Texas psych-Americana band Lord Buffalo has canceled its upcoming European tour after it claims that drummer Yamal Said was taken off a plane by border patrol agents on Monday.
“We are heartbroken to announce we have to cancel our upcoming European tour. Our drummer, who is a Mexican citizen and lawful permanent resident of the United States (green card holder) was forcibly removed from our flight to Europe by Customs and Border Patrol at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport on Monday May 12,” the band said in a Wednesday social media post.
According to the group, Said has not been released from custody.
“We are currently working with an immigration lawyer to find out more information and to attempt to secure his release,” the band continued in its post. “We are devastated to cancel this tour, but we are focusing all of our energy and resources on Yamal’s safety and freedom. We are hopeful that this is a temporary setback and that it could be safe for us to reschedule this tour in the future.”
Lord Buffalo later updated the message to announce that Said has secured legal representation.
According to a CBP spokesperson, Said was detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection while aboard a May 12 flight heading outside of the U.S. due to allegedly having an active arrest warrant. He was subsequently turned over to local law enforcement.
The Times has reached out to Lord Buffalo for comment.
The Texas band is not the first musical act to claim they have needed to postpone or cancel shows due to immigration issues in recent months.
In April, British singer FKA twigs announced in an Instagram post that she had to cancel series of concerts for the month in North America — including a slot at Coachella 2025 — due to “ongoing visa issues.”
Earlier this month, Chicago’s Michelada Fest, a Spanish-language music festival that had acts scheduled from across the globe, was canceled due to concerns over artists’ visas.
“Due to the uncertainty surrounding artist visas and the rapidly changing political climate, we’re no longer able to guarantee the full experience we had dreamed up for you with all your favorite artists,” the festival’s organizers explained in a statement. “Although we tried to push through, it became clear that we wouldn’t be able to deliver the full lineup as planned.”
The organizers would go on to write that, as an independent outfit, Michelada Fest “can’t afford to take on a big risk with so much uncertainty ahead.”
Grupo Firme, Anitta, Danny Ocean, Tokischa and Luis R. Conriquez were scheduled to perform at the July festival.
Bob Worsley has solid conservative credentials. He’s anti abortion. A fiscal hawk and lifelong member of the Mormon Church. As an Arizona state senator, he won high marks from the National Rifle Assn.
These days, however, Worsley is an oddity, an exception, a Republican pushing back against the animating impulses of today’s MAGA-fied Republican Party.
Here’s how he speaks of immigrants — some of whom entered the United States illegally — and those who seek to demonize them.
“We have people that are aristocratically living in another world,” Worsley said. “Maybe they work for you, but you haven’t really lived with them and understand they’re not criminals. They are good people. They’re family people. They’re religious people. They are great Americans…. So I think that’s a problem if you don’t live with them and you’re making policy.”
If that line of reasoning is too mawkish and bleeding-heart for your taste, Worsley makes a more pragmatic argument for a generous, welcoming immigration policy, one unsentimentally rooted in cold dollars and cents.
“The Trump Organization needs workers, hospitality workers, construction workers,” Worsley said. “The horse-breeding industry, the horse-racing industry, they need these people. The pig farmers, the chicken farmers.”
Worsley owns a Phoenix-based modular housing firm and is chairman of the American Business Immigration Coalition, an organization representing more than 1,700 chief executives and business owners nationwide. Their exceedingly ambitious goal: to find compromise and a middle ground on one of the most contentious and insoluble issues of recent decades — and to bring some balance to a Trump policy that is almost wholly punitive in its nature and intent.
“We are employers … and we don’t have a workforce. We need this workforce,” Worsley said. “And building a wall and stopping all immigration is not going to work, because the water will rise until it comes over.”
A serial entrepreneur before he entered politics, Worsley doesn’t favor throwing the U.S.-Mexico border open to all comers. The “lines between countries” should mean something, he said. But now that America’s borders have been practically sealed shut, fulfilling one of President Trump’s major campaign promises, Worsley suggests it’s past time to address another part of the immigration equation.
“What we need is bigger portals, bigger legal openings to come through the border,” Worsley said, likening it to the way a spillway releases pressure behind a dam. “We need a secure workforce as much as we need a secure border.”
The immigration issue was Worsley’s impetus to enter politics. Or, more specifically, the scapegoating and vilification of immigrants that prefigured Trump and his “poisoning the blood of our country” Sturm und Drang.
Worsley, speaking at a 2017 legislative meeting in Phoenix, entered electoral politics to fight anti-immigrant policies
(Bob Christie / Associated Press)
Worsley, whose ventures included founding the SkyMall catalog — a pre-Amazon everything store — was coaxed into running to thwart the return of former Arizona Senate President Russell Pearce, who was recalled by voters in part for his fiercely anti-immigrant lawmaking. (Worsley beat him in the 2012 GOP primary, then won the general election.)
As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Worsley did his youth missionary work in Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. “I developed a certain level of comfort and love for the people down there,” Worsley said.
Moreover, the experience colored his perspective on those impoverished souls who traverse borders in search of a better life. A person can’t empathize “unless you’ve actually walked in their shoes, lived in their homes, eaten their food and socialized with them,” Worsley said via Zoom from his home office in Salt Lake City. “And I think that’s a problem.”
He left the Arizona Senate — and electoral politics — in 2019, vexed and frustrated by the rise of Trump and the anti-immigrant wave he rode to his first, improbable election to the White House.
“It was really irritating because I had fought this in Arizona a decade before,” Worsley said. “And so to have this kind of comeback on a national stage was incredibly frustrating.”
He moved part time to Utah, to be closer to his extended family. He wrote a book, “The Horseshoe Virus,” about the immigration issue; the title suggested the convergence of the far left and far right in the country’s long history of anti-immigrant movements.
He became involved with the American Business Immigration Coalition, recruited by Mitt Romney, the GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee, whom Worsley knew through politics and a mutual friendship with Arizona’s late senator, John McCain. Worsley became the board’s chairman in January.
He’s still no fan of Trump, though Worsley emphasized, “I am still a Republican and would vote for a Mitt Romney or John McCain kind of Republican.”
That said, now that the border is under much tighter control, Worsley hopes Trump will not just seek to round up and punish those in the country illegally but also focus on a larger fix to the nation’s dysfunctional immigration system — something no president, Democrat or Republican, has accomplished in nearly 40 years.
It was 1986 when Ronald Reagan signed sweeping legislation that offered amnesty to millions of long-term residents, expanded certain visa programs, cracked down on employers who hired illegal workers and promised to harden the border once and for all through stiffer enforcement — a pledge that, obviously, came to naught.
“Once you’ve secured the border and you don’t have caravans of people coming toward us, then you can address [the question of] what’s the pragmatic solution so that this doesn’t happen again?” Worsley asked. “We’re hopeful that’s where we’re going next.”
