Trump Immigration Cruelty Fuels Surge in New Candidates
These political newcomers are appalled by the sights and stories of the deportation regime.
WHEN EILEEN HIGGINS BEAT Republican businessman Emilio Gonzalez by nearly 20 points in Miami’s mayoral race on Tuesday, she became the first Democrat to win the office in the heavily Hispanic city in almost three decades.
It strengthened the impression that the fortunes of Democrats rise every day Donald Trump is president. It also showed how the president’s immigration policies are upending the nation’s politics, not just by turning voters against him but by compelling candidates to run for office.
In interviews after her win, Higgins made clear the central role that voter anger over immigration played in motivating her candidacy. She said it had personally affected her race, calling it a politics of “trickle-down hatred” that has created a “new environment” of ambient fear in Miami.
“I’m at community meetings—it’s so sad—and you’ll talk to someone. They’ll whisper to you, my brother, my uncle. Sometimes they’ll tell you they were taken to Alligator Alcatraz. Sometimes they’ll tell you they don’t know where they were taken. They’ve just been disappeared,” Higgins told NPR. “And so unfortunately, this national anti-immigrant fervor is affecting us here in Miami. And I do think it influenced the way people voted this time.”
The Trump administration’s campaign to drive undocumented immigrants out of the country and away from public life has created a hunger for candidates willing to fight him on the issue. It’s also compelled immigrants and Latino candidates to step into the political arena as we barrel toward 2026.
In Texas, Bobby Pulido, a famous Tejano music star, has made immigration central to his congressional race as he works to upset GOP gerrymandering efforts in the Lone Star State. Also in Texas, Julio Salinas, a candidate for the state House, has made his experience as the son of migrant farmworkers a core part of his campaign.
In Illinois, there are a handful of candidates who have been spurred to run not just by the nationwide immigration crackdown but specifically by the way Chicago has been singled out. Jessica Vasquez—running to be elected Cook County Commissioner in the 8th district, a position she has held by appointment since May—is the daughter of Colombian immigrants and the first Colombian American to hold public office in the state of Illinois. She’s also a former immigration advocate, having worked at the well-respected Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, and her campaign platform includes fighting to maintain Cook County’s sanctuary status.
Staff Sgt. Demi Palecek, a Latina National Guard member running for a seat in the Illinois House, is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant. She is centering immigrant and refugee rights in her platform, and made headlines in October for saying she would disobey orders to deploy to Chicago as part of immigration enforcement.
Anabel Mendoza, 28, running in a crowded field for the 7th Congressional District seat in Illinois, is another former immigration advocate who has been moved to run by Trump’s mass deportation program and what she’s hearing from her community. She told me she found inspiration to run in her work to protect DACA recipients, as well as in her experiences as the granddaughter of a man who immigrated to the United States in the 1970s.
“I fear for [my family members’] safety, that they will be racially profiled and detained in the streets of Chicago,” Mendoza told me. “You can be a U.S. citizen and have that fear.”
Immigration politics can be cyclical. A backlash to the family-separation policies and Muslim ban efforts in Trump’s first term propelled a lot of Dem activism in the 2018 midterms. A revulsion to an allegedly porous Southern border during Joe Biden’s presidency helped make Trump’s own comeback possible.
What stands out about our current period is both how much further Trump is going than he did during his first time in office—ProPublica recently reported that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been detained by immigration enforcement agents—and how his administration’s actions are motivating not just activism but proactive decisions to seek office.
Amanda Litman is the cofounder and president of Run for Something, an organization that helps recruit progressive candidates; they have seen 75,000 people sign up to run for office in the last year. Litman manages an online community chat where she sees prospective candidates talking about immigration regularly.
“We see it in the pipeline of folks signing up to run, quite a few are naming immigration as one of their top issues,” she told The Bulwark.
While she said housing and affordability are the top issues—“it has always been housing when you’re running locally”—she added that candidates are responding to voters who believe what the Trump administration is doing to immigrants is “egregious and morally offensive.”
