Recently, in Los Angeles, protesters waving Mexican flags amid burning vehicles and law enforcement in riot gear have resurrected memories of 1994, when similar scenes defined Latino political identity for a generation. During that year’s movement against California Proposition 187, which sought to bar undocumented immigrants from accessing education, health care, and social services, Latino citizens banded together with recent arrivals of varying legal status in solidarity. This was a catalyzing moment that spurred many Latinos not only in California, but across the country, to understand themselves as an aggrieved ethnic minority, and to vote as a bloc. Now, three decades later, something similar might be taking place.
The escalation of immigration raids around Los Angeles and Donald Trump’s deployment of military forces—over Governor Gavin Newsom’s objection—to quell anti-ICE protests have heightened fears among many Latinos that they are under systemic attack. The forcible removal of Senator Alex Padilla from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s press conference after he tried to ask her about ICE raids has only added to the unease. Even though many social metrics suggest that Latinos are assimilating into the U.S. mainstream, the MAGA movement keeps reminding them that it does not consider them fully American. On Friday, Vice President J. D. Vance, who served in the Senate with Padilla, mocked him and called him “José Padilla.”
Out of dissatisfaction with the economy under Joe Biden, more Latinos voted for Trump in November than in his two previous bids. That historic showing was widely viewed as a turn away from ethnic politics. The reality is more nuanced: Latinos have always been primarily focused on economic issues, but they will coalesce as an ethnic voting bloc when they sense a serious threat to their community.
American Latinos are a diverse group. Many see themselves as a mainstay of the country’s working class and as strivers eager to build a better life for their family. Latinos responded strongly to the Trumpist GOP’s economic populism. Last year, Latino voters told pollsters that issues such as inflation, jobs, and housing costs were their highest priorities; immigration was farther down the list. The overwhelming majority of Latino voters today were born in the United States; from 2002 to 2022, the proportion of newly registered Latino voters in Los Angeles County who were foreign-born dropped from 54 percent to less than 9 percent.
This helps explain why immigration issues resonated less among Latinos in November than at any other point in the past three decades. NBC News exit polls estimated that 46 percent of Latinos voted for Trump last year, up from 32 percent in 2020. Other researchers estimated that Trump improved his standing among Latino men by 35 points, narrowly winning the demographic.
The rightward shift wasn’t an abandonment of Latino identity; it was an expression of these voters’ sense of what they, and people like them, want from their government. Aspiring Latino families, hit hard by inflation and housing costs, responded to promises of economic relief.
Since Trump’s inauguration, his support among Latinos has dropped—a trend that was first detectable after the president’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcements sapped consumer confidence and cast global financial markets into chaos. In a mid-April poll of Latino voters, 60 percent said that Trump and congressional Republicans were not focusing on bringing down the cost of everyday goods, and 66 percent thought that tariffs would raise prices and hurt their economic security.
Now Trump’s immigration crackdown in California and elsewhere is undoubtedly adding to his declining position among Latinos. According to a poll last month, Latino respondents agreed by a 66–29 margin that Trump’s “actions are going too far and targeting the types of immigrants who strengthen our nation.” When immigration enforcement is perceived as targeting entire communities rather than focusing narrowly on dangerous criminals, it activates deeper questions about belonging and acceptance in American society.
When that happens, the effects can be long-lasting. In 1994, Proposition 187’s anti-immigrant provisions generated massive Latino turnout against Republicans, fundamentally reshaping the state’s political landscape to Democrats’ advantage. In the midterms of 2018, Trump’s immigration rhetoric and family-separation policies drove another wave of Latino political mobilization, contributing to Democratic gains across the country. That year, in the midst of ICE raids in communities, Latino voters increased voter turnout to its highest level in midterm history; they cast ballots against Republicans by an equally historic margin.
The recent L.A. protests represent a potential third such moment. The rough treatment of Padilla, a California native of Mexican ancestry, at Noem’s press conference exemplified how Trump’s moves against immigrants could bring harm to U.S.-born Latinos as well. In a fiery Senate speech days after Homeland Security agents pushed him to the floor and handcuffed him, Padilla focused mostly on the Trump administration’s extreme and un-American use of executive power. Yet he was implicitly making another point: Not even an MIT graduate who is a U.S. senator for his home state has a secure seat at the American table. Padilla is separated by a generation from the immigrant experience, but he was still forced out of an event in a government building.
Read: There’s no playbook for what Alex Padilla is trying to do
Recent events are resonating with Latinos outside California—even in South Florida, where Cuban Americans are a core Republican constituency. In October, Florida International University’s poll of likely Cuban American voters in Miami-Dade County reported that 68 percent intended to vote for Trump, by far the largest level of support for him on record. Yet Trump’s recent immigration actions—including his decision to end the humanitarian parole program for Cubans, revoking temporary legal status for thousands of immigrants—are testing these loyalties. “This is not what we voted for,” State Senator Ileana Garcia, a co-founder of Latinas for Trump, declared on X earlier this month.
Across the country, Latino votes are very much in play. Fully one-third of all Latino voters today were not even alive when Proposition 187 was on the ballot. As images of federal agents confronting Latino protesters spread across social media and prompt kitchen-table conversations, the question isn’t whether Latinos will remain politically engaged; it’s which party will better understand the full dimensions of Latino political identity. Democrats cannot assume Latino support based solely on opposition to harsh immigration policies, and Republicans cannot maintain Latino voters through economic appeals alone if those same voters feel that their communities are under siege.
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