Although Latino Voters Reject Mass Deportations, President-elect is Oiling Up the Machine

Maribel Hastings

Posted November 21, 2024

President-elect Donald Trump began to build the machine to implement his promise of mass deportations. Stephen Miller, intellectual author of family separations at the border, defender of eliminating birthright citizenship and taking citizenship from those who naturalized, and Tom Homan, who declared that one of the ways to avoid separating families is for U.S. citizen children of undocumented people to be deported with their parents, will head it up.

While Trump’s reign of anti-immigrant terror takes shape, a coalition of 16 national organizations, including America’s Voice, presented the results of an electoral analysis that found that the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, won the Latino vote even though Trump increased his level of support among Latino men.

Moreover, a majority of Latinos, some 80%, favor the legalization of immigrants who have been living in the United States for decades over mass deportations. And 71% of Latinos support a tough bipartisan border security bill that even restricts asylum. In other words, said experts, Trump doesn’t have the mandate to implement mass deportations since, in addition to Latinos, other electoral sectors also do not support them.

Trump has a long list from which to choose his first immigration actions as soon as he takes charge on January 20, 2025, from declaring an “emergency” to seal the border to revisiting the Muslim ban.

Harris won the Latino vote 62% over Trump’s 37%, which is very different from the exit polls on November 5, which gave Trump 46% support among Latinos, the highest of any Republican in recent history.

According to the analysis, Harris won the Latino male vote with 56% compared to 43% for Trump. “It’s categorically incorrect to say that the majority of Latino men voted for Trump,” Matt Barreto, founder of BSP Strategies — one of the firms leading this electoral analysis — indicated in a press teleconference.

Except Florida, they said, Harris beat Trump in all states in precincts with a high concentration of Hispanics, between 60-70%, including the battleground states, although her numbers were lower than those of Biden in the 2020 election.

That includes Puerto Ricans, the group that supported Harris the most at 65%, although a combination of factors ultimately gave Trump the Electoral College and popular vote victory.

Among Latinos, the economy was the central factor for supporting Trump, which led activists and analysts to agree that Trump’s mandate must be to reduce the price of food and housing, among other items. It’s not a mandate to conduct raids and mass deportations that would eliminate 5% of the country’s labor force and end up increasing the prices of goods and services, which Trump promised to reduce.

But Trump and the functionaries he has been nominating are motivated by more than economic worries. There are elements of racism and white nationalism that form the base of their public policy proposals. And it’s not only about undocumented immigrants. They focus on authorized immigrants under programs like DACA, TPS, and asylum, including those with humanitarian parole. The idea is to leave them unprotected and vulnerable to deportation.

Homan, the former acting Director of ICE in the first Trump administration, would be the new “border czar.” Miller, Trump’s former advisor and architect of the infamous zero-tolerance immigration policy, would be the Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy at the White House.

In contrast to the first Trump administration, they seem more focused on seeking loopholes that allow them to implement their policies without being stopped by the courts. Also, Trump will have a Republican Congress. He also has judges, who he has nominated in various courts, who have demonstrated sympathy toward his policies.

Recently, for example, Federal Judge J. Campbell Barker, appointed by Trump, annulled Joe Biden’s Keeping Families Together policy that sought to ease the legalization of undocumented people married to U.S. citizens. The judge ruled in favor of Texas and another dozen Republican states who called Biden’s plan “illegal.”

Trump has a long list from which to choose his first immigration actions as soon as he takes charge on January 20, 2025, from declaring an “emergency” to seal the border to revisiting the Muslim ban.

For now, Trump is oiling up the deportation machine — although his mandate is economic.

Maribel Hastings is a Senior Advisor to América’s Voice.