“There is an undercurrent of ‘I want to see fight,’ and part of the reason is ‘I want to see a Democratic party that fights.’ . . . Voters believe [Democrats are] not doing enough on immigration detainees, on chaos and kidnapping,” she said.
TO UNDERSTAND THIS PHENOMENON of Trump’s immigration policies producing a wave of immigration-minded Democratic candidates, it’s worth studying Mayra Macías.
I’ve known Macías in Latino political circles for a long time. She helped grow the Latino Victory Project in Washington, D.C. before moving to the Biden-allied group Build Back Together. But the black-tie galas in Washington felt far from the streets of Chicago, where she had been raised. And building influence in the beltway was not always what Macías wanted to do. So she moved back home and started to help out with ICE Watch shifts alongside local groups like Increase the Peace, and she raised money to hand out meals to Chicagoans who found their communities terrorized by ICE agents.
Those experiences, and her conversations with residents in her Back of the Yards neighborhood, persuaded her of the need for people affected by immigration politics and immigrant communities to run for office. The questions were who and where.
At around the same time, Rep. Chuy García announced that he was retiring from office. But he did so right before the filing deadline, and the only person who knew his plans in time to gather enough signatures to file paperwork for her own candidacy was his chief of staff, Patty Garcia (no relation), who became the de facto Democratic candidate for the seat without needing to earn a single primary vote.
Frustrated and angry with the congressman, and already compelled to think about running for office herself, Macías decided to announce that she would run as an independent in the Illinois 4th Congressional District. She launched her campaign last week, and if she ultimately wins the seat, she plans to caucus with the Democrats.
The daughter of a father who was a trash collector for the city of Chicago and a mother who is a home health care worker, Macías says she knows she’s the underdog in this race. But she’s hoping to use her candidacy to amplify what voters tell her in the streets of Chicago—namely, that both affordability and fighting back against Trump’s deportation regime are superlatively important.
“It’s indescribable, what’s happening in Chicago, and the positive is just how much the community has shown up for each other, coming around and protecting one another,” she told me.
“I think there’s a moment to galvanize that community power and turn it into political power and make sure we have elected leaders to continue this flight in Washington, D.C., legislatively.”
Macías said she understands that many voters—burned by the failed promises of earlier politicians—roll their eyes when they hear candidates talk about immigration reform. But she says Trump’s deportation machine is inadvertently creating new political space. It is activating people who haven’t cared about the issue before because they hadn’t previously seen daycare providers dragged in terror away from the children they were overseeing, or ICE abducting community members, or weeping mothers being torn away from their children. Those and many other disturbing images are what come to mind now for many Americans when they think about what “mass deportations” actually means.
“Nationally, we have to make sure we’re leveraging that,” she said. “There’s a lot of work Democrats can do holding ICE and DHS accountable for the abuses these agents are committing in communities like mine.”
She said Democrats should be pushing for agents to be required to have their body cameras on, supporting and raising awareness for organizations filing civil lawsuits against ICE, and continuing to track abuses so that accountability will become possible if the party succeeds in taking control of the House next fall. In a little over a year, we could start seeing televised congressional hearings.
Immigration isn’t something that Democrats need to run away from anymore, Macías emphasized. It’s something that they should run with.
“For the longest time Democrats have been playing defense on immigration. We’ve been trying to pass some type of reform and, in order to try and get the buy-in of Republicans, have been really focused on border enforcement and security, and it makes it hard for people to believe Democrats are pro-passing some type of pathway to legalization when it feels like they keep making concessions and not getting anything in return,” she told me. “Folks want to see their elected officials fighting for them.”
As a husband and stepdad to two Venezuelan immigrants, thank you for continuing to write on this topic and congratulations on coming onboard full time with The Bulwark. Your writing on this difficult subject is greatly appreciated.
Congratulations! Excellent work.