August 12, 2025 02:03 PM UTC

Gabe Evans is Only Lying When He's Talking

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• by: Colorado Pols

If Congress were like a poker game, freshman Rep. Gabe Evans (R-Ft. Lupton) would be in big trouble. That’s because Evans has an unshakable “tell” that gives him away every time.

It’s quite simple: If Gabe Evans is talking, then he’s lying.

Much like former Republican Sen. Cory Gardner — the last Republican to win a significant statewide office in Colorado (in 2014) — Evans has only one path to winning re-election. “America’s Most Vulnerable Incumbent” can only secure a second term in 2026 if voters in the eighth congressional district don’t notice that he is completely full of shit.

Evans sat down recently for an interview with Voz Media, and on two separate occasions he looked reporter Joaquín Núñez directly in the eye…and lied to his face:

Here’s how Evans began an answer about immigration policy in Congress and his [cough] “Dignity Act” legislation:

EVANS: So, you know my story, right? My abuelo, Cuauhtemoc Chavez, came to the United States. He got his citizenship with service in World War Two. [He received] two purple hearts fighting with Patton’s Third Army. So for me, growing up, it was always taught to me that you want to come to the United States, you want to work hard, you want to raise your family here, you want to follow the laws, you want to pay the taxes. 

This personal story from Evans is a fabrication. He knows it, and he knows that other people know it. But he keeps repeating it anyway.

As Chase Woodruff of Colorado Newsline first reported in July, Evans has long misrepresented his family’s immigration history in order to serve his own political ambitions:

Evans has leaned heavily on his Mexican-American heritage and the man to whom he referred in a campaign launch video as his “abuelito Chavez.” Telling and retelling the story of his grandfather, who died in 2014, is Evans’ go-to means of putting a more moderate face on the historically extreme mass-deportation policies backed by Trump and his top advisers.

“We are a nation that is ruled by law,” Evans told moderators at a January 2024 debate, responding to a question about how “millions of people living in the U.S. illegally” should be treated. “You need to go stand in that line and do it the right way, do it the legal way, so you are not leapfrogging over those folks like my grandfather, who did it the right way and did it the legal way.”

But Evans has mischaracterized the story of how his Depression-era ancestors achieved the American dream, and misstated key dates and details in his grandfather’s biography, according to documents obtained by Newsline through archival research and government records requests. [Pols emphasis]

Evans has regularly spun a tale about his immigrant grandfather coming to the United States from Mexico and obtaining his American citizenship “the legal way,” which included service in the military during World War II. The real story, as Woodruff discovered, is that Evans’ grandfather was in the country illegally for over 15 years, and along the way picked up a criminal arrest record for burglary charges. has used his grandfather’s story countless times as a foil to defend himself against accusations of hypocrisy for supporting a far-right anti-immigrant agenda. Under President Trump’s immigration policy, which Evans fully supports, Cuauhtemoc Chavez would almost certainly be facing deportation today.

As Woodruff continued for Newsline:

In a 2022 statement to Spanish-language newspaper La Prensa de Colorado, Evans, then a first-time state House candidate, wrote that Cuauhtemoc had “acquir(ed) citizenship in 1943,” while serving in the Army. In fact, records show that he did not apply for naturalization until several years later, in 1946. The discrepancy is significant because Cuauhtemoc’s naturalization petition indicates that he was granted citizenship under a 1944 law that eliminated proof of “lawful entry” as a requirement for naturalization. [Pols emphasis]

Evans repeated the inaccurate timeline during his 2024 congressional campaign. He told the Berthoud Weekly Surveyor that it “took (Cuauhtemoc) 13 years to get his citizenship,” likening his wait to a story he’d heard on the campaign trail of a Colorado resident who “legally pursue(d) citizenship for 17 years.” But Cuauhtemoc affirmed twice — first on his 1941 AR-2 form and then on his 1946 petition for citizenship — that he had not previously applied for naturalization.

In response to reporting from Colorado Newsline, a spokesperson named Delanie Bomar initially claimed that Evans had been “very consistent” and “clear about his family’s story,” but subsequently said his past comments may have been “confusing.” Then she dropped this nonsense bomb:

“In Hispanic culture, immigrating the ‘right way’ generally means working hard, contributing to their community, and not causing problems — not necessarily that something is 100% perfectly legal,” [Pols emphasis]

You might think that Evans would be more careful about telling the same lie to a journalist now that his “origin story” has been debunked, but Evans won’t let silly things like ‘facts’ get in the way of his personal narrative.

Here’s Evans later in the same interview with Voz Media, responding to a question about his message for the Hispanic community:

EVANS: I am Latino and we share, you know…we are Latinos and and so we share the same work ethic. We share that same dedication to our families and to wanting to give our families that better life. Uh, again, my [grandfather]  Cuauhtemoc Chavez…Um, I’ve read some of his his writings in his journal where he talks about doing what he did to give a better starting point in life for his kids. So that’d be my mom. And then knowing that his grandkids, [including] me, would have a better start in life than even my mom did.

In his July reporting, Woodruff spoke with Jennifer Chavez, Cuauhtemoc’s daughter and Evans’ aunt, who confirmed that Cuauhtemoc immigrated from Mexico AT THE AGE OF FIVE. Chavez also found Evans’ yarn about a hardscrabble existence to be quite hilarious:

When asked about another line from Evans’ campaign announcement email — in which he said that his mother, Rebecca Chavez, “thought she would spend her whole life in a one-room hut with a dirt floor in Juarez, Mexico” — Jennifer Chavez burst out laughing.

“We were raised in a middle-class neighborhood in El Paso,” she said. “We went to Eastwood High School, which was predominantly Caucasian. … To this day, none of us are fluent in Spanish.” [Pols emphasis]

We’ve seen a lot of terrible people in Colorado politics in the more than 20 years that Colorado Pols has been online. Rarely have we come across a politician so comfortable flat-out lying about himself — even after he’s been caught fabricating the details of his own existence.

It takes a different kind of cat to be this ridiculously dishonest. Hopefully the voters of CO-08 are as disgusted as the rest of us.