Trump Promised Latino Voters Prosperity And Respect—Then Sent High Prices And ICE Instead

The Backlash & Anti-Red Wave Begins In The Rio Grande Valley

Basically, all of the congressional districts in the country with big Hispanic populations moved in favor of Trump between 2020 and 2024— some drastically so. Take these dozen Hispanic-majority districts:

• CA-40— 87.1% Hispanic (Trump 48.0% in 2020, 49.5% in 2024)

• TX- 34— 84.5% Hispanic (Trump 41.8% in 2020, 51.8% in 2024)

• TX 16— 80.0% Hispanic (Trump 31.5% in 2020, 41.4% in 2024)

• TX-15— 78.0% Hispanic (Trump 51.0% in 2020, 58.5% in 2024)

• TX-28— 74.0% Hispanic (Trump 45.9% in 2020, 53.2% in 2024)

• FL-26— 72.0% Hispanic (Trump 58.9% in 2020, 67.2% in 2024

• FL-27— 74.0% Hispanic (Trump 49.9% in 2020, 56.9% in 2024

• CA-21— 71.0% Hispanic (Trump 38.8% in 2020, 46.8% in 2024

• TX-23— 70.0% Hispanic (Trump 52.9% in 2020, 57.3% in 2024

• CA-44— 69.0% Hispanic (Trump 24.7% in 2020, 31.5% in 2024

• NY-15— 65.0% Hispanic (Trump 14.4% in 2020, 25.3% in 2024)

• NM-02— 52% Hispanic (Trump 46.1% in 2020, 49.9% in 2024)

These are all traditionally blue districts— or were. Some have flipped and the ones that still are blue, won’t be much longer if this trend continues. Right now though, it doesn’t look like the trend will continue. On Monday, Rachel Monroe looked into it in south Texas and noted that the red wave is cresting… or crashing.  She began in McAllen, (a city split between Monica De La Cruz’s 15th district and Vicente Gonzalez’s 34th district), respectively R+7 and even. Trump won both last year. McAllen is located in the Rio Grande Valley, “a longtime Democratic strongholdwith an 85% Hispanic population— and a Republican mayor. “In last year’s Presidential election, Trump won every county in the Valley, including one where Hillary Clinton had beat him by forty points, in 2016. McAllen had the second-biggest shift in party share of any large city in the nation, trailing only Laredo, another Texas border community. ‘In the Rio Grande Valley, the Red Wave Makes Landfall,’ the Texas Observer declared, calling the 2024 election a ‘bloodbath’ and wondering whether Texas Democrats were ‘doomed.’”

But Trump’s tariff policies have put economic strain on a region that’s heavily dependent on trade with Mexico. Then, in mid-June, Trump posted on Truth Social that, “by notice of this TRUTH,” ICE officers were ordered to “do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.” In attempting to meet a quota of thousands of deportations a day, the Trump Administration has targeted cities run by Democrats, most notably Los Angeles. But Texas has not been spared, despite Governor Greg Abbott’s crucial role in helping to get Trump elected. McAllen is a city with roughly the same percentage of noncitizens as Los Angeles. Raids have been reported at night clubs, restaurants, and immigration hearings in the area. When I visited a popular flea-market complex, it was unusually subdued; it had been raided recently, a plant vender told me. Since then, he estimated, traffic had decreased by ninety per cent. The wide-reaching impact of the raids is making some Republicans concerned that, as [McAllen Mayor] Villalobos told me, “we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.”

Last month, at an event in San Antonio hosted by the South Texas Business Partnership, Villalobos vowed to “ruffle feathers” about the raids. “Supposedly, they were going to be deporting murderers, rapists, criminals. That’s not what’s going on,” he said. Instead, “it’s like a dragnet— it’s going to affect us all.”

… Villalobos, who is fifty-nine, has a story that’s broadly common to many of his generation in the Valley. The son of migrant workers, he started picking onions and cucumbers alongside his parents when he was in first grade. His older brother, the first person in the family to graduate high school, “opened the door,” Villalobos said; both brothers eventually earned law degrees. Villalobos typically voted for Democrats until around 2007, when he switched parties, a move largely motivated by “economic concerns,” he said. At the time, politics in the Valley were dominated by a powerful Democratic Party machine. When Villalobos served as the chair of the local chapter of the Republican Party, he said, “we would get clobbered no matter what”; in 2012, Barack Obama won more than seventy per cent of the vote in Hidalgo County.

