The Pew Analysis Heart is likely one of the most trusted polling corporations within the nation, particularly in terms of Latinos. Final week, it printed findings that ought to have been a victory lap for Donald Trump and his tortuous relationship with America’s largest minority.
In response to Pew, Trump gained 48% of Latino voters within the 2024 presidential election — the best share ever recorded by a Republican presidential nominee and a 12 share level enchancment from his 2020 exhibiting.
Latinos made up 10% of Trump’s coalition, up from 7% 4 years in the past. Latino males went with a Republican for the primary time. Trump even improved his share of help amongst Latinas — lengthy seen by Democratic leaders as a bulwark towards their macho Trumpster family members — by a 13-point margin, a swing even higher than that of Latino males.
These stats show what I’ve been warning about for years: that Latinos had been souring on unlawful immigration — even in blue California — and tiring of a Democratic Get together too targeted on insurance policies that weren’t bettering their lives. This gave Trump an opportunity to win over Latino voters, regardless of his years-long bloviations towards Mexico and Central American nations, as a result of Latinos — who assimilate like every other immigrants, if no more so — had been performed with the Democratic established order. They had been prepared to take a danger on an erratic strongman resembling these from their ancestral lands.
Pew’s findings verify one in all Trump’s most exceptional accomplishments — one so unlikely that skilled Latinos lengthy dismissed his election positive factors as exaggerations. These voters might have been the winds blowing the xenophobic sails of his deportation fleet proper now.
All Trump needed to do was keep on with his marketing campaign guarantees and goal the thousands and thousands of immigrants who got here in illegally through the Biden years. Decide off newcomers in areas of the nation the place Latinos stay a large minority and don’t have a practice of organizing. Dare Democrats and immigrant rights activists to defend the kid molesters, drug sellers and murderers Trump vowed to prioritize in his roundups. Conduct raids like a sluggish boil by means of 2026, to construct on the record-breaking variety of Latino GOP legislators in California and past.
Trump has performed none of that. He as an alternative determined to smash his immigration hammer on Los Angeles, the Latino capital of the U.S.
As an alternative of going after the worst of the worst, la migra has nabbed residents and noncitizens alike. A Instances evaluation of information obtained by the Deportation Information Undertaking at UC Berkeley Regulation discovered that just about 70% of these arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement from June 1 by means of June 10 had no legal convictions.
As an alternative of harassing newcomers with few ties to the U.S., brokers are sweeping up migrants who’ve been right here for many years. As an alternative of doing operations that drew little consideration, as occurred below Presidents Obama and Biden — and even throughout Trump’s first time period — masked males have thrown round their energy like secret police in a third-rate dictatorship whereas their bosses crow about it on social media. As an alternative of treating individuals with some dignity and permitting them an opportunity to contest their deportations, the Trump administration has stuffed them into detention services like tinned fish and handled the Structure like a suggestion as an alternative of the legislation of the land.
The cruelty has at all times been the purpose for Trump. However he dangers making the identical mistake that California Republicans made within the Nineteen Eighties and Nineties: taking a political win they earned with Latinos and turning it into trash.
Fullerton School pupil David Rojas calls on Fullerton Excessive college students throughout road to affix a protest towards Proposition 187 on Nov. 3, 1994. The poll initiative sought to make life depressing for undocumented immigrants however as an alternative modified California politics.
(Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Instances)
Subsequent yr will mark the fortieth anniversary of the final amnesty for immigrants within the nation illegally. It was signed into legislation by Ronald Reagan, who famously mentioned that Latinos had been Republicans who didn’t understand it but. The Nice Communicator knew that one of the simplest ways to deliver them into the GOP was to push meat-and-potato points whereas not demonizing them.
The 1986 amnesty might have been a second for Republicans to win over Latinos through the so-called Decade of the Hispanic. As an alternative, California politicians started to push for xenophobic bans, together with on retailer indicators in different languages and driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, arguing that these supposed invaders had been destroying the Golden State. This motion culminated within the passage of Proposition 187 in 1994, which sought to make life depressing for undocumented immigrants and was finally declared unconstitutional.
Everyone knows how that labored out.
My era of Mexican Individuals — properly on our approach to assimilation, feeling little in frequent with the undocumented immigrants from southern Mexico and Central America who arrived after our mother and father — as an alternative turned radicalized. We waved the Mexican flag with satisfaction, discovering no must brandish the Stars and Stripes that we saved in our hearts. We helped Democrats set up a supermajority in California and tossed Republicans into the political equal of the La Brea Tar Pits.
After I lined anti-ICE protests in June exterior a federal constructing in Santa Ana, it felt just like the Proposition 187 years over again. The Mexican tricolor flew once more, this time joined by the flags of El Salvador, Guatemala and different Latin American international locations. Nearly all of protesters had been teenagers and younger adults with no ties to the immigrant rights teams I do know — they would be the subsequent era of activists.
I additionally met of us comparable to Giovanni Lopez. For a superb hour, the 38-year-old Santa Ana resident, carrying a white poncho depicting the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, blew a loud plastic horn as if he had been Joshua making an attempt to knock down the partitions of Jericho. It was his first protest.
“I’m all for them deporting the criminals,” Lopez mentioned throughout a brief break. “But that’s not what they’re doing…. They’re getting regular people, and that’s not right. You gotta stand up for regular raza.”
Since then, I’ve seen my social media feeds rework right into a barrio CNN, as individuals share movies of l. a. migra grabbing individuals and onlookers unafraid to inform them off. Different reels function prospects shopping for out road distributors for the day to allow them to stay safely at house. The transformation has even hit house: My dad and brother went to a “No Kings” rally in Anaheim a number of weeks in the past — with out telling one another, or me, beforehand.
When rancho libertarians like them are offended sufficient to publicly combat again, you recognize the president is blowing it with Latinos.
Folks collect on Sundown Boulevard and Vin Scully Avenue to protest towards immigration raids in Los Angeles in addition to the Dodgers on June 21, 2025.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Instances)
Again to Pew. One other report launched final month discovered that just about half of Latinos are apprehensive that somebody they know would possibly get deported. The concern is actual, even amongst Latino Republicans, with simply 31% approving of Trump’s plan to deport all undocumented immigrants, in contrast with 61% of white Republicans.
California Assemblymember Suzette Martinez Valladares and state Sen. Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh are amongst these GOP skeptics. They signed a letter to Trump from California Republican legislators asking that his migra squads concentrate on precise dangerous hombres and “when possible, avoid the kinds of sweeping raids that instill fear and disrupt the workplace.”
When proud conservatives like Ochoa Bogh and Valladares, who’s co-chair of the California Hispanic Legislative Caucus, are disturbed by Trump’s deportation deluge, you recognize the president’s blowing it with Latinos.
But Trump continues to be at it. This week, the Division of Justice introduced it was suing the L.A. Metropolis Council and Mayor Karen Bass, arguing that their “sanctuary” metropolis coverage was thwarting “the will of the American people regarding deportations.”
By selecting on the Metropolis of Angels, Trump is letting us set an instance for everybody else — as a result of nobody will get down for immigrant rights like L.A., or creates Latino political energy like we do. When mass raids pop up elsewhere, communities will probably be prepared.
Many Latinos voted for Trump as a result of they felt that Democrats forgot them. Now that Trump is being attentive to us, increasingly of us are realizing that his intentions had been by no means good — and carrying our passports since you simply by no means know.
You blew it, Donald — however what else is new?
