Christina Montes is running for judge in El Paso, the kind of bench that handles family violence and misdemeanor criminal cases. Court records reviewed by the Daily Mail show her husband, Juan Manuel Montes, is a registered sex offender required to remain on the Texas sex offender registry for life.

The 44-year-old Democrat is competing in the May 26 Democratic primary runoff for County Court at Law No. 2 in El Paso. The winner takes office January 1, 2027, and serves a four-year term presiding over misdemeanor criminal matters, DWIs, burglaries, prostitution, and family violence cases.

Her husband's record raises questions that voters in that runoff deserve to have answered before they cast a ballot.

A 2011 charge, a plea deal, and lifetime registration

Juan Manuel Montes, also 44, was charged with indecency with a child by contact and sexual performance by a child over a 2011 incident involving a 12-year-old female. El Paso Matters reported that the victim was a relative of Montes.

He took a plea deal in 2013. After completing seven years of community supervision, the charges were dropped in 2020. But the plea carried a permanent consequence: lifetime sex offender registration. He must update his information on the Texas registry four times a year.

The judge who approved that plea deal was 171st District Judge Bonnie Rangel, who is retiring this year. Rangel donated $150 to Christina Montes' campaign.

That detail alone deserves scrutiny. A retiring judge who approved a sex-offender plea deal for a candidate's husband then turned around and financially supported that candidate's bid for the bench. Voters can draw their own conclusions about what that looks like.

A longer record than one case

The 2011 charge was not Juan Manuel Montes' first brush with the law. Court records show an arrest history stretching back to 1998, with charges including possession of a prohibited weapon, robbery, and forgery. All of those earlier charges were dismissed.

Then came 2018. Manuel Montes was among a group of bounty hunters arrested after they were accused of kidnapping a woman and child. The group was working for 9ONE5 Bail Bonds at the time, reportedly trying to get a person on bond to turn themselves in. Those charges were later dropped due to insufficient evidence.

Christina Montes herself represented 9ONE5 Bail Bonds in a lawsuit stemming from that kidnapping incident, meaning she served as legal counsel in a case directly tied to her husband's arrest. The Texas Democratic landscape is full of candidates who talk about accountability and justice. Representing a bail bond company in a lawsuit connected to your own husband's arrest is not what most people picture when they hear those words.

The candidate's own background

Christina Montes obtained her law degree in 2018 from Whittier College School of Law, a now-defunct institution. She passed the Texas State Bar in 2019 and operates the Montes Law Firm, which specializes in criminal, family, and immigration law.

Records show the couple married in 2006, five years before the sex offense charge against her husband. According to her Facebook page, she is a mother of six.

The couple has also been previously charged with contributing to non-attendance after their children accumulated a significant number of unexcused absences at school. And Montes currently faces a lawsuit from her previous landlord over the building that housed her law office, alleging breach of contract.

None of these items, taken alone, would necessarily disqualify someone from public life. Taken together, they paint a picture of a candidate whose personal and professional record invites hard questions, questions that become far more pressing when the office in question is a criminal court judgeship.

Campaigning together, in public

Pictures posted on Christina Montes' Facebook page showed the couple campaigning together at recent events. There was no effort to distance herself from her husband or his record. Neither Christina Montes nor Juan Manuel Montes responded to the Daily Mail's requests for comment.

The silence is notable. A candidate for the criminal bench who declines to address her husband's lifetime sex offender registration is asking voters to trust her judgment without offering any explanation of her own.

This is the Democratic Party's candidate in a runoff. The party that lectures the rest of the country about protecting women and children has, in El Paso, advanced a judicial candidate whose husband is on the sex offender registry for an offense involving a 12-year-old girl. That is not a partisan attack. It is a public record.

A broader pattern of Democratic credibility problems

Texas Democrats have had no shortage of embarrassments lately. National polling has buried prominent Democrats as voters lose confidence in the party's leadership and judgment.

The Montes situation is local, but it fits a pattern. The party that positions itself as the guardian of vulnerable populations keeps stumbling over its own candidates' records.

In Texas specifically, intra-party fights over the state's Democratic Senate nomination have already exposed fault lines. And prominent Democrats in the state have publicly rebuked their own nominees, as when Henry Cuellar challenged his party's Senate nominee over border rhetoric.

The El Paso judicial race may not draw national headlines. But the voters who will live under this judge's rulings deserve to know exactly who they are electing, and who that person goes home to.

Accountability questions beyond El Paso

Texas is not the only state where questions about elected officials' personal conduct and professional boundaries have surfaced. The Washington Examiner reported that Adrian Aviles, the husband of a former congressional district director who died by suicide, publicly accused Rep. Tony Gonzales of having an affair with his wife and called on the congressman to take responsibility. Aviles said he discovered sexually explicit texts between his wife and Gonzales in 2024.

The New York Post reported that a text message attributed to the staffer, Regina Santos-Aviles, appeared to acknowledge the relationship, writing: "I had [an] affair with our boss and I'm fine." Aviles accused Gonzales of abusing his power by allegedly having a relationship with a subordinate.

These are different cases with different facts. But the common thread is straightforward: voters expect the people who hold power, whether in Congress or on the bench, to meet basic standards of conduct. When they don't, the public has a right to know before the next election.

What voters face on May 26

El Paso's Democratic primary runoff voters will decide whether Christina Montes should preside over misdemeanor criminal cases, including family violence matters. She has declined to comment on her husband's sex offender status. She campaigned alongside him. The judge who approved his plea deal donated to her campaign.

Court records are public for a reason. The question now is whether the voters of El Paso will see them before they vote, or only after.

A party that claims to stand for the vulnerable ought to vet its own candidates at least as carefully as it demands everyone else be vetted. In El Paso, that standard was not met.