Republican gains in the Valley are the result of overlapping forces. The Valley’s population tends to be patriotic and religious, with relatively lower rates of educational attainment. Republicans touted their support for law enforcement and oil and gas— significant sources of employment in the area— while local Democrats were increasingly seen as complacent, and in some cases [the Cuellar family] corrupt. In 2022, McAllen’s congressional district, which had been held by Democrats for more than a century, elected its first Republican. (The district had been redrawn after the 2020 census to make it more favorable to Republicans.)

… As mayor, Villalobos has largely avoided culture-war posturing, and he prickled at the common right-wing characterization of the Texas border as a lawless zone. “You’d think there were bandidos running around here with guns,” he said. “Even under the previous Administration, our area wasn’t chaotic.” Now he feared for the local economy. “We have two international bridges, and the bridge crossings are down twenty-five per cent since around a month ago. With sales tax, we’ve been breaking records for the past few years— then, this past month, it went down. Restaurants don’t have the employees. I always knew, of course, we have people who are not here legally, and I guess maybe we have a little more than I thought,” he said. “We know that our population is getting older. We know that the birth rates are getting lower. We need people. And sometimes people get angry when I say this, but it’s true: the work ethic of a lot of American people is not what it was, starting with my kids. They’re not out there working in the fields. They’re never going to do that.”

Local activism against the federal immigration raids has been growing. In February, a lively and well-attended protest march took over the streets of downtown McAllen; a news site compared it to a celebration after a high-school-football victory. “It’s a lot of new people who are showing up, people who have not typically participated in these events,” Michael Mireles, the civic-engagement director for lupe, a nonprofit group that supports low-income community organizing, said. “And you have elected officials who are speaking out for the first time.” (Mireles added that he finds it “frustrating” that leaders are framing the issue mostly in economic terms. “People are not willing to take a moral lens on the issue because they don’t want to come off as far left or something,” he said.)

… Eric said that he doubted the raids would change the minds of the many people he knew who’d voted for Trump. “But everybody’s thinking about it,” he said. “Small companies, big companies, even our farmers. Because I’m not going to wake myself up at no 4 a.m. to go work the fields.”

The Republican surge in the Rio Grande Valley and in Hispanic-heavy districts across the country wasn’t inevitable— and I don’t expect it to be permanent. Many Latinos took a chance on Trumpism because it promised prosperity, order and respect. What they’re getting instead is economic pain, social disruption, racism, xenophobia and open hostility. Tariffs that hurt border economies, mass deportations that hollow out neighborhoods and labor forces and a party leadership increasingly obsessed with cruelty for its own sake— it’s no wonder local Republicans like Villalobos are warning that the GOP is “shooting itself in the foot.” They are.

The shift toward Trump wasn’t ideological— it was aspirational. But Trump has now made clear that what he’s offering is not a seat at the table, but a target on the backs of their families and neighbors. The economy is deteriorating under the weight of his policies, and the immigration raids are not just scaring the undocumented, they’re brutalizing entire communities. Voters in places like McAllen, nor in Bakersfield, The Bronx or even in Miami, didn’t sign up for this.

If the DCCC ceased to exist— or at least ceased to exist as a function of the New Dems— Republican incumbents Monica De La Cruz (TX), David Valadao (CA), Juan Ciscomani (AZ), Young Kim (CA), Ken Calvert (CA), Eli Crane (AZ) and Maria Salazar (FL) and maybe even Tony Gonzales and Carlos Gimenez (FL) would all be underdogs in their reelection efforts, largely because Hispanic voters. But luckily for these Republicans, the DCCC isn’t going anywhere and Suzan DelBene will be steering it right into an iceberg like she did last year. The only headway the GOP is likely to make in a blue district is in TX-28, where the Democrats should have retired criminal congressman Henry Cuellar long ago... but doubled down even after he was indicted.