Exclusive: Trump’s Losing the Latino Voters He Won in ’24
New poll shows real cracks in the president’s backing—and opportunities for Democrats.
DONALD TRUMP’S SUPPORT AMONG LATINO VOTERS, including those who voted for him in 2024, is fracturing, a new poll shared exclusively with The Bulwark found.
The poll by Equis Research, a Democratic group, conducted in conjunction with Data for Progress, showed that 66 percent of Latino voters believe Trump’s deportation actions “are going too far and targeting the types of immigrants who strengthen our nation.”
Critically, that figure included 36 percent of Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024.
A sizable minority of respondents—29 percent—view Trump’s actions as “good and fair,” agreeing with the statement “if some people who are not criminals suffer because of it, it’s the price to pay to ensure our safety.”
And the most interesting data point: Among voters who backed Joe Biden in 2020 but moved to Trump last year—the category Equis calls “Biden defectors”—64 percent said Trump has gone too far on mass deportation.
Equis says the poll, conducted between April 16 and May 5, is consistent with its findings this year that Trump’s newest voters “expected him to focus narrowly on the deportation of criminals and recent border-crossers” and largely did not support broader mass deportation efforts.
The weighted poll of 2,500 Latino registered voters included 44 percent who said they voted for Trump in November, which comports with exit poll and VoteCast data indicating how Hispanics voted.
Carlos Odio, the cofounder of Equis, told The Bulwark the poll represents “cracks” but not a total “collapse” in Trump’s Hispanic support—but he stressed that these voters’ dissatisfaction with immigration policy is just part of a set of larger complaints about the second Trump administration. Just 38 percent of those polled approve of Trump’s performance so far, compared with 60 percent who disapprove.
Those numbers are worse than Trump’s standing among the overall electorate, according to polling averages. And the reason is that Trump supporters in this cohort are more likely than Trump supporters in general to be dissatisfied with his performance. “In all,” reports Equis, “some 15 percent of Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024 currently disapprove of his performance in office.”
“The economy is the lead actor, but immigration is playing an important supporting role,” Odio said. Trump’s net approval rating on the economy, according to the poll, is -26, whereas his overall net approval rating is -22. There was also a huge 22-point swing downward among young Latino men, who were a strength for Trump just six months ago.
As I reported recently, based on exclusive access I was given to focus groups, Trump’s support among Hispanics has taken a hit largely due to their views of his stewardship of the economy. But the Equis data reaffirms that immigration is also a powerful issue negatively affecting their impressions of his presidency.
An Opportunity for Democrats—If They Can Seize It
While Trump’s numbers continue to drop, Odio said what is driving concern among Latinos is their belief that the president is unfairly punishing otherwise law-abiding people and their families. But that doesn’t mean that they’re ready to run to the Democrats. Among Latinos who disapprove of Trump’s mass deportations, 25 percent say they still don’t support either party on immigration and 20 percent don’t prefer either party generally.
The Democratic party is still sorting out what its message is going to be and how it’s going to communicate it.1
But more recently, we’ve seen high-profile efforts to put a spotlight on the issue of immigration. Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), and Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas) traveled to Mexico last week to meet with the family of an 11-year-old U.S. citizen who was deported along with her parents despite her being in recovery from treatment for a rare brain tumor. The girl was among four U.S.-citizen kids deported with their undocumented parents at the outset of Trump’s presidency. More recently, a mother was deported to Honduras with her two U.S.-citizen children, including one with stage IV cancer.
“I’m trying to protect people’s rights so they can live their lives and pursue the American Dream,” Rep. Castro told me. “When you have people getting snatched off the street by masked men who don’t want to identify themselves, including U.S. citizens, that’s a threat to people everywhere, and the Hispanic community is bearing the harsh brunt of these policies.”
A day before those lawmakers traveled to Mexico, ICE agents arrested Newark Mayor Ras Baraka outside a New Jersey ICE detention facility as he joined three House Democrats in an effort to provide oversight of the facility. The acting head of ICE later confirmed that members of Congress are legally allowed to provide oversight of ICE facilities, even unannounced. And the New York Times reported that Baraka was arrested “in a public area outside the front entrance gates of the facility.” He was released later that day.
