President Donald Trump all but shut down illegal border crossings, and in a South Texas county that helped power his 2024 comeback, that success is now turning into a political problem for Republicans, The Washington Post reported.
Starr County is 97.1 percent Latino, and Trump won just 18.9 percent of the vote there in 2016. But in 2024 he carried it with 57.8 percent, becoming the first Republican presidential candidate to win the county in more than a century. Much of that swing came from anger over the chaos at the border under former President Joe Biden.
Now the border is quiet, and many locals say it is no longer their top concern heading into the midterms. Voters expect the situation to stay the same because Trump will remain president regardless of which party controls Congress. Instead, residents are worried about Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents showing up in their neighborhoods.
Claudia Alcazar chaired the Starr County Republican Party in 2022, when migrants regularly knocked on her windows. Earlier this year, she watched Border Patrol agents arrest a construction crew that was working on a roof across the street from her home.
“They picked up the whole crew. They had a helicopter and everything,” Alcazar said. “I’m like, these dudes were just fixing a roof. They weren’t bothering anybody.”
She says she no longer affiliates directly with the GOP. “Right now, I’m more in the middle – I can’t 100 percent support either party,” she said.
State Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, a longtime Democrat, said Biden “really messed up on border security” and gave Trump credit for shutting it down. “But he overreached,” Hinojosa said.
The numbers back up both halves of his point. Migrant encounters fell from more than 2.2 million in 2022 to 237,538 in fiscal year 2025, the lowest since 1970. Even so, Border Patrol funding and hiring have surged. That has freed agents to help ICE arrest longtime undocumented residents, which has led to worker shortages across the region. According to ProPublica, agents have mistakenly detained more than 500 U.S. citizens nationwide, including at least one in the Rio Grande Valley.
Alexis García, a middle school teacher who campaigned for Trump in 2024, said many neighbors believed the deportations would target criminals and new arrivals.
“When it actually happens to your cousin’s wife or your tío’s neighbor, it affects home, right? So a lot of people did not agree with that,” he said.
The shift reaches well beyond Starr County. A recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that more voters trust Democrats than Republicans on immigration, for the first time in years.
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