A spokesperson for U.S. Senator Ted Cruz responded to online criticism after he was spotted on a flight to California on Tuesday ahead of an arctic storm set to hit Texas this weekend, saying he was on a work trip he had arranged weeks ago.
“He will be returning to Texas before the storm hits,” a spokesman said in a statement. They declined to answer questions about Cruz’s destination in California and why.
Photos of Cruz on the plane began circulating early Wednesday morning and had been viewed 3.3 million times as of noon. “You can count on (Cruz) to be on a flight to the warm tropics and (sic) the first sign of Mother Nature,” one X user wrote.
Houston city officials warned residents Wednesday that temperatures will drop into the mid-20s or teens this weekend, while wind chills will drop into the teens or single digits.
Cruz, a Texas Republican, has previously been criticized for flying out of Texas during bad weather. In 2021, when a winter storm left millions of Texans without power, he flew to Cancun with his daughters, explaining that his “two girls had been out cold for two days with no heat, and they said, ‘Hey, look, we don’t have school, why don’t we go, let’s get out of here.'”
He later apologized, saying: “It was obviously a mistake and in hindsight I would not have done it.”
Photos of Cruz’s flight on Tuesday were posted by Shay Jordan Smith, who worked for the late U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston.
“Earlier today, January 20, 2026, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was spotted on a plane bound for Laguna Beach as Texas braced for a rare ice threat and arctic cold front,” he wrote.
This article was originally published on Ted Cruz responds to photos of his trip to California ahead of Texas winter storm.