| New York Times reporting from South Texas shows Hispanic voters are continuing to sour on Republicans as families have been devastated by unaccountable ICE operations and local economies that have been decimated by Republican policies, all while the cost of living continues to skyrocket.
The past two years have been defined by Republicans’ broken promises and voters know who’s to blame. “This isn’t anything that we wanted and it certainly isn’t a better life for anyone I know,” said Lupita Garza, 48, who lives in McAllen and voted for Mr. Trump in 2024. “Instead of the economy getting stronger, we are weaker. And now we have to be scared of ICE too.”
DC Republicans redrew Texas’ map counting on their 2024 gains with Latinos, and then turned around and broke every promise they made.
DCCC Spokesperson Bridget Gonzalez:
“Republicans are paying the price for their extremist agenda that has made life harder for Latino families across the country, and even their gerrymandering scheme is going to fail come November.”
Read more: Hispanic Voters on the Texas Border Have Soured on Trump
- Jessica Cantu Vuittonet, who runs a coffee shop in San Benito, Texas, cast her first ballot in 2024 — for Donald Trump. Two years later, after her brother was deported, she feels angry and betrayed.
- Ariel Salinas, who owns a construction company in McAllen, Texas, can no longer reliably find laborers for his work crews. He blames the president’s immigration policies for his financial headaches.
- And Luis Cabrera, a pastor who once mobilized his congregation in Harlingen, Texas, to vote for Republican candidates, is now trying to keep Hispanic evangelicals from giving up on voting altogether.
- In 2024, Hispanic voters in the Rio Grande Valley delivered a political earthquake: majority support for Republicans for the first time in modern history, a shift that helped reshape national politics. Now, that support appears to be evaporating even more quickly than it arrived.
- In more than two dozen interviews across the region in recent weeks, Hispanic voters said they were furious over the president’s approach to immigration and the economy — the very problems they had counted on him to fix.
- Their economic struggles seem to have only gotten worse, they said, shaped by the same forces at play in the rest of the country and exacerbated by the administration’s aggressive tactics on immigration enforcement. Construction has slowed as workers have been deported. Many small business owners say they have lost customers who now stay home to avoid being stopped by immigration agents.
- In restaurants and on construction sites, in church lobbies and bars, optimism about the second Trump administration has curdled into a deep sense of abandonment.
- “This isn’t anything that we wanted and it certainly isn’t a better life for anyone I know,” said Lupita Garza, 48, who lives in McAllen and voted for Mr. Trump in 2024. “Instead of the economy getting stronger, we are weaker. And now we have to be scared of ICE too.”
- This growing anger and fear could help determine who controls Congress. Texas Republicans redrew several House districts last year with the assumption that the Hispanic voters who moved toward their party were part of a new, durable coalition. But many of those voters have turned against the Republicans. Some voters say they may vote for Democrats in the November midterms; some may not vote at all.
- “I knew that he was going to start deporting people, but that he was going to go after bad criminals, like true hardcore criminals, rapists, killers,” Ms. Vuittonet said, sitting in the small coffee shop she runs from the back of an antique store. She thought of her six children, who range from ages 6 to 12. “Of course I want the streets safe.”
- But when her brother was taken to an immigration detention center earlier this year, just days after a scheduled check-in with an immigration official, she said it felt like a punch to the gut.
- “Your world truly does go upside down because now it’s not just hurting you — it’s hurting your parents, it’s hurting his children, his grandchildren,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. She quickly began to resent both Washington and the political movement she had enthusiastically embraced.
- “I started to hate,” she said. “I started holding resentment and grudges, especially from those people that I rallied with for Trump.”
- The immigration crackdown has paralyzed the local construction industry, which had depended on immigrant workers for decades. Once-busy job sites sit empty, as more and more laborers fear deportation.
- Benny Melendez, 32, who owns a small construction business in Weslaco, voted for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020 but was won over by Mr. Trump’s promises in 2024 to help small businesses succeed and control the border. The president’s tariffs immediately hurt his business, he said, even before the ICE raids depleted the construction work force.
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