Editor’s Note: A version of this op-ed appeared in the San Antonio Express-News.
For years, pundits insisted that Hispanic voters were a monolith on immigration — predictable, progressive and reliably Democratic.
The 2024 election shattered that myth.
Thousands of Hispanic voters — especially in Texas, Florida, Nevada and Arizona — backed President Donald Trump’s call for a secure border.
They were not confused. They were not voting against their interests. They were responding to a simple truth: Hispanic families want safety, order and a functioning immigration system just as much as anyone else.
Did the Trump administration make a critical miscalculation by assuming that support for a secure border automatically translated into support for sweeping, unforgiving interior immigration enforcement? It did.
Most polls show that Hispanic support for Trump’s immigration enforcement has dropped since the election, a difference that can change the outcome of future elections.
What Hispanic voters endorsed in 2024 was border security, not mass, indiscriminate interior immigration enforcement. They supported stopping cartel violence, reducing chaos at the border and restoring a sense of control.
They did not sign up for workplace raids, racial profiling or the detention of longtime residents with no criminal history. They did not expect reversals of asylum policies or pauses in visa processing for Caribbean and South American countries labeled “hostile” to the United States.
Yet that is precisely where federal enforcement has shifted, and Hispanic public opinion has shifted with it.
Across the country, Latino communities have watched immigration enforcement arrests rise sharply among people with no criminal records. Families who once believed enforcement would focus on dangerous offenders now see neighbors, co-workers and even U.S. citizens swept into a system that feels arbitrary and indiscriminate.
Roving patrols in unmarked vehicles, masked agents with guns and operations in everyday spaces have created an atmosphere of intimidation. The promise of law and order has morphed into a fear that anyone who looks Latino could be questioned, detained or mistakenly targeted while going to church, work or the grocery store.
So, it should surprise no one that Hispanic support for deportations has softened — not because Hispanics suddenly oppose border security, but because the enforcement they are witnessing bears little resemblance to the enforcement they believed they were promised.
Hispanics still want a secure border. They just do not want their communities treated as collateral damage.
Republicans who believed they could expand their Hispanic coalition through aggressive enforcement are discovering the limits of that strategy. Democrats, meanwhile, misread the 2024 results and assumed Hispanics had abandoned humanitarian concerns. Both parties misunderstood the core principle guiding Hispanic opinion: fairness.
If either party wants to win Hispanic trust heading into the midterms, the path is clear. Stop treating immigration as a binary choice between open borders and mass deportations.
Hispanic voters supported border security in 2024 because they believed it would restore order to a system that felt chaotic and unmanageable, but by 2026, many are turning away from the Trump administration’s immigration interior enforcement because it has produced a different kind of disorder — one that reaches into their own homes, workplaces and neighborhoods.
More Hispanics support a pathway for those who have remained in the United States for years to become legal residents. Increasingly, they include longtime residents who have built lives here, contributed to their communities and waited years for Congress to create a lawful pathway to citizenship.
This includes Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals participants, mixed-status families and parents who have raised U.S.-born children while navigating a system that has offered them no resolution.
The bipartisan bill introduced last year, the Dignity Act, can be a start to long overdue immigration reform.
The real question now is whether either political party will finally listen.
If Republicans and Democrats want to earn the trust of Hispanics and keep it, they must deliver on the two issues that matter to our communities: real border security and a fair, compassionate pathway for long-term immigrants to gain citizenship.
That is what most Hispanic voters want for America, and it is what neither party can afford to ignore.
