Angered by ICE raids, Latino voters swing Texas and Florida in US election rout for Republicans

Hispanic Americans turned out in record numbers in key battlegrounds in Tuesday night's US election to protest the Trump administration's anti-immigrant operations, supercharging an explosive rout of the Republican party, the report said.

'Trump went against us,' said Benny Melendez from Weslaco, Texas. 'He made us the target of ICE operations, so we decided to punish him by voting against his party. That's what happened.'

Melendez, the owner of a small housebuilding company in south Texas, voted for Donald Trump in the presidential election two years ago, attracted by his promise to secure the Mexican border and improve the economy. But on Tuesday, he cast his vote for the Democrats in a display of pure anger.

Two of his cousins and up to 15 of his building workers have been picked up and deported to Mexico by ICE. When Melendez voted for Trump in 2024 he expected the immigration raids would focus on those with criminal records, he said, not his relatives and employees.

He said: 'They're taking our neighbors. They're taking our friends. They're taking our workers, and they're taking our family members. This is an attack against our community.'

In the closing days of the 2024 presidential race, Trump made a special pitch to Hispanic voters. According to Pew Research, in 2024 Trump garnered 48% of the Latino vote, 12 points up from four years previously.

But on Tuesday night, Hispanic American support for Republicans plummeted to 30%. According to the New York Times analysis of voter trends, election night marked a 28 point shift from 2024 in Latino allegiance toward Democrats nationwide, more than any other demographic group, with the next largest shift of 17% coming from Asian Americans.

The shift helped propel Democratic wins in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as governor's seats in states like Texas, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

Texas elected its first Latino governor, Democrat Gina Hinojosa, a native of the Rio Grande Valley whose mother is an immigrant from Mexico. Democrat Xavier Becerra, the son of immigrants from Mexico, will become the first elected Latino governor in California.

In Hispanic-dominated south Texas, Democrats won all four congressional districts along the border with Mexico, including three districts Republicans had redrawn in an attempt to bolster their control of the US House. Henry Cuellar in Texas 28 and Vicente Gonzalez in Texas 34 held their seats, while the 81% Hispanic Texas 15 was flipped by Democratic candidate and Tejano music star Bobby Pulido by 24 percentage points with 95% of the ballots counted, against Republican incumbent Monica De La Cruz.

Pulido's campaign manager Abel Prado said the result was in part a reflection of Trump's mass deportation drive that has seen thousands of undocumented Hispanic people detained and deported by ICE in Texas. Among the 48,000 individuals that the Pulido campaign assembled in its voter database, almost 40% were members of mixed-status families, he said.

In Florida, Latino voters swung powerfully toward Democratic candidates in the Cuban and Venezuelan communities of Miami-Dade, and equally in the heavily Puerto Rican areas around Orlando. In Miami-Dade, which Trump won by 15 points in 2024, Republican incumbent Maria Elvira Salazar was fighting a neck-and-neck battle with Democratic candidate Eliott Rodriguez.

Stephanie Valencia, co-founder of the Latino polling experts Equis Research, said: 'People have called us the sleeping giant for a long time, and now we're really the swinging giant.' She said Democrats are entering a probationary period with voters and should not make the mistake of thinking that this swing is permanent; voters want focus on the economy and inflation, immigration, and wars abroad.