RIO GRANDE CITY, Texas — In 2022, when Claudia Alcazar served as the chairwoman of the Starr County Republican Party, the most successful Republican organizers were not the volunteers knocking on doors; they were the migrants knocking on windows.
Alcazar lived on the southern edge of this border town, where homes back up into the tangle of mesquite and huisache that line the Rio Grande. Starting in 2021, thousands of migrants began emerging from this thorny brush, walking through the neighborhoods, asking people for water or directions. “I wanted it to stop,” Alcazar said. “I mean, I’m in America and I got people knocking on my windows — I don’t know where they’re from.”
The chaos turned many along the border against the Biden administration. In 2016, Trump only won 18.9 percent of the vote here in Starr County, which is 97.1 percent Latino. In 2024, Donald Trump carried the county with 57.8 percent, becoming the first Republican presidential candidate to win in Starr County in over a century.
This year, Republicans no longer benefit from migrants unwittingly turning out the vote for conservatives. In early 2025, when Trump reentered the White House, the border crossings stopped almost overnight, Alcazar said. “I was shocked; I honestly didn’t think that, down here, it would be that much of a difference,” she said. “But it really did. I barely had anyone coming across anymore.”
That means that Republicans have lost one of their greatest advantages in the last election: the border is quiet, and the fear and insecurity people once felt in South Texas has dissipated. As crossings drop to record lows, the border has been neutralized as a political issue. While border security was a major priority for voters here in 2024, in the current midterms many locals say it no longer ranks as the top concern. Voters reason that Trump will still be president in 2027, no matter which party wins Congress, and so they expect the situation on the border to remain unchanged, at least for the next two years.
A recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that voters disapproved of Trump’s policy on immigration, and, for the first time in years, a greater percent of voters said they trusted Democrats to do a better job than Republicans handling immigration.
State Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, a long-term Democratic legislator on the border, was deported to Mexico as a young child, when authorities under the Eisenhower administration arrested him along with his mother, dumping them across the border that same day. That gives Hinojosa, a native-born U.S. citizen, uncommon sympathy for migrants. Yet when it comes to the border, Hinojosa said that Biden failed.
“Part of the reason that many Hispanics voted for Trump is that President Joe Biden really messed up on border security,” Hinojosa said. During the Biden years, Hinojosa warned other Democratic elected officials that communities on the border were overwhelmed — shelters and bus stations were overflowing with asylum seekers. “They were telling us, ‘Well, we want to be humanitarian,’” Hinojosa said. “I said, ‘Well, that’s fine. Nobody’s against being humanitarian. But everybody’s coming across the border, and we cannot even handle them here locally.’”
Hinojosa credits Trump for stopping crossings. But he said that the president’s success on the border has now turned into a liability, as it dissolves as a consensus issue here. “You’ve got to give the Trump administration credit: he’s done a good job of shutting down the border,” Hinojosa said. “But he overreached.”
Locals are no longer nervous about migrants arriving in their neighborhoods. Instead, they’re worried about U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement showing up.
Earlier this year, Alcazar noticed a crew of construction workers fixing the roof of the house across the street from her, and she intended to ask them if they could do some work on her own home. A few days later, Alcazar walked outside and saw a phalanx of Border Patrol agents arresting the workers. “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.”
In 2022, Customs and Border Protection reported more than 2.2 million migrant encounters over the course of the year, a record high. In the 2025 financial year, that number dropped to 237,538, the lowest of any year since 1970. Yet even as crossings dropped, Border Patrol funding and hiring has surged, freeing up local agents to join ICE in arresting longer-term undocumented immigrants living across the borderlands. These arrests have led to painful worker shortages, turning some Trump-voting employers against the president. In the Rio Grande Valley, agents have mistakenly detained at least one U.S. citizen. Nationwide, that figure rises to more than 500, according to ProPublica.
Alcazar said she’s no longer affiliating directly with the party. “Right now, I’m more in the middle; I can’t 100 percent support either party,” she said. That’s in part because she does not support how the president is carrying out his mass-deportation agenda.
Other local Republicans also report feeling alienated. Over the last six years, Starr made national headlines as the county that shifted further right than anywhere else in the country. Today that momentum feels dulled.
Alexis García, a middle school teacher from Rio Grande City, enthusiastically campaigned for Trump in 2024, in part because of the president’s promises to end illegal immigration. That year, García saw many of his friends and neighbors vote for Trump, believing that the president’s mass-deportation program would target criminals, as well as the recently arrived migrants filling the bus stations in South Texas.
Now, the impact of the arrests has felt personal to many locals here.
“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,” García said, using the Spanish word for uncle.
García supported Trump’s border crackdown, and he’s seen it work. “The border has been the most secure it’s ever been. You don’t see mass groups of grown men crossing,” García said.
He’s happy about that. But the reality of Trump’s new enforcement has unsettled García, as he sees it change the physical face of his home.
When García drives along Highway 83, he can see miles and miles of border barriers going up, rusty bollards towering over the mesquite. “A lot of people weren’t happy, because now when they wake up in the morning, they see that rusty, ugly steel fence,” he said.
He supports the wall, but he doesn’t like looking at it. “When they put it into words, into ideas, it sounds like, ‘Whoa, good idea,’” García said. “But when it’s actually put into place, it’s like, ‘Whoa. He got it done.’”
The post Trump closed down the border — and ended it as a campaign issue appeared first on Washington Post.
