One of the noteworthy features of the 2024 election was the deep inroads that Trump made into the traditionally Democratic voters in the Hispanic community.

The [Rio Grande] Valley, a longtime Democratic stronghold, has in recent years been used as evidence of Donald Trump and his maga movement’s appeal to nonwhite voters. In 2021, when Villalobos was elected, Republicans celebrated the win as a sign of good things to come. “Amazing news! McAllen, Texas is a major border town of 140,000 people. 85% Hispanic—and just elected a Republican mayor,” Steve Cortes, a former Trump adviser, posted on Twitter. “The macro realignment accelerates in South Texas, and elsewhere, as Hispanics rally to America First.” 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.”
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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 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.)

But Trump has declared war on the Hispanic community, targeting anyone of that heritage for harassment, detention, and deportation. ICE agents have focused their attentions on neighborhoods where they live and places where they congregate to find work and targeting anyone who happens to look Hispanic. This has resulted in many of them being afraid to go out anywhere or show up for work.

Roel Moreno, Jr., wore a black dress shirt with a gold saint’s medal pinned to the lapel. Moreno owns a company that does commercial and residential construction in the Valley. In the wake of the raids, he said, many of his employees were afraid to show up to work. “Most of the time, you have four to ten people at a home that’s being worked on, but right now we’re anywhere from zero to two. Yesterday, I only had two people working, and that’s because they were my friends, and they came down from Corpus to help me hang Sheetrock,” he told me. Moreno said that he called a worker and asked, “ ‘Hey, can you come to start a house?’ He’s, like, ‘Roel, I’m scared to go. I came over at the age of three—you know, DACA, but now DACA’s not even good.’ He’s, like, ‘My wife, my kids are here, my parents are here, my grandparents are here. If I get sent to Mexico, I have nowhere to go. This is home.’ ” Moreno added that, like many people in the Valley, he had “conservative values”: “We believe in family, God, preserving our property values, and protecting our people.” He declined to say whether the raids would have an impact on his politics. “I mean, I keep the faith strong. I believe that God created us all equally, and that things are going to get better,” he said. “We’re going to need to continue to extend our hands out to our friends and neighbors.”

NPR reports that because of fears of being randomly rounded up, members of the Hispanic community have gone to great lengths to avoid displaying any markers of who they are, just like people in other countries under the rule of despots and death squads who targeted minority ethnic groups.

On a very hot Sunday afternoon on the outskirts of Tampa, Florida, several immigrant families are standing outside an evangelical church. The men wear colorful shirts. The women – traditional Guatemalan embroidered dresses. Sunday service is over. These parishioners – about a dozen of them – are waiting for a ride home. Everyone here knows someone who has been stopped recently by Florida Highway Patrol and is now facing deportation. And so everyone knows that there are new rules for driving anywhere – to work, church or the supermarket. Rule No. 1, no foreign flags or Spanish language stickers or advertisements on the car.
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This is Ashley Ambrocio, age 19. She’s driving the parishioners home today. She’s a U.S. citizen, which makes people feel safer about her being behind the wheel. Rule No. 2 these days, drive with someone you know and trust. She moves on to Rule No. 3, no Spanish-language music.
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Rule No. 4, don’t drive white cargo vans, the ones typically used by workers. She says, they’re getting stopped a lot. Rule No. 5, she says, Don’t wear your work uniform or hat in your car. Don’t telegraph that you’re on your way to or from your cleaning, farming or construction job. But Maria, who owns a construction company, says, many immigrants are still too scared to drive to work.

I am reminded of the time in 1983 in Sri Lanka when members of the minority ethnic Tamil group that I belonged to were being targeted for death by mobs of the majority Sinhala community and they resorted to avoiding wearing any clothes or makeup or other markers that indicated their ethnicity or speaking in Tamil in public. It is a disgrace when people are forced to coneal their ethnicity. It was a shameful period for Sri Lanka then and is for the US now.

Needless to say, this has disrupted not just the lives of immigrants but also the region’s employers, with people not showing up for work.

But on the other hand, there is growing resistance, with ordinary people challenging the right of these masked, unidentified gangs to grab people.

Federal immigration agents seeking to detain a Honduran landscaper chased him into a Southern California surgical center and quickly found themselves in a tense standoff as clinic staff demanded to see identification and a warrant.

In a video clip of the Tuesday altercation that has spread on social media, Ontario Advanced Surgery Center staff in blue scrubs are heard telling an armed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent wearing a mask and bulletproof vest to let go of the man, who is crying and gasping for breath.

“Get your hands off of him. You don’t even have a warrant,” says one staff member, shielding the man from an immigration agent. “Let him go. You need to get out.”

Watch the video in the link. Of course, ICE is arguing that their agents were ‘assaulted’, their typical response whenever anyone challenges them, when the video clearly shows otherwise.

Communities are also now creating rapid response teams to quickly go to any area where ICE agents appear to try and overwhelm them with sheer numbers.

A confrontation erupted Thursday between protesters and federal officials carrying out a raid on a Southern California farm, with authorities throwing canisters that sprayed what looked like smoke into the air to disperse the crowd.

Vehicles from Border Patrol and U.S. Customs and Border Protection blocked the road in a largely agricultural area of Camarillo lined with fields and greenhouses. There were military-style vehicles and a helicopter flying overhead.

Television images showed dozens of demonstrators gathered on a road between fields where uniformed officers stood in a line across from them. In other images, white and green smoke can be seen as protesters retreat. Other images showed protesters shouting at agents wearing camouflage gear, helmets and gas masks. It wasn’t clear why the authorities threw the canisters or if they released chemicals like tear gas.

Trump’s policies are increasing support for immigrants, especially among Republicans.

Just months after President Donald Trump returned to office amid a wave of anti-immigration sentiment, the share of U.S. adults saying immigration is a “good thing” for the country has jumped substantially — including among Republicans, according to new Gallup polling.

About 8 in 10 Americans, 79%, say immigration is “a good thing” for the country today, an increase from 64% a year ago and a high point in the nearly 25-year trend. Only about 2 in 10 U.S. adults say immigration is a bad thing right now, down from 32% last year.
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In general, Americans’ views of immigration policies have shifted dramatically in the last year, the Gallup polling shows — including among Republicans, who have become much more content with immigration levels since Trump took office but who have also grown more supportive of pathways to citizenship for people in the country illegally.

The broader trend also shows that public opinion is generally much more favorable to immigrants than it was decades ago.

Americans’ more positive view on immigration is driven primarily by a shift among Republicans and independents.

About two-thirds of Republicans now say immigrants are “a good thing” for the country, up from 39% last year. And independents moved from about two-thirds last year to 80% this year.

You might think that support fro Trump would be cratering in the Hispanic community. But one poll found that Hispanic and Black support for Trump’s deportation policy has surged recently. However I had never heard of this polling outfit Cygnal. Other polls have shown a decrease in support.

I find it hard to believe that this war waged on the Hispanic community is not antagonizing them. Perhaps it is a sign of how once people have joined a cult, which is what Trumpism is, it is hard for them to leave.