President Trump returned to the White House calling for “mass deportations now,” after anger over illegal immigration drove his voters to the polls in 2024. But two years later, amid high-profile raids and deadly ICE shootings, immigration politics have been scrambled once again, creating unpredictable fault lines in the hours leading up to Election Day.
Public polling suggests that voters are now more likely to trust Democrats on immigration policy, although Republican voters remain more motivated by the issue. And while some Latino voting-rights activists worry that recent immigration raids in California and elsewhere could suppress Hispanic turnout, others are optimistic that the opposite is true in some of the most competitive congressional districts in the country.
“Republicans are really out of step with where Americans are with immigration, just like how Democrats were out of step in 2024,” said Senator Ruben Gallego, a Democrat who won in Arizona two years ago while calling for stricter immigration enforcement. “They wanted the chaos to be done, but what is happening now is not what they wanted. They are not for heavy-handed immigration forces. They are not for racial profiling; they see the sob stories.”
In the first two years of his second term, Mr. Trump has moved aggressively to overhaul the nation’s immigration system, and the southern border has largely been shut down. Attempted illegal border crossings have plummeted from a peak of nearly 250,000 in November 2023 to about 11,000 this past August.
But the administration also unleashed an enormous enforcement apparatus that has drawn widespread criticism. Large-scale raids have unfolded in Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis. Federal detention capacity has more than doubled through a network of local jail contracts, retrofitted warehouses and tent cities.
And the administration has all but dismantled pathways to asylum, reduced refugee admissions to a trickle and stripped temporary deportation protections from roughly one million migrants who entered the country during the Biden administration. At the same time, the government has pressured immigrants into self-deportation and pushed immigration judges to expedite dockets, keeping more people behind bars and deporting hundreds to countries where they have no personal ties.
At campaign events, the president has compared his record favorably to that of his predecessor. At a recent rally in Iowa, he blamed Democrats for the flood of migrants entering the country during the Biden administration and warned that it would happen again if Republicans lost the election. “It was an invasion — it was like a military invasion,” he said. “They will do it again. They’re going to open up the border.”
But his assertive approach has created a backlash among voters.
Voters in 2024 were more likely to list immigration as a top issue than in this midterm year, when economic concerns are driving the conversation even more. And immigration continues to be more of a motivating issue for Republicans than Democrats. But opposition to the Trump administration’s policies has changed the calculus significantly. In the most recent New York Times/Siena poll, half of all voters said they trusted Democrats on the issue, while 46 percent said they trusted Republicans. That is a striking reversal from just two years ago, when Mr. Trump held an 11-point advantage on immigration in the Times/Siena national poll.
Immigration has helped drive the gains that Democrats appear to be making with Hispanic voters throughout the country. While Latino voters were divided on which party to trust on immigration in 2024, they now give Democrats a 27-point lead. And about one in five Latinos said immigration was the most important issue to their vote, according to the Times/Siena poll, compared to just 6 percent in September.
The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, who leads the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, which includes thousands of churches, said Republicans had squandered a unique opportunity to make politically popular changes to immigration policies.
“They could have developed a viable solution to immigration and bring a secure border, and get rid of egregious criminals,” he said. “Instead, you’re picking up people who have been making their lives for years, and even ministers. What are we doing here? What just happened?”
The issue could help Democrats in dozens of tight races throughout the country, particularly in California, Colorado, Florida and Texas, where immigrant-heavy communities have felt the impact of the crackdown. In September, Representative María Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican, released a television ad warning Mr. Trump that his aggressive tactics had “gone too far” and left many of his Hispanic supporters feeling “betrayed.” Like many Republicans who represent areas with a large Latino population, Ms. Salazar is in a surprisingly tight re-election campaign in a district where Mr. Trump won with a double-digit lead.
One such district sits in the heart of California’s Central Valley, where Representative David Valadao, a Republican, has repeatedly faced serious challengers since he was first elected in 2012. The district stretches across the state’s agricultural heartland. Roughly 65 percent of registered voters are Latino, and Democrats have long outnumbered Republicans.
Recent immigration raids in Mr. Valadao’s district have gripped some farmworker communities with so much fear that local markets began delivering groceries to immigrant families afraid to leave home. Local residents say the rise in traffic stops and other arrests has kept Latino workers from reporting to work and emptied Latino businesses.
Mr. Valadao has long said he would support a legal pathway for undocumented residents who have been in the country for many years and have not committed crimes. He has also urged the administration to prioritize deporting violent criminals rather than agricultural workers.
In the final days of the campaign, Mr. Valadao’s Democratic challenger, Randy Villegas, 31, a college professor and the son of Mexican immigrants, has seized on the issue of immigration, attacking Mr. Valadao for supporting legislation that tripled the budget for federal immigration enforcement. He blames Mr. Valadao for enabling a deportation campaign he says is harming agricultural workers and the economy.
“It’s shameful, it is despicable and we deserve a member of Congress who has a spine to actually stand up for our immigrant communities,” Mr. Villegas said in an interview.
In a statement, Mr. Valadao said that he has worked with both parties to “fix our broken immigration system” and that “meaningful immigration will require bipartisan cooperation.”
“I understand the concerns about enforcement activities, but based on my conversations with the administration and producers around my district, there’s no evidence that farmworkers are being targeted,” he added.
Immigration continues to be a campaign issue for Republican candidates for Congress, but Democrats in this election have increasingly used it as a line of attack, too, including in political advertising.
Democrats have produced about 320 ads focused on immigration — more than five times the number in the 2022 midterms, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm. Republicans have created about 890, a slight uptick from four years ago.
Across competitive races in the Southwest, Andrea Flores, a lawyer and immigration policy adviser in the Obama and Biden administrations, said she had seen a slate of Democratic candidates more willing to “flip the script” by tying immigration policy to labor shortages and the battered economy.
In New Mexico, Representative Gabe Vasquez, a Democrat locked in a tight bid for a third term, has championed visas for child care providers. In Texas, Gina Hinojosa, the Democrat who has pulled within striking distance of unseating Gov. Greg Abbott, addressed reporters from an uncompleted construction site, where she said immigrant workers did not feel safe showing up.
Still, Ms. Flores said Democrats have largely focused on attacking Republicans, rather than articulating their own policy agenda. “There is an urgent need to define what they are for on the issue because just being against ICE is not enough,” she said.
In the run-up to the election, some voting rights advocates have worried about the impact of immigration enforcement on turnout.
Although voters are by definition U.S. citizens, many fear being harassed or even detained by immigration agents, said Cesar Fierros, a spokesman for a group called Living United for Change in Arizona.
“There was a time when there was a belief that, ‘Hey, I am a citizen. I am not undocumented. I don’t have to worry about it,’” he said. “But now you are seeing U.S. citizens arrested and detained.”
But so far, early data suggests an increase in early voting turnout among Latinos, including in Texas and California.
“If this was meant as voter intimidation, it’s not working,” said Andrea Guerrero, executive director at Alliance San Diego, a legal services and voter mobilization organization. “Voting is surging in San Diego County and in California.”
Ruth Igielnik and Miriam Jordan contributed reporting.
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