Is Donald Trump’s Hispanic Red Waves starting to collapse?

City of Rio Grande Valley, McLaren Mayor Javier Villalobos, has noticed changes in his community over the past few weeks ice The raid in the area is located at the southern tip of Texas. “You go to some of the segments that are being built, it’s empty. You go to Home Depot, there’s no one there.” “It’s weird. It feels like the ‘Walking Dead’. Transparent

The valley is a long-term fortress of democracy that has been used as evidence in recent years Donald Trump And his Magazine The movement attracts non-white voters. Republicans celebrate victory in 2021 when Billy Labos is elected, which is a sign of what is coming to be a beauty. “Stunning news! McLaren, Texas is a major border town with 140,000 people. 85% Hispanics have just elected the Republican mayor,” said former Trump adviser Steve Cortes. Posted On Twitter. “The macro adjustment accelerates in South Texas and elsewhere as Hispanics rally the United States first.” In last year’s presidential election, Trump won every county in the valley, including Hillary Clinton who beat one of his counties by 40 points in 2016. McAllen has the second largest turn in the party share of any big city in the country, lagging just behind another Texas border community, Laredo. “In Rio Grande Valley, Red Wave landed,” Texas Observer Announcecalling the 2024 election “bloody” and wondering if Texas Democrats are “doomed”.

But Trump’s tariffs restrict economic pressure to a region that relies heavily on trade with Mexico. Then, in mid-June, Trump Posted About the Truth Society, “by notifying this truth”, ice Officials were ordered to “do their best to achieve the very important goal of achieving the largest large-scale deportation program in history.” The Trump administration is trying to reach thousands of deportation quotas every day, targeting cities run by Democrats Los Angeles. But Texas is not spared despite Gov. Greg Abbott’s key role in helping Trump get elected. McAllen is a city with the same percentage of non-citizens in Los Angeles. Attacks were reported in nightclubs, restaurants and immigration hearings in the area. It was unusually soft when I visited a popular flea market complex. A plant supplier told me it was recently raided. He estimates that traffic has dropped by 90% since then. The widespread impact of the raid has worried some Republicans, as Villalobos told me, “We are shooting on the feet.”

Last month, at an event held in San Antonio, hosted by South Texas Business Partnership, Villalobos vowed to “a messy feather.” “It is said that they will expel the murderer, the rapist, the criminal. It’s not what happened,” he said. Instead, “it’s like a drag, it’s going to affect all of us.”

One day in June, the heat in the middle of the morning was already punished, but the McAllen Convention Center was chilling cold. Wearing a lively cobalt blue suit, Villalobos walked half an hour in the half hour before the fifty-second annual Mayor’s Prayer Lunch, an event designed to “promote a greater understanding of our community and seek God’s divine guidance in our urban affairs.”

A group of people in church gowns felt a cowboy hat drilling a decorative piece on the table decorated with an image of a dove with an olive branch on it. The day before, Villalobos Famous On Facebook, he has been discussing “hot topics about immigration enforcement and how it can negatively impact all sectors of our economy” with members of Congress from Texas, including Democrats Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez. “Republicans and Democrats can solve this problem with logical and common sense thinking,” he wrote. “God blesses and saves America!” The online response is mixed (“I hope more Republicans share your views on the matter”; “The First Stage of Americans”), but at the conference center, people support it uniformly. A woman in a patterned skirt pressed down on Vera Lobos’s hand, thanking him for his efforts. “It’s not as a Republican or a Democrat. It’s to do the right thing for our economy and our civilization,” she told me.

Roel Moreno Jr. was wearing a black dress shirt and was fixed to the lapel with a gold medal. Moreno owns a company that carries out commercial and residential construction in the valley. He said many of his employees were afraid to show up after the raid. “Most of the time, you have four to ten people in a house that is working, but now we start from scratch to two. Yesterday, I had only two people working, and that’s because they were my friends and they came down from the corpus to help me hang up Sheetrock,” he told me. Moreno said he called a worker and asked, “‘Hey, can you come and open a house?’ He was like,’I’m scared that I was three years old. Dhakabut now Dhaka“Not even good.” He was like, “My wife, my kids are here, my parents are here, my grandparents are here. If I were sent to Mexico, I had nowhere to go. this at home. Moreno added that like many in the valley, he possesses “conservative values”: “We believe in family, God, to preserve our property values ​​and to protect our people.” He refused to say whether the raid would have an impact on his politics. I believe that God created us all equally and that things will be better. “We need to continue to reach out to our friends and neighbors,” he said. ”

There is a story about Villalobos, fifty-nine, who is common in many generations in the valley. He was the son of an immigrant worker and he began picking onions and cucumbers with his parents in their first grade. Villalobos said his brother was the first high school in the family to graduate. “Villalobos said. Both brothers eventually received a law degree. He said Villalobos would usually vote for the Democrats until around 2007, when he changed the party, a move that was largely motivated by “economic concerns.” At the time, politics in the valley was dominated by powerful Democratic machines. When Villalobos served as president of the Republican local chapter, he said: “We’re all coagulated anyway.” ” In 2012, Barack Obama won more than 70% of the vote in Hidalgo County.

Republican gains in the valley are the result of overlapping forces. The valley’s population is often patriotic and religious, with relatively low educational rates. Republicans tout their support for law enforcement and oil and gas in the region, which is increasingly seen as complacency and in some cases corrupt. In 2022, McAllen Congressional District, held by Democrats for more than a century, elected its first Republican. (The region has been redrawn after the 2020 census to make it more beneficial to Republicans.)