Arellano: Trump was winning with Latinos. Now, his cruelty is derailing him

Published On: July 5, 2025

One of the most reputable polling organizations in the nation, particularly with regard to Latinos, is the Pew Research Center. It released results last week that ought to have been a victory lap for Donald Trump and his tumultuous relationship with the largest minority in America.

Pew reports that Trump received 48% of Latino voters in the 2024 presidential election, which is a 12 percentage point increase over his 2020 performance and the greatest proportion ever recorded by a Republican presidential nominee.

Ten percent of Trump’s coalition was Latino, up from seven percent four years prior. It was the first time that Latino men sided with a Republican. Even more than Latino men, Trump increased his support among Latinas, who have traditionally been viewed by Democratic leaders as a safeguard against their macho Trumpster relatives, by 13 points.

These statistics confirm what I have been saying for years: that even in blue California, Latinos were growing weary of illegal immigration and fed up with a Democratic Party that was too preoccupied with policies that didn’t improve their lives. Because Latinos assimilate like any other immigrants, if not more so, they were fed up with the Democratic status quo, which provided Trump an opportunity to win over Latino supporters despite his years of disparaging Mexico and Central American countries. They were prepared to risk their lives against an unpredictable strongman who resembled those from their ancestral homelands.

According to Pew, one of Trump’s most impressive achievements is so improbable that professional Latinos have long written off his election victories as exaggerations.His deportation fleet’s bigoted sails might have been blown by those votes at this very moment.

Trump only needed to follow through on his campaign pledges to target the millions of illegal immigrants who entered the country under the Biden administration. Take advantage of arrivals in regions of the nation where Latinos are still a significant minority and lack an organizing tradition. Democrats and immigrant rights advocates were challenged to stand up for the drug traffickers, child molesters, and killers Trump promised to target in his roundups. To increase the record-breaking number of Latino GOP lawmakers in California and beyond, conduct raids equivalent to a gradual boil through 2026.

None of it has been done by Trump. Instead, he chose to slam his immigration hammer into the U.S.’s Latino city, Los Angeles.

Rather than targeting the worst of the worst, La Migrahas captured both citizens and noncitizens. Nearly 70% of people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement between June 1 and June 10 had no prior records, according to a Times analysis of data acquired by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley Law.

Agents are apprehending migrants who have been in the country for decades rather than harassing recent arrivals with little connection to the country. As their supervisors boast about it on social media, masked men have flung around their power like secret police in a third-rate dictatorship, rather than conducting operations that garnered little attention, as was the case under Presidents Obama and Biden and even during Trump’s first term. The Trump administration has crammed people into detention centers like canned fish and treated the Constitution as a suggestion rather than the law of the land, rather than treating them with some dignity and giving them an opportunity to challenge their deportations.

For Trump, cruelty has always been the main focus. However, he runs the risk of repeating the error that California Republicans committed in the 1980s and 1990s: destroying a political victory they achieved with Latinos.

The 40th anniversary of the last amnesty for illegal immigrants will be celebrated next year. Ronald Reagan, who famously claimed that Latinos were Republicans but were unaware of it, signed it into law. The Great Communicator understood that promoting meat-and-potato issues without condemning them was the greatest way to win them around to the GOP.

During the so-called “Decade of the Hispanic,” Republicans may have been able to win over Latinos with the 1986 amnesty. Instead, claiming that these alleged invaders were ruining the Golden State, California legislators started to advocate for xenophobic laws that would prohibit drivers’ licenses for undocumented immigrants and store signs in other languages. Proposition 187, which attempted to make life difficult for undocumented immigrants and was ultimately ruled unlawful, was passed in 1994 as a result of this movement.

We are all aware of how that transpired.

The undocumented immigrants from southern Mexico and Central America who arrived after our parents were radicalized have little in common with my generation of Mexican Americans, who are well on their way to assimilation.We felt no need to display the Stars and Stripes that we held close to our hearts, so we proudly hoisted the Mexican flag. We sent Republicans into the political equivalent of the La Brea Tar Pits and assisted Democrats in gaining a supermajority in California.

It was like Proposition 187 all over again in June when I covered anti-ICE demonstrations outside a federal building in Santa Ana. The flags of El Salvador, Guatemala, and other Latin American nations flew alongside the Mexican tricolor once more. Teenagers and young adults, who I believe will be the future generation of activists, made up the majority of protestors. They had no affiliation with the immigrant rights organizations.

I also got to know people like Giovanni Lopez. Wearing a white poncho that portrayed the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, the 38-year-old Santa Ana homeowner blew a loud plastic horn for a good hour, as if he were Joshua attempting to tear down the walls of Jericho. He had never protested before.

During a brief pause, Lopez stated, “I’m all for them deporting the criminals.” However, they’re not doing that. It’s wrong that they’re getting ordinary folks. Regularraza needs your support.

Since then, I’ve watched my social media feeds turn into a neighborhood CNN, with people posting videos of themselves grabbing people and passersby not hesitating to reprimand them. In other reels, buyers purchase the goods of street sellers for the day in order to be secure at home. The change has also affected me personally: a few weeks ago, my brother and dad went to a No Kings rally in Anaheim without alerting me or each other in advance.

You can tell the president is having a bad time with Latinos when rancho libertarians like them get so mad that they publicly retaliate.

Return to Pew. Nearly half of Latinos are concerned that someone they know may be deported, according to a different survey that was published last month. With only 31% of Latino Republicans supporting Trump’s promise to deport all undocumented immigrants, compared to 61% of white Republicans, the fear is evident even among this group.

Those GOP skeptics include state senator Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh and California assemblymember Suzette Martinez Valladares. They signed a letter from Republican lawmakers in California to Trump requesting that his migra squads concentrate on real bad guys and, if feasible, refrain from conducting sweeping raids that cause anxiety and disturb the work environment.

When proud conservatives like Ochoa Bogh and Valladares, who is co-chair of the California Hispanic Legislative Caucus,are disturbed by Trump s deportation deluge, you know the president s blowing it with Latinos.

Yet Trump is still at it. This week, the Department of Justice announcedit was suing the L.A. City Council and Mayor Karen Bass, arguing that their sanctuary city policy was thwarting the will of the American people regarding deportations.

By picking on the City of Angels, Trump is letting us set an example for everyone else because no one gets down for immigrant rights like L.A., or createsLatino political power like we do. Communities will be prepared when large raids occur elsewhere.

Many Latinos voted for Trump because they felt that Democrats forgot them. Now that Trump is paying attention to us, more and more of us are realizing that his intentions were never good and carrying our passports because you just never know.

You blew it, Donald but what else is new?