What if the Democrats held mass nationwide protests and "fiery but mostly peaceful" agitation against the Administration's immigration enforcement and its agents, and nobody but white upper middle class progressives showed up?
Amid the various flailings and flounderings the Democrats have been going through lately, their misapprehension of Latino American attitudes on border enforcement has certainly been among the biggest backfires: it's been an open secret for over a decade that while Latino citizens have nuanced views about immigration and enforcement (big supporters of strict border control, but often complex views about deportation). That dissonance crested last November, with a majority of Latino males voting for Trump.
But what about now, when the actual deportations have actually started, with all the strum und drang in courts, in the news and on the fiery but mostly peaceful streets of LA and other cities?
Well...
A poll of registered voters conducted by the League of American Workers, conducted June 9-11 (immediately after the fierybutmostlypeacefulprotests in Los Angeles, shows nearly 60% support the Trump deportation plan - including 53% of Latino respondents. Latinos appear to particularly support deporting illegal migrants with criminal records:
The poll also showed that 65 percent of all respondents—including 61 percent of Hispanic voters—agree that Trump “deserves credit” for the reported 95 percent decrease in “gotaways” at the US border compared to levels seen during Joe Biden’s presidency. The poll defined gotaways as individuals who illegally crossed the border and were observed but not apprehended.
“This survey reveals that violence and radicalism in Los Angeles and other cities only serves to reinforce the will of the people to achieve secure borders, orderly lawful migration, and peace in our streets,” said LAW President Steve Cortes. “As this polling makes clear, Americans chose Donald Trump precisely because of his America First approach to immigration, plus law-and-order generally.”
Indeed, immigrants in general - presumably the legal kind - appear to be not only warming up to the deportation plan, but to Trump and the GOP itself. According to CNN's data guy, Harry Enten:
“Immigrant citizens, immigrant voters and foreign-born voters have gone tremendously to the right on this issue in 2024 and 2025 versus where they were in 2020,” Enten said. “If you go back to 2020, Democrats get this, they held a 32-point lead on this issue. Immigrant voters were in the Democratic camp. Jump forward to 2024 and 2025, look at that shift! A 40-point shift toward the right among immigrant voters. Republicans now lead on this issue by eight points over Democrats, more so than any other group that I could find. The group of voters who became more hawkish on immigration were in fact immigrants themselves, immigrants who are registered to vote in this country.”
As we noted in this space a few weeks ago, this is reflected in some places that might have seemed unthinkable a year or two ago:
In the city of Dearborn, where some 55 percent of residents are of Middle Eastern descent, Trump won with 42.48 percent of the vote over Vice President Kamala Harris, who received just 36.26 percent. The Green Party’s Jill Stein, who campaigned heavily on ending Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, received 18.37 percent. In 2020, an impressive 74.20 percent of voters in the city had cast their ballot for Biden.
It's hard to say how durable this phenomenon is, or whether Republicans can get it to transfer to candates trying to follow Trump to the Oval Office.
But it's something I never actually believed I'd see, in any case.
