The backlash against President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is putting vulnerable Republicans in a difficult spot, forcing them to change their tone to appease frustrated Hispanic voters — or risk losing key battleground seats.
It’s a tricky pivot for Republicans in South Texas, who have spent years taking a tough approach on immigration and flipping historically blue districts in the process.
Republican Monica De La Cruz, who represents a majority Hispanic district, went from calling for mass deportations to focusing on “the worst of the worst.” Instead of speeding up removal, she wants to create new visa categories for undocumented workers to fill jobs in construction and agriculture. And instead of slamming the Biden White House for its “border failure,” she’s holding private meetings at Trump’s White House to demand moderation in immigration enforcement.
Representative Tony Gonzales, whose district shares hundreds of miles with Mexico, wants his party to talk more about the border, saying he plans to “continue to advocate that the Republican Party needs to focus on convicted criminal aliens” amid widespread outrage over the deportations of undocumented people without any proven risk to public safety.
Like other Republicans, they are trying to slowly distance themselves from the massive immigration crackdown that has quickly become political kryptonite for the GOP — but without being seen as disloyal to the president or watering down their previous positions.
“President Trump made a promise, and he kept that promise by securing the border. That was the first stage,” said De La Cruz in an interview. “Now we’re in the second stage, having a conversation about real immigration reform.”
Republicans’ efforts to change the conversation will test their ability to maintain, or even extend, Trump’s gains in 2024 with Hispanic voters — and play a central role in the fight for control of Congress in November. A slew of polls in recent weeks have shown that many Hispanic voters across the country, put off by the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign, are turning on the Republican president they supported to a historic degree in 2024.
It’s a warning the White House appears to be taking seriously. In recent weeks, following the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by an immigration enforcement officer in Minneapolis, the White House has shown it is open to scaling back its deportation operation. On Thursday, border czar Tom Homan announced that the administration’s immigration boom in Minneapolis will come to an end.
Latino voters’ embrace of Trump was a political earthquake, and South Texas was the epicenter.
De La Cruz’s district — which stretches from the Rio Grande Valley on the US-Mexico border to the suburbs of San Antonio — was represented by a Democrat in Congress for 120 years before De La Cruz won her seat in 2022.
The 15th Congressional District was among those redrawn by the Texas legislature’s redistricting gambit last year, offering De La Cruz an even more favorable electorate. But that bet depends heavily on Hispanic voters sticking with the GOP: Nearly 80 percent of the district identifies as Hispanic or Latino, and if those voters switch back to the Democratic Party or stay home, it could undo much of the new map’s intended friendliness to Republicans.
“With a secure border and Latinos responding to ICE raids and government overreach, the districts that Republicans thought were their future a year ago are likely to be their undoing,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who is a frequent critic of Trump. “It is difficult to find another situation in the last 50 years where a political party has sworn off such a generational opportunity.”
Flipping De La Cruz’s district is a key objective for House Democrats this cycle, who are excited by the prospect of winning back Latino voters. She’ll face either Bobby Pulido, a Tejano music star with a big name ID recruited by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or Ana Cuellar, an ER doctor with an impressive knack for fundraising.
Local Republicans began sounding the alarm.
Daniel Garza, president of the LIBRE Initiative, a grassroots conservative group based in South Texas, said that the “Biden border chaos” was directly responsible for the victories of Texas Republicans in recent election cycles, including that of De La Cruz, but that moving to the other extreme – harsh repression – could again dissuade Hispanic voters who might support the GOP.
“We don’t have to be a nation that has to decide between an ‘all in’ or ‘all out’ approach,” Garza said. “I honestly feel that the counties around the entire Texan border have shifted to the right because of the chaos of the border… But this kind of approach of everyone, I think, is also causing some reflection.”
The immigration crackdown wreaked havoc on the area’s business community. Greg LaMantia, who runs a major beer wholesaler in the region, said his company’s sales have fallen as a result of the raids. “You have legal people who are scared to death of getting caught up in this fiasco and being deported,” said LaMantia, who voted for Trump and recently donated to both Republican and Democratic lawmakers. “It’s caused sales to drop, no doubt about it. It’s chaos.”
Daniel Guerrero, CEO of the McAllen-based South Texas Builders Association, said rampant ICE activity has sent a shiver through the construction industry, leading to major delays. He said ICE is known to follow concrete trucks to job sites, then apprehend workers as they begin pouring a foundation, leaving half-poured concrete slabs.
“The feeling is quite clear around the table, that no one really expected this magnitude of enforcement,” said Guerrero, who voted for Trump and De La Cruz in 2024.
He said that the Hispanic supporters of Trump that he knows are cheating on this administration, an observation supported by a recent survey. In the latest warning sign, Latino voters helped a Democrat flip a reliably red seat in Fort Worth last month. Taylor Rehmet, who picked up a state Senate seat in a special election, won about 4 out of 5 Hispanic votes across the district, a huge 26-point improvement over Kamala Harris in 2024.
Many Republicans are trying to steer the immigration discussion to focus on how border crossings have fallen to historic lows under Trump — which they hope will remind Hispanic voters why they should stick with the GOP.
“The Hispanic population gives President Trump and the Republicans a lot of leeway about how bad things were before and where they are now,” said Gonzales, whose sprawling border district is majority Hispanic. “They have a lot of freedom to get a lot of runway, if you want.”
De La Cruz successfully ran in 2024 on deportations and the “worst border security crisis in our nation’s history.” It is now proposing a new visa category, H-2C, which would allow employers such as those in construction and hospitality to hire foreign workers. She also introduced legislation expanding the H-2A visa category for seasonal agricultural workers.
In recent weeks, De La Cruz said she has taken constituents to meet with the Department of Labor, the White House and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, putting them on her bills and urging the administration to change its tactics on immigration enforcement.
“There are limited resources, period. And we want those limited resources to be focused on the worst of the worst, the criminal immigrants who entered,” said De La Cruz. “We have legal immigrants in our district who have work visas who do not want to go out to work because some may be afraid of the process that is currently being administered.”
But De La Cruz’s change in messaging has simultaneously garnered skepticism from some industry leaders and frustration with the base, highlighting the political tightrope that must be walked until November.
Guerrero, the leader of the construction nonprofit, said he sensed political opportunism in De La Cruz’s newfound interest in helping his industry.
“People feel abandoned because you have never shown a face, and now that there is an actual crisis, you want to show a face?” Guerrero said. “Never, man, it’s a little too late, man.”
The MAGA base, meanwhile, doesn’t like change either. Patricio County GOP Chairman Rex Warner thinks De La Cruz has gone too soft on deportations. “I align with some of it, but very little,” he said.