ICE Raids Backlash: Latino Voters Turn on Republicans

The ice raids were supposed to be the fulfillment of a campaign promise. For many of the Latino voters who helped carry Donald Trump back to the White House in 2024, they have instead become the reason they say they are done with him. In Doral, Florida — a mostly Latino city near Miami nicknamed “Doralzuela” for its large Venezuelan population — residents told the AFP news agency this week that the deportation drive has emptied businesses, thinned classrooms, and poisoned a community that only months ago was trending Republican. One restaurant owner who voted for Trump put the new mood in four words: “Anyone but Trump.”

The report, carried by outlets including The Straits Times and The Korea Times on October 21, 2026, lands less than two weeks before the midterm elections 2026 and captures a shift that polls have been registering for months: the president’s standing among Hispanic voters has collapsed, and Republican strategists are watching with alarm as one of the party’s signature 2024 gains threatens to become a 2026 liability.

ICE Raids: ‘Anyone but Trump’ in Doral

Doral is not just any suburb. It is home to one of Trump’s own golf clubs, and it sits in the heart of the South Florida Latino communities — Cuban, Venezuelan, and others — that swung hard toward the republican party news machine in recent cycles. AFP’s reporters found a community transformed by fear.

Maria Fernanda Perez, a 32-year-old restaurant owner who voted for Trump, told AFP she feels betrayed. “I feel sad and disappointed,” she said. “My thinking was that the economy would improve.” Instead, three of her employees stopped showing up to work over fears of being deported, and her sales have fallen 40 percent as people in the community pull back from going out. “My whole family, all my friends are going through immigration proceedings, and they’re no longer working, they’re no longer going about their daily lives,” she said. When asked how she would vote in the upcoming election, she declined to say — but added emphatically: “Anyone but Trump.”

Carlos Bermudez, a 47-year-old lawyer also of Venezuelan origin, told AFP he receives constant calls from desperate people going through immigration proceedings. “They don’t go out, they can’t go to work… It’s constant psychological pressure, and it affects the whole community,” he said. Bermudez describes himself as a Republican — “I’m a Republican because I come from a country where communism, socialism took hold, and I don’t want to continue with that ideology” — but said he does not agree with “what the extreme wing of the party is doing now.”

Even elected Republicans in the area are sounding the alarm. Doral Councilman Rafael Pineyro, himself a Republican, told AFP he sees the crackdown’s impact not only in his city but across southern Florida. “There’s uncertainty, there’s fear… It’s not just Doral, it’s the whole Latino community in South Florida that’s affected,” Pineyro said from his office at city hall. He questioned the Trump administration’s immigration strategy directly: “This isn’t right, because this isn’t what was promised in 2024 when we were talking about (deporting) criminals.” He warned that the GOP’s gains among Florida’s Cuban, Venezuelan, and other Latino voters could be undone: “That opportunity has been slipping away more and more in recent months because of bad decisions, in my view, specifically when it comes to the economy and immigration.”

Residents told AFP that, like communities around the country, Doral now runs message chains alerting one another to the presence of immigration agents or to someone being detained — a grassroots early-warning system born of the deportation news cycle.

Election Polls: How Fast the Latino Vote Is Moving

The anecdotes from Doral line up with a dramatic story the election polls have been telling. A New York Times and Siena College poll conducted in September found that 66 percent of Hispanic respondents disapproved of Trump’s performance, and 78 percent said they would prefer Democrats take control of Congress from Republicans.

The deterioration has been swift. A CNN analysis published October 19, 2026, citing an NBC News/Telemundo poll released this month, found Latino voters saying by a 24-point margin — 59 percent to 35 percent — that they would prefer Democrats win control of Congress in November. In that poll, just 27 percent of Latino voters approve of Trump’s job performance overall, with an even smaller 20 percent approving of his handling of the cost of living. For a president whose 2024 coalition was built on economic promises, the cost-of-living number is the more dangerous one.

A separate Pew Research Center survey, which queried an unusually large group of about 5,000 Latino respondents, allowed for rare subgroup detail: 73 percent of Latinas disapproved of Trump’s performance, as did 67 percent of Latino men. Three-fourths of Latino Catholics and those unaffiliated with any religion disapproved, as did nearly three-fifths of Protestants. In 2024, Trump carried a solid majority of Latino men without a college degree; Pew found that two-thirds of them now disapprove of his performance. On the economy, 61 percent of Latinos said his policies were worsening conditions — four times the 15 percent who said he was improving them — and about 7 in 10 said he was doing too much to deport undocumented immigrants.

The Trump approval rating erosion among Latinos began soon after he took office in January — as it did with other groups where he notched his most notable 2024 advances, such as younger and Black men. But the Latino slide has been among the steepest.

