Fear and loathing in Trump’s Miami backyard over immigration crackdown

Por Marc Caputo — Axios

Staring into the camera, Rep. Maria Salazar (R-Fla.) cut a new campaign ad that told President Trump what so many of her fellow Hispanic Republicans in Miami are saying: Immigration crackdown has gone too far.

Why it matters: The anger at Trump over heavy-handed immigration enforcement is palpable in Miami-Dade County, and there’s mounting political worry among Republicans across the state that it could cost the GOP in the midterm elections.

Zoom in: A bellwether, Miami-Dade is Florida’s most-populous county, which Trump flipped to the Republican column in 2020 and 2024 thanks to strong Latino support, especially among Cuban Americans.

• “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Salazar says in her ad. “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”
• Trump carried her district by 15 points two years ago. Today, she’s tied in polls with newscaster Eliot Rodriguez, a fellow Cuban American, who said her new ad was a sign of desperation.
• A Trump adviser told Axios: “I’m getting the Trumpiest Cubans sending me videos from Miami of guys getting busted at places like the gas station, for no apparent reason.”

By the numbers: In Miami-Dade, 62% of the county’s 1.3 million registered voters are Hispanic. They account for 76% of the registered Republicans.

• 63% of Hispanic voters said they supported “deporting illegal immigrants” while 34% were opposed to them, according to a poll conducted last month by a GOP pollster and shared with Axios
• But those numbers switched when it came to how deportations were being carried out: Just 29% were in favor; 58% were opposed.
• “The support is just evaporating. The economy sucks and ICE is just out of control,” said the pollster, who’s from Miami. “People feel they didn’t sign up for this.”

Yes, but: Trump ran on a platform of mass deportations. He promised to target undocumented criminals, but the president’s critics warned that his aggressive immigration push would lead to raids, arrests in the streets, racial profiling and separated families.

• “There was truth in advertising,” the pollster said.
• Trump last year also began revoking Temporary Protected Status for as many as 1.3 million people across the country, some of whom first received the TPS designation in 1998.
• “Temporary means temporary,” a White House official told Axios, noting that President Biden had allowed millions into the country under TPS and a new program that Trump reversed.

Ground zero for the Miami-Dade fear and loathing is in Doral. Trump owns a prized golf course there. It’s also nicknamed “Doralzuela” because of the large Venezuelan population.

• Businesses were hit doubly hard last year when Trump canceled TPS for Venezuelans: Legal workers lost the authorization to work, once-legal residents fled, and those who are still there are in hiding or constantly getting picked up by federal agents.
• “Our sales have dropped 70%. We spend hours empty,” Katia Rios of Pipo Burgers, told CBS Miami on Wednesday.
• Doral Mayor Christi Fraga, a Republican, has been besieged with complaints and has tried to distance herself from the Trump administration. “I don’t agree with the way things are handled,” she told CBS.

Zoom out: Salazar’s Republican congressional colleague from Miami, Mario Diaz-Balart, has a district that stretches from Doral on Florida’s southeast coast to Naples on its southwest coast.

• “We’ve been sending this message to the administration for months,” he said of Salazar’s ad. Diaz-Balart, however, hasn’t spoken publicly against the administration because he prefers to work behind the scenes.
• Republicans say they’re not too worried about conservative Hispanic voters switching to vote for Democrats, but they all believe turnout for the GOP will be low, which could affect legislative and congressional contests, and perhaps the race for governor.
• “Byron Donalds better watch out,” a top Republican consultant said of the Republican congressman locked in a tighter-than-expected gubernatorial race against Democrat David Jolly. (A Donalds spokesman said Jolly will lose.)

Friction point: Miami’s best-known Cuban American political figure, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has been publicly supportive of the administration’s immigration policies, despite the outcry back home.

• Rubio was identified with bipartisan immigration reform in 2013, when he served in the Senate.
• Venezuelans have grown increasingly agitated with Rubio and Trump for not voicing support for an election date in Venezuela and for the administration’s transactional relationship with its acting president, Delcy Rodriguez, a socialist who came to power after the U.S. ousted strongman Nicolas Maduro on Jan. 3.
• “There’s a growing feeling that Trump just wanted our oil,” a Venezuelan Republican activist said.

Between the lines: Miami-Dade has one of the country’s most-diverse Latino populations. Cuban Americans are the dominant group, but there are sizable communities with roots elsewhere in Latin America.

• Cuban Americans tend to be the most conservative because of the exile community that swelled after Fidel Castro took power there in the 1959 revolution.
• Exiles from families who fled leftist oppression or violence in Nicaragua, Colombia and Venezuela also found common cause with Cuban-American Republicans over the years.
• Now, these South Florida Hispanic communities are grappling with an immigration system that treats them about the same as Haitians in Miami or arrivals from Mexico in more liberal U.S. cities such as Los Angeles.

Cubans once enjoyed expansive immigration protections in the U.S.

• Under Trump, they’re being deported in large numbers to Mexico and even countries in Africa.

Behind the scenes: Salazar’s broadside against Trump followed days of discussions between her office, Diaz-Balart’s and the administration over the arrest of Luis Galeano, a Nicaraguan journalist in Miami with an active asylum application.

• The Department of Homeland Security accused Galeano of overstaying his visa.
• The lawmakers say his visa should have been paused because of his asylum claim, which stemmed from his critical coverage of Nicaragua’s leftist dictator, Daniel Ortega, who confiscated Galeano’s property and stripped him of Nicaraguan citizenship.
• “There has got to be a better way to do this,” Diaz-Balart said. “I’m hearing that everywhere.”

Fonte: Axios