There’s been a clear vibe shift among the MAGA Latino community since Donald Trump’s election victory in 2024.
Back then, after Trump won a substantial portion of Latino voters, there were signals — such as “Cancion de Trump,” the Latin, pro-Trump ditty — that seemed to indicate a rising Latino MAGA movement. Or, at minimum, a sufficiently successful rebrand of Trump — who launched his political career by smearing Mexican immigrants — into a friend of American Latinos.
But that increasingly seems to have been a brief blip, as Trump’s support among Latinos now appears to have cratered, according to recent polling data. Like most of America, Latinos evidently aren’t too keen on Trump’s destructive economic policies or his racist immigration crackdown.
Several prominent MAGA Latinos have sounded the alarm for Republicans, but not everyone wants to hear what they have to say.
On Tuesday, The New York Times quoted Florida state Sen. Ileana Garcia, founder of Latinas for Trump, as saying Republicans will “lose the midterm elections because of Stephen Miller,” Trump’s deputy chief of staff who is widely seen as an architect of the immigration crackdown.
Garcia got into a social media spat on Tuesday with Katie Miller, Stephen’s wife. In a social media post, Katie Miller claimed, without evidence, that Garcia had been fired in Trump’s first term for not showing up to work.
Garcia then threw a little mud of her own:
@KatieMillerInvite me to your podcast so we can have a candid discussion about what truly transpired and how you labeled your then-boyfriend a racist when you were upset that he treated you poorly and me as a mere token Hispanic for the administration. Let’s discuss who was responsible for the leaks in the White House, and how you helped carve the floor out from under then-Secretary (Kirstjen) Nielsen.
Before we go any further, let me be clear that we have no idea whether any of these claims are true. The point is that they are pointed and personal, and they show the real tensions that Trump’s aggressive anti-immigrant agenda is creating within the MAGA movement.
Another Florida Republican, Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, also sounded the alarm on Tuesday. “I warned about this months ago, before the headlines caught up. Today we are watching it unfold in real time,” she said. “Hispanics are leaving the GOP in large numbers, and pretending otherwise won’t fix it. As Republicans, we must reverse course and act now.” The replies to her tweet — and the resulting reactions from some prominent voices in MAGA world — suggest that few are interested in changing support, even if that undermines the coalition that helped elect Trump in 2024. That may not matter to Trump, who isn’t going to be on the ballot, but it should be a wake-up call for the Republicans who will be.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
