Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, R-Florida, has made waves by publicly breaking with President Donald Trump over immigration.
"Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far," Salazar says in a new campaign ad. "The same Hispanics that helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today."
In 2024, voters broadly trusted Republicans to handle illegal immigration. Through incompetence and cruelty, the Trump administration has lost that goodwill. The last election showed Republicans have a path forward on immigration. But to take it, they need to ditch the cruel memes and aggressive tactics that have plagued Trump's second term.
Salazar is right: Hispanics were a major part of Trump's 2024 victory. According to Pew
Research Center, the president nearly tied former Vice President Kamala Harris among Hispanic voters, a group former President Joe Biden won by 25 percentage points in 2020.
Since then, Trump's gains among Hispanics have evaporated. In February 2025, according to Pew, 93% of Hispanics who voted for Trump approved of the job he was doing. By April of this year, just 66% did. Over the same stretch, his approval among all Hispanic adults fell from 36% to 22%, while among non-Hispanic adults, it slipped from 49% to 37%.
The drop in support can be attributed largely to the administration's mishandling of immigration.
President Trump has fumbled immigration
The loudest headlines came out of Operation Metro Surge, the enforcement campaign that flooded Minneapolis with more than 3,000 federal agents last winter. The surge was driven more by political optics than by any strategic need, and it ended with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents shooting and killing two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Worse yet, administration officials then smeared Pretti. White House advisor Stephen Miller called him a "domestic terrorist," and the Department of Homeland Security claimed he "wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement." Bystander video showed he never drew his holstered pistol, which he was licensed to carry. Americans noticed: 61% of voters told Quinnipiac University pollsters that the administration had not given an honest account of the shooting.
By mid-February, Americans opposed ICE's tactics 62% to 31%, according to an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll. The backlash presumably helped cost Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem her job.
Since Noem's firing, ICE has largely faded from the headlines, as DHS Sec. Markwayne Mullin has worked to keep the agency out of the spotlight. That changed Sept. 20, when an ICE officer in Austin shot and wounded Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, a Venezuelan man with a deportation order who had fled a vehicle stop. The facts are still unclear, and there is no ICE body-camera footage of the shooting. After Minneapolis, Americans have little reason to give the administration the benefit of the doubt.
Beyond the heated environment it needlessly created in Minnesota, the administration has driven support away with its messaging.
Throughout Trump's second term, official government social media accounts have churned out memes, many of them about immigration. The White House posted a Studio Ghibli-style cartoon of a convicted drug trafficker weeping as she was arrested and has promised that "the memes will continue." Other posts have included mock travel ads for deportation flights, and the administration has co-opted endless TikTok memes and audio trends to celebrate deportations.
All of it undercuts the administration's posture on such a serious matter. Nobody has ever been won over to a policy by a cartoon of a crying deportee, criminal or not. All it does is deepen the divide.
Republicans have a way forward on immigration, Hispanic voters
Frustration with Democrats' failures at the border handed Republicans an opening in 2024. Voters trusted Trump over Harris on immigration 51% to 38%. Republicans have since squandered that advantage, but the path to a sensible immigration policy isn't closed.
Americans still draw a line between securing the border and Trump's broader crackdown. In a New York Times/Siena College poll in January, roughly half of voters approved of his handling of the border, while they were split on deportations and a clear majority said ICE had "gone too far." That gap shows sensible border policy still has broad support, despite the administration's spectacle of mismanagement and cruelty.
Trump's inroads with Hispanic voters in 2024 were thought to signal a new Republican coalition, and they showed that these voters could back a more conservative immigration policy. Those gains have all but vanished. What looked like a lasting Republican asset has become a serious liability heading into the midterms.
To win back their advantage on immigration, Republicans need to ditch the cruelty. The memes, ICE's aggressive tactics and the general callousness have soured Americans on policies that should command popular support for years to come.
Lawmakers like Salazar may be breaking with Trump for electoral reasons. But if they win in November, they will be the ones building the Republican Party's next approach to immigration. That approach should press Democrats on their weaknesses on the issue, without the cruelty that has defined Trump's second term.
Dace Potas, a law student, is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY. Follow him on X: @DacePotas.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Voters trusted Republicans on immigration. Trump squandered it. | Opinion