Immigration News: From 45% to a Red Sinkhole

The scale of the reversal is what makes this immigration news story so consequential. In 2024, Trump’s gains with Latinos were difficult to overstate. Exit polls put his share of the Latino vote at roughly 45 percent — more than any previous Republican presidential nominee — a substantial gain from about 35 percent in 2020, which was itself an improvement from roughly 3 in 10 in 2016. He won a majority of Latino men, something no previous Republican nominee had done, and improved dramatically across subgroups: Mexican Americans in the Southwest, Dominicans and Puerto Ricans in the Northeast, Central and South Americans in South Florida.

The 2024 campaign’s message was mass deportation — but framed as a historic operation targeting hardened criminals. That framing is exactly what Latino voters like Perez and Pineyro say they heard, and what they now say has been violated. With over a thousand people being taken into immigration custody every day, according to AFP’s reporting, many Latino voters feel misled: the dragnet looks very different from the promise.

“They’re moving away from Republicans for the same reason they moved away from Democrats two years ago,” Republican strategist Mike Madrid told CNN, describing a “dealignment” in which large shares of Latino voters hold no party loyalty and punish whoever is in power. “Latinos are now a true swingy vote,” he said, “but they are not voting for aspirational, positive reasons; they are punishing whoever is in power.” Democratic strategist Tory Gavito, who leads the progressive donor network Way to Win, said Latino voters believed Trump’s pledge to “shake things up” in 2024 and were willing to ignore his harsh immigration rhetoric because they didn’t see themselves among the targets. Now, she said, “they don’t see prices getting lowered, they don’t see an increase in jobs, and many mixed-status families are living in fear.” Her summary of the moment: “I don’t think we’re in a blue wave. I think we’re in a red sinkhole.”

Deportation News: The Cracks Inside the Party

The deportation news has already produced open Republican dissent. In September, Representative Maria Elvira Salazar — a Latina Republican lawmaker facing a competitive reelection race in Florida — recorded a 30-second ad, in English and Spanish, in front of the White House warning the president directly. “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Salazar said. “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.” Salazar, who represents a heavily Latino Miami district including Little Havana, faces a challenge from Democrat Eliott Rodriguez; nonpartisan analysts rate the race as likely Republican but competitive, and Democrats see it as a pickup opportunity. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The enforcement campaign’s toll on public opinion extends beyond Latinos. An analysis by the Cook Political Report found Texas Hispanic voters are roughly 66 percent less likely to back a candidate supporting Trump’s immigration policies, and more than one in three Trump voters say that while they support the goals of the mass deportation campaign, they disapprove of how it is being implemented. A ProPublica investigation found that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been held by immigration agents — including some Americans who were tackled, beaten, or shocked with Tasers by federal officers — incidents that have fueled protests in cities including Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

Earlier this year, the administration briefly directed ICE to pause worksite raids on farms, hotels, and restaurants after business leaders warned that enforcement was removing long-tenured workers who were difficult to replace — a pause that was short-lived before enforcement resumed more broadly across industries. The Minneapolis episode, in which federal agents killed two U.S. citizens earlier this year, drew national backlash and prompted the administration to scale back some highly visible operations, though deportations have remained high.

2026 Midterms: What Comes Next for the Latino Vote

With the midterm elections set for November 3, both parties are treating the Latino electorate as a live battleground rather than a settled coalition. The likelihood of another large swing is showing up far beyond South Florida: from California’s Central Valley, to House battles in Arizona and Colorado, to a Senate contest in Georgia, where the Latino population is rapidly growing, a big shift in the Latino electorate could tilt a number of outcomes on Election Day.

For Republicans, the problem is twofold. The economic frustrations that helped propel Trump to victory are now fueling dissatisfaction with Republicans who fully control the federal government — only 20 percent of Latino voters approve of the president’s handling of the cost of living. And the immigration enforcement that was meant to energize the base has instead generated the kind of images — workplace raids, community alert chains, grieving families — that opposition ads are built from.

Madrid’s warning cuts against both parties: “Neither party is providing a compelling vision or results-oriented policy for working-class people.” In his telling, Latino voters are an emergent populism that is anti-establishment in both directions — punishing Democrats in 2024, punishing Republicans now. What happens on November 3 will test whether the “Anyone but Trump” sentiment AFP found in Doral has spread into a durable realignment, or whether it fades into the familiar midterm pattern of a swing vote swinging back.

One thing the Doral interviews make clear: the voters Trump gained in 2024 do not consider themselves lost causes for either party. They consider themselves customers of a deal they believe was broken. “This isn’t what was promised,” as Pineyro put it — and in a midterm election decided by margins, broken promises in communities like Doral are exactly the kind of thing that decides who controls Congress.

Source: AFP