Jessica Cantu Vuittonet, who runs a coffee shop in San Benito, Texas, cast her first ballot in 2024 — for Donald Trump. Two years later, after her brother was deported, she feels angry and betrayed.
Ariel Salinas, who owns a construction company in McAllen, Texas, can no longer reliably find laborers for his work crews. He blames the president’s immigration policies for his financial headaches.
And Luis Cabrera, a pastor who once mobilized his congregation in Harlingen, Texas, to vote for Republican candidates, is now trying to keep Hispanic evangelicals from giving up on voting altogether.
In 2024, Hispanic voters in the Rio Grande Valley delivered a political earthquake: majority support for Republicans for the first time in modern history, a shift that helped reshape national politics. Now, that support appears to be evaporating even more quickly than it arrived.
In more than two dozen interviews across the region in recent weeks, Hispanic voters said they were furious over the president’s approach to immigration and the economy — the very problems they had counted on him to fix.
Their economic struggles seem to have only gotten worse, they said, shaped by the same forces at play in the rest of the country and exacerbated by the administration’s aggressive tactics on immigration enforcement. Construction has slowed as workers have been deported. Many small business owners say they have lost customers who now stay home to avoid being stopped by immigration agents.
In restaurants and on construction sites, in church lobbies and bars, optimism about the second Trump administration has curdled into a deep sense of abandonment.
“This isn’t anything that we wanted and it certainly isn’t a better life for anyone I know,” said Lupita Garza, 48, who lives in McAllen and voted for Mr. Trump in 2024. “Instead of the economy getting stronger, we are weaker. And now we have to be scared of ICE too.”
This growing anger and fear could help determine who controls Congress. Texas Republicans redrew several House districts last year with the assumption that the Hispanic voters who moved toward their party were part of a new, durable coalition. But many of those voters have turned against the Republicans. Some voters say they may vote for Democrats in the November midterms; some may not vote at all.
Recent polls show Democrats leading Republicans among likely Hispanic voters by roughly 35 percentage points on the generic congressional ballot, which asks voters which party they will support for Congress. The new dynamic is especially clear in Texas’s 15th, 28th and 34th Congressional Districts, which stretch across the Rio Grande Valley. Republican candidates are facing uphill battles despite the fact that Mr. Trump won the same areas by double-digit margins. If James Talarico, the state’s Democratic Senate candidate, is able to beat Ken Paxton, the Republican, his victory will likely be fueled by Hispanic voters here. In one sign of Republican worry, Vice President JD Vance is traveling to the region on Wednesday to rally voters.
For voters like Ms. Vuittonet, 38, enthusiasm for the G.O.P. evaporated months ago.
“They betrayed me, they turned their backs on us,” she said. “Nobody cares about us here, I see that now clearly.”
Like many of her neighbors, Ms. Vuittonet had been worried about the streams of new immigrants coming across the Rio Grande during the Biden administration and had trusted that Mr. Trump would stop them. Although some Trump supporters held signs calling for “mass deportations now” during the 2024 campaign, Ms. Vuittonet never thought such deportations would include people she knew who had lived in the United States for decades.
“I knew that he was going to start deporting people, but that he was going to go after bad criminals, like true hardcore criminals, rapists, killers,” Ms. Vuittonet said, sitting in the small coffee shop she runs from the back of an antique store. She thought of her six children, who range from ages 6 to 12. “Of course I want the streets safe.”
But when her brother was taken to an immigration detention center earlier this year, just days after a scheduled check-in with an immigration official, she said it felt like a punch to the gut.
“Your world truly does go upside down because now it’s not just hurting you — it’s hurting your parents, it’s hurting his children, his grandchildren,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. She quickly began to resent both Washington and the political movement she had enthusiastically embraced.
“I started to hate,” she said. “I started holding resentment and grudges, especially from those people that I rallied with for Trump.”
Just a few years ago, Ms. Vuittonet cheered on the “Trump trains,” loud caravans of pickup trucks flying Trump flags as they crisscrossed South Texas. Now, those flags have vanished.
Ms. Vuittonet has no plans to vote this year.
“At this point with the way things went, it’s hard to trust now — that has been broken,” she said. “We see that red and blue are just two colors. They’re both after the same thing and don’t care about people here.”
