President-elect Donald Trump did what once seemed impossible: According to NBC News exit polls, after running a campaign promising the mass deportation of undocumented migrants, he won 45% of the Latino vote. That’s the highest-ever tally for a Republican presidential candidate.
Like voters of all stripes who were frustrated with inflation, Latino voters kept listing the economy as the top issue and believed Trump to be better on that issue.
Extreme positions to “seal the border,” “stop the migrant invasion,” and “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history” rightly sounded threatening to many U.S. Latinos, but others looked past the Trump campaign’s violent anti-immigrant rhetoric and focused on the Republican’s promises to “make America affordable again.” Like voters of all stripes who were frustrated with inflation, Latino voters in pre-election polls kept listing the economy as the top concern and believed Trump to be better on that issue.And, yes, many Latinos also believed Trump would be better at securing the border and controlling immigration.
Over the summer, CBS News/YouGov poll reported that 53% of registered Latino voters favored Trump’s plan of mass deportation. No one wanted to believe it, but that finding was consistent with other data. Pew Research reported that 76% of Latinos thought the border was a “crisis” or a “major problem,” with 74 % saying that the government was doing a bad job in addressing it.
History can help explain this. As Russell Contreras wrote this week for Axios, there have always been anti-immigrant sentiments in Latino communities. “During the Mexican American civil rights movement of the 1950s,” Contreras wrote, “Latino civil rights leaders often pressed for deportations and limited migration over fear immigrants were depressing wages and taking jobs from poor Hispanic workers.” Consider the Queens voter who was born in Ecuador and voted for Trump on Tuesday. She told Documented, “I know that they have come to settle but there are also many people who have come here and have destroyed the city and the country in general.”
Trump exploited that “us versus them” mentality that has long existed among Latinos in this country, especially among those who are more assimilated, more English-dominant and who were born in the U.S. He also masked his fearmongering of Latinos seeking entry into the country with praise for many Latinos who are already here. “The Latino vote is so incredible because they’re unbelievable people. They have incredible skills, incredible energy, and they’re very entrepreneurial,” he said during a Univision interview last year.
According to a September Pew Research Center study of Latino voters and the presidential race, “70% of Latinos who back Trump say their choice is more a vote for Trump than against Harris” and listed the economy (93%), violent crime (73%) and immigration (71%) as their top issues.
Horacio Perdomo, a Latino voter in Florida, told me via email Thursday that “Trump did not put us in a box. Simply, his policies appealed to Latinos.”
Well, not all of them.
“I remember when Donald Trump first came into power, every immigrant in my community was afraid to get picked up by immigration officials,” an activist told The Guardian this week. “And I know now that there’s a lot of people scared, asking themselves: ‘What am I going to do?’” Harris confronted the mass deportation issue head-on and correctly framed it as a policy that threatens families and undermines American values. According to the American Immigration Council, the financial burden of mass deportation could reach hundreds of billions of dollars, while the heartbreaking sight of families being torn apart starkly contradicts the ideals of community and compassion. Harris confronted the mass deportation issue head-on and correctly framed it as a policy that threatens families and undermines American values. It was the right thing for her to clearly articulate these impacts, but when the Biden-Harris administration became a “Republican-lite” version of immigration enforcement only to change its position again after progressive Democrats pushed for more welcoming policies, it felt wishy-washy and politically calculating. Latinos had moved to the right on immigration, and Democrats could no longer contain that. The one hope the Biden-Harris administration offered before the election, a plan to make a pathway to citizenship more attainable for undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens, was struck down by a federal judge two days after the election.Trump effectively neutralized his plan of mass deportation by characterizing himself as the working-class populist candidate who would create jobs, reduce taxes, and promote small business growth. That appealed to the entrepreneurial spirit within the community that he identified. This dual approach allowed him to maintain support even among those who might have otherwise opposed his harsh immigration stance, as economic concerns took precedence in the minds of voters facing daily financial pressures. This was particularly true for third- and fourth-generation Latinos who aren’t “very tied to the immigration experience,” according to Latino political consultant Mike Madrid, from a local interview. “And when they hear regularly that immigration, especially from the Democratic Party, is a key issue, it’s having the reverse effect of actually alienating these voters and pushing them to this economic pocketbook voter, this economic populist place. And Donald Trump represents the most populist candidate in the race and is winning more of their votes.” Despite many expecting Trump’s strategy with Latino voters to fail, it proved effective. It might sound hard to believe, but this is where Latino voters are in 2024. For those who will be on the front lines fighting back against increased deportations, their work may feel all the more difficult given that so many Latinos essentially voted for them.
Julio Ricardo Varela is the founder of "The Latino Newsletter" and co-editor of "Pressing Issues from Free Press." 
