Of Latinos in America, 25% are registered Independent and an additional 22% say other or don’t know. Since only 21% are Republican, there is tremendous opportunity here for Democrats, even if they don’t win over a single GOP among them. But we need to know that Latinos have a complex relationship with border politics. This has been a big stumbling block in understanding their needs and how to win them over. “It’s clear to anyone watching that Latinos are now the largest swing group in America moving by historic margins between Democrats and Republicans, punishing whichever party is in power.” That might seem a gift to us right now, but will be a problem, in the future, if we don’t learn from our mistakes. Here are excerpts from a piece by Andrea R. Flores in NYT about this issue.
~Sarah Walz
As a Mexican American lawyer and policy expert who has spent my career trying to fix our immigration system, I view Mr. Araujo’s killing as a tragic failure. For decades, our country has refused to recognize and protect millions of people like him: undocumented immigrants with deep ties to this country who have waited decades for Congress to create a path to earn legal status as they work, pay taxes and support our economy.
Latinos in America are in a crisis. Many people, including me, do not leave home without a passport.
But Mr. Trump was put into power with the help of the largest share of Latino voters of any Republican president. While a majority of Latino voters supported Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, 46 percent of Latino voters chose Mr. Trump. Latinos shifted toward Republicans by more than 20 points in key states like Nevada and Michigan. The ICE operation that led to Mr. Araujo’s death was in Texas, where Mr. Trump won Latino voters by a 10-point margin.
The vulnerability that Latinos are feeling right now creates an opportunity for Democrats to establish political momentum around what Latinos have been saying loud and clear: We want both a secure border and a legal pathway for the people who have built their lives in this country to become documented and safe.
Immigration, and how to enforce immigration law
Enforcing immigration law against undocumented immigrants, has always been a complicated issue among Latinos. The internal division traces back to the farmworkers’ movement, when the issue of the undocumented fractured Latinos who were organizing for their rights.
At the height of his organizing work, Mr. Cesar Chavez didn’t merely take a hard-line position on immigration; he worked to exclude undocumented and newly arrived workers from the labor movement because they were often used as scab labor against unions. In the 1970s he started what became known as the Illegals Campaign, encouraging union members to block Mexican immigrants from crossing the border. Those who disagreed with Mr. Chavez saw that the government did not distinguish between Latino citizens and those without documents when it raided farms, and the dissenters began to organize with these workers instead.
For Latinos who have lived here for decades, sometimes generations, our experiences are not the same as those of new arrivals. It’s why immigration has remained so fraught among Latinos and has colored decades’ worth of political decision making. It’s part of the reason many Latinos believed that when Mr. Trump promised mass deportations, he was not referring to them.
The full picture of the Latino population is lost
This picture is lost to many in the Democratic Party. Latinos prioritize the economy and health care over immigration, yet the party has too often reduced a racially, ethnically, linguistically and regionally diverse people to this single cause: immigration. Worse still, many Democrats have misunderstood Latinos’ attitudes on immigration altogether, wrongly assuming they want lax enforcement policies because they want to legalize the undocumented.
Over many decades Democrats have promised to regularize the citizenship of Latinos who have been in the country for many years and worked hard. They promised to make it more fair to enter the country legally and become naturalized. They promised better border control. After the elections are over, those promises are broken, again and again. Of course the Left is not all to blame. But this makes Latinos feel ill disposed to trust them.
The broken promises and brewing resentments helped Mr. Trump secure an unprecedented number of votes from Latinos. They saw Mr. Trump as someone who could amp up the economy, stop the crisis at the border and prioritize them over new arrivals. And once again, a familiar wedge was being used to divide Latinos. Voters made the same assumption that Mr. Chavez did decades ago: that a secure border and cracking down on unchecked migration would improve their lives.
Mr. Trump’s second term
Trump’s second term has revealed the consequences of leaving millions of undocumented Latinos unprotected. The effects of aggressive enforcement are rippling through communities from Maine to Houston. Families are skipping doctor appointments, children are missing school, and workers are afraid to show up for their jobs. Fear has spread far beyond undocumented households, touching citizens, legal residents and mixed-status families alike.
The results of this egregious abuse of their trust in the president are starting to come in.
In November 2025, Latinos swung toward Democrats in New Jersey and Virginia. A month later, voters in Miami — a stronghold of Latino support for Mr. Trump — elected Eileen Higgins as the city’s first Democratic mayor in nearly three decades.
But as Lorella Praeli, a president of Community Change, a nonprofit that works on building working-class and multiracial political coalitions, told me, “Democrats should be careful not to confuse Trump’s failures with their own success.” “The opportunity before Democrats is to put legalization back at the center of their agenda — not just as a promise on the campaign trail but as a governing priority in office,” she said,
There are glimmers of hope that Democrats can get it right. In Texas the Democrat James Talarico is running for Senate and appears to be making gains among Latinos on the issue of immigration. He is advocating both a secure border and more pathways for undocumented immigrants who are longtime residents to earn residency and citizenship. “Our border should be like a front porch — it should have a welcome mat out front and a lock on the door,” reads one of his campaign slogans.
It seems that someone may finally be hearing what Latinos have been trying to tell the Left.
https://latinonewsnetwork.com/democracy/latino-voters-new-york-independent-democrats-dealignment/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Cesar-Chavez
https://humanrights.fhi.duke.edu/chavez-ufw-and-wetback-problem
Photo Illustration by Tam Stockton for The New York Times