‘We feel betrayed’
The immigration crackdown has paralyzed the local construction industry, which had depended on immigrant workers for decades. Once-busy job sites sit empty, as more and more laborers fear deportation.
Mr. Salinas, 50, has built homes in the region for decades, managing through the mortgage crisis and the pandemic. But nothing, he said, compares to this.
While border patrol checkpoints had dotted the region for decades, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers seemed to be everywhere starting last spring, rounding up immigrants as they worked on construction sites or pulling them over as they drove to work. Suddenly, they were wearing masks and could be around any corner. Videos of such encounters are passed around almost daily on local group chats and Facebook pages.
“As soon as they pick up workers at a job site, it scares the rest — with papers and without papers,” Mr. Salinas said. Nobody wants to get detained even if you have papers. We saw a decrease in labor right away, and it just got worse. March, April, May, June, July — it just got worse, worse, and worse.”
To protect their remaining crews, builders throughout the valley built fences around housing developments under construction.
“Years ago, you put a fence up because people were stealing stuff,” Mr. Salinas said. “Now you put the fence up because ICE is stealing the workers. There was even a fence shortage in the summer. It caught all of us off guard.”
The labor shortage has thrown construction timelines into chaos. Projects that once took three months to complete are now sitting for nearly a year. Subcontractor prices have spiked, and waiting lists for framing, drywall and foundation crews stretch for weeks.
Benny Melendez, 32, who owns a small construction business in Weslaco, voted for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020 but was won over by Mr. Trump’s promises in 2024 to help small businesses succeed and control the border. The president’s tariffs immediately hurt his business, he said, even before the ICE raids depleted the construction work force.
Mr. Melendez said he used to manage the construction of 10 homes at the same time. These days, he’s lucky if he can manage four.
For Mr. Salinas, whose father worked in construction after immigrating from Mexico, the immigration crackdown feels like it is punishing the wrong people.
“To us folks — conservative, Hispanic, God-fearing — this doesn’t make sense,” he said. “You take away folks that are contributing to society, and there’s nobody to replace them. My circle, my family, we feel betrayed by this.”
‘Nothing to be afraid of’
For all the regret among many Trump voters here, there are some who remain enthusiastic about his most aggressive promises to stop illegal immigration.
“People are mad that he is enforcing the law, when that’s exactly what he was elected to do,” said Jerry Hernandez, 60, who like many voters in the area considers himself both conservative and independent. “People who haven’t broken a law have nothing to be afraid of.”
He scoffed at the idea of a labor shortage. “Anyone complaining they can’t find workers are probably not paying enough,” he added. “They act as if they care about immigrants but they’re just trying to make a buck.”
Still, after Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who had lived in the U.S. for decades, was killed by ICE agents in Houston this summer, many in the Rio Grande Valley considered it a turning point.
For Mario Guerrero, the chairman of the South Texas Builders Association, it showed “that this administration has lost control of ICE,” he said.
“I think it’s gone way too far,” he said. “If their job was to strike fear, their mission has been accomplished.”
All of this has left Pastor Cabrera feeling stuck in the middle of a storm he did not expect. He had spent years telling local working-class voters that the Republican Party better aligned with their religious values and economic interests. Now, he finds himself attempting to manage widespread disillusionment while pleading with national Republican allies to recognize the damage being done by the sustained immigration crackdown.
“It’s not a good look for the administration, especially when it goes into people’s workplaces,” Mr. Cabrera said. “There’s a lot of hardcore criminals out there that you can take care of first. Let’s create some kind of path for people who have been here for 20 or 25 years, haven’t broken the law except for that initial entry, and have established homes and businesses.”
Mr. Cabrera points to stalled efforts in Congress to give work permits to immigrants who have long lived in the U.S. as the kind of change border communities actually want: strict border security combined with earned legal status for long-term workers.
Now, after leaving his local congregation to spend much of his time traveling to churches around the country, Mr. Cabrera is just trying to keep Hispanic evangelicals from abandoning voting altogether, even as he understands their anger. He chairs the faith initiative committee of the Cameron County G.O.P. and has urged national leaders to curb some immigration raids to avoid further alienating Hispanic voters.
“So many people, for the first time ever, shifted parties to vote for you,” he said he tells them. “Now you’re going out against everything they love. They are baby Republicans — they just came to the party — and if you don’t take care of what you promised people, they’re going to turn on you.”
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