciplined enough to deserve the responsibility of public service.
This is why I refuse to describe my resignation as a “choice.” I am losing the privilege of representing people I care deeply about and losing work that is central to the meaning of my life. Kyle is also losing a public servant who still wanted to be here and still had more she hoped to accomplish.
However, for the past 11 months, I have been the target of a sustained campaign of harassment and dehumanization. I refuse to keep pretending that any of it is ordinary disagreement or the unfortunate price of public office.
In Facebook groups devoted to Kyle politics, including Kyle Watchdog UNCENSORED (formerly Kyle Council Citizen Oversight UNCENSORED) and Kyle Council Citizen Oversight, there is a documented stream of racist, homophobic, fatphobic and sexist comments, conspiracy theories and degrading AI images and threats directed at me.
In Kyle Watchdog UNCENSORED alone, 174 posts attacking or degrading me were made between April 1 and August 31, although there were only 153 days in that timespan.
On any given day, I can open my phone and find messages telling me to hang myself or jump from a building, accusations that I am a drug addict and AI-generated images of me in compromising positions, while people make degrading sexual comments about seeing up my dress, to name only a few. I am treated as public property by people I have never met.
Sadly, I am not alone.
The Center for Democracy & Technology analyzed more than 100,000 social media posts around the 2020 congressional elections and found that women of color candidates were twice as likely as other candidates to be targeted by mis- and disinformation and substantially more likely to encounter racist, sexist and violent abuse. Its 2024 analysis of more than 800,000 posts found that women of color candidates received more offensive speech and hate speech than other candidates.
To make matters worse, over time, the boundary between these Facebook groups and city hall disappeared. Some of the same residents who spout the most hateful rhetoric walk into council chambers, approach the podium and ask council for kindness, compassion, investment or action on an issue affecting them.
Despite how deeply their vitriol affected me, I remained committed to my duty to serve them. Being emotionally affected by abuse is not the same as allowing those emotions to govern your decisions, though the two have been deliberately collapsed in the way people describe my leadership. My voting record reflects that distinction. When an issue before me was good for residents, I supported it.
But understand what that costs: sitting still and professionally composed in a room with people who have joked about my suicide is not easy. Working hard to meet their needs while carrying the harm they caused me is not easy.
There have been moments when the relentlessness of it made me want to take my own life just to escape it. But even at my lowest, I have never hidden who I am or what I fight for: a proud progressive LGBTQ+ Mexican woman who believes every resident deserves dignity, safety, opportunity and a government that materially improves their lives.
I have continued to serve even as I’ve been attacked for simply defending myself. I've been told my distress and defense are proof that I am "too sensitive," "thin-skinned," a "bully," "disrespectful" or somehow unfit for office.
That logic is outrageous and protects those who use hate and coercion to subvert democracy.
You cannot deliberately injure another person and then call them the problem for standing their ground. I have been expected to take the high road while other people dig lower and to prove I am strong enough for office by demonstrating that nothing can hurt me — as though the ideal public servant is someone devoid of feeling.
As much as I love Kyle, I cannot continue to absorb abuse in order to serve it.
It seems we have forgotten that most municipal elected officials are not elite political figures. They are neighbors. Many are unpaid or severely underpaid, have jobs and families. Their children go to school with yours and they sit in the same traffic.
None of that means elected officials should not be criticized. I have spent my career in public service and have challenged elected officials, wielding that right as many of you have. But accountability and dehumanization are not equal.
Some residents understand this and approach governance fairly, not without criticism, but fairly. Some have been shining lights during a very dark period for me and I know supporting me exposed them and their families to threats of retaliation or harm. Others have told me that they stay silent, avoid speaking before council, and have even decided not to run for city council because they fear becoming the next target.
This is not a healthy democracy.
A 2026 Cambridge University Press review essay examining institutional responses during the second Trump administration describes a phenomenon called "capitulation to populist authoritarianism." They found that drift to authoritarianism can occur when people accommodate it, stay silent or decide resistance costs too much. Silence creates the conditions for authoritarianism to succeed and can indicate that a hateful political machine is functioning as intended.
Kyle is a microcosm for what is happening in our national discourse. The Trump era has been accompanied by a political style built on grievance, delegitimization and humiliation. Political leaders teach people what is acceptable and permissible political behavior, which is why their silence is noteworthy. In Kyle, there are elected officials who have chosen to remain silent or have even encouraged this behavior, proudly accepting support from some of the worst offenders.
Humiliation substitutes for argument, conspiracy substitutes for evidence and political targets are dehumanized — making increasingly abhorrent treatment easier to justify. Protect Democracy's "Authoritarian Playbook" catalogs these tactics: disinformation, suppression of dissent, scapegoating and the tolerance of political violence.
A resident recently wrote, "If we don’t support those who are brave, we won’t have anyone to stand up for us." I cried the first time I read that sentence.
A community cannot endlessly outsource courage to the person being attacked.
Public service requires sacrifice, difficult votes, long nights, uncomfortable conversations, criticism, compromise and accountability. It should not require me to surrender my humanity.
So I leave Kyle City Council with grief, anger, tremendous disappointment, but also with pride in the positive work we’ve done together despite the hate we’ve faced. I am grateful to every resident who trusted me, challenged me honestly, worked beside me or reminded me that the ugliest voices were never the entirety of this community. To those who loved me through it all — my family, T, D, P, C, S, A, J, and P — I am eternally grateful.
My hope is that Kyle chooses to learn something from what has happened here.
I care too much about this city to leave without asking you to think about who you want to be.
I’m passing you the baton now. It's your city, too. Fight for it.
Yours in solidarity, always —
Claudia Zapata
Kyle City Council member
District 3, At-Large