Video from the scene also shows ICE agents physically confronting two New Jersey congresswomen, Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman and LaMonica McIver. Another New Jerseyan present at the scene, Rep. Rob Menendez, said the agents escalated the situation, turning it violent, and arrested the mayor despite him being in a public area.
While some in the Democratic party see Coleman, McIver, Menendez, and Baraka’s confrontation with ICE as brave and creative, others in the party are concerned that highly visible protest actions that draw the ire and retribution of the administration could backfire.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus “wants to lean in and says we should do a day of action at detention centers, but I don’t know if that’s the right idea,” a Democratic member of the House told me. “Right now the Democratic party is in a very vulnerable place and we need to broaden our message to do the things we want to do and protect the people we want to protect. We can’t do that if we’re not engaging an audience broader than the people who feel a certain way about immigration today.”
Some Democrats believe that a more successful message could look like what Sen. Ruben Gallego proposed Monday when he introduced a five-part framework to finally achieve immigration reform, starting with a “non-negotiable” commitment to secure the border.
The collective appetite for Gallego’s approach was hammered home for me when I received an unsolicited statement praising it from moderate Democrat Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), who co-chairs the Democrats for Border Security Task Force. Suozzi’s office had heard I was writing about Gallego’s plan. In the statement, he called Gallego a “serious Democratic leader,” whose plan achieves all key immigration goals “without pandering to the far left’s impractical demands or the far right’s mean-spirited extremism.”
Gallego also wants to tighten the criteria for asylum claims, expand legal immigration pathways, address the root causes of violence that lead to migration to the United States, offer incentives to retain Customs and Border Protection personnel, and create a pathway to citizenship for so-called Dreamers brought to the country as children and the spouses of U.S. citizens.
On a virtual forum hosted Thursday by the American Business Immigration Coalition and Comité de 100, an immigration advocacy group, Gallego said Democrats have to regain the trust of those who want to secure the border, including Latinos, before they can move to “step two,” which is immigration reform.
“My thesis is that to build trust with voters we have to continue to have the least amount of border crossings possible,” he said.
But Gallego’s plan won’t be gaining support from MAGA Republicans anytime soon. Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, decried the proposal as a plan “just to make the illegal aliens into citizens.”
Odio said Equis’s poll provides some evidence that Gallego’s framework could be useful as Democrats move beyond opposition to Trump and try to find their own message on immigration. According to him, Latino voters favor “balanced, non-extreme approach” on immigration that includes border security.
I asked Gallego how Democrats balance new ideas while fighting back on Trump’s unlawful mass deportation zealotry. He said it is a “very easy balance” to strike.
“What he’s doing is bad and what we’re doing is what the American public wants: They want a secure border, less chaos at the border, they don’t want chaos in our communities or families ripped apart because some ICE agent needed to meet their quotas, and they don’t want politicians arrested,” he told me. “I want Democrats to be able to not just say we’re against that, but point and say, ‘This is what we believe is real: Border security and immigration reform that brings safety to individuals and not just being the party of no.’”
One Last Thing
A shameful non-response from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem yesterday when asked by Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) for a proof-of-life check on Andry José Hernández Romero, the makeup artist sent to the notorious Salvadoran CECOT prison:
I don’t know the specifics of this individual case....This individual is in El Salvador and the appeal would be best made to the president and the government of El Salvador on this. This is not under my jurisdiction.
It’s as plain as day: Noem claims the power to pick someone up, drop them off in a foreign prison with no hearing and no chance at due process—and then she disclaims all responsibility for the person.
If you aren’t following my colleague Lauren Egan’s newsletter all about Democrats in the wilderness, The Opposition, you definitely should!
You mean "the good ones" and the "honorary whites" are realizing that they were not simply pulling up the ladder behind themselves?
The thing I hate about these polling figures is that they ask people where they stand on a particular issue, but they don't ask where this issue stands in the voters' priority ranking on policy. Some 70% of respondents could say they disagree with Trump's actions around deportations, but they don't say if this issue is a top 3 issue for them or if it's issue # 7, 8, 9, etc. in terms of their priority rankings. That extra bit of priority info would be very helpful for elected dems thinking about which issues they should prioritize over others.