Latino Trump voters in Minneapolis expressed regret over immigration crackdowns following violent raids and deportations under his administration.
minneapolis: Like many Latinos voting in the 2024 US presidential election, Edgar Hernandez cast his ballot for Donald Trump.
But faced with Trump’s harsh immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, where two US citizens were killed by federal agents last month, the Protestant pastor has regrets.
“I don’t agree with what’s happening, it’s very violent,” he said, noting that he was part of the so-called Latino wave that helped re-elect the Republican billionaire.
The ongoing raids in the Midwestern city — where masked, armed federal agents lurk outside hardware stores, gas stations and neighborhood sidewalks — have left his church evacuated.
For the past two months, only a quarter of his congregants have dared to attend Sunday service.
“All Latinos agree that if someone is here illegally and committing crimes, thefts, murders, they should be arrested and deported,” Hernandez said. “But I don’t agree with deporting people who came here out of need and haven’t done anything.”
At 45, the Mexican-American is frustrated with the American political landscape, which forces him to choose between “the extreme right and the extreme left.”
Democratic candidate Kamala Harris was out of the question for Hernandez, who laments the “moral and spiritual decline” of the left that, for example, defends abortion or children’s programs hosted by drag queens.
‘never thought’
Hernandez remains a critic of former Democratic President Joe Biden for failing to slow inflation and “major deporter” Barack Obama for expelling millions of immigrants — though without the shock tactics of the Trump administration.
Although Trump promised unprecedented mass deportations during the campaign, many immigrants did not think they or their families would be personally targeted.
And many voters willingly ignored the 79-year-old Republican’s openly racist dog whistles, where he frequently conflated immigrants with criminals.
Instead, Hernandez believed Trump when he vowed to weed out the “bad guys” and focus on those with violent convictions.
But the current indiscriminate net traps undocumented workers with no criminal records, people legally seeking asylum, and children — which shocks Sergio Amezcua, a Mexican American pastor who also supported Trump.
“I didn’t vote for this,” Amezcua said, outraged by the racial profiling he is seeing in Minneapolis.
Former Vice President Harris won Latinos by a narrow margin in 2024, but Trump received the support of 48 percent of such voters, according to the Pew Research Center — up from 36 percent when he ran against Biden in 2020.
That dramatic gain could be reversed in the midterm elections later this year, as Minneapolis becomes a political flashpoint.
In the past month, federal immigration enforcement agents have been filmed shooting and killing two US citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretty, amid protests in the city.
Agents were also depicted detaining Liam Conejo Ramos, a five-year-old Ecuadorian boy wearing a fuzzy rabbit-eared hat and a lost gaze, sparking national outrage.
While the ballot box is unpredictable, the images coming from Minneapolis are “powerful images that I don’t think will go away between now and Election Day in November,” said David Schultz, a political science professor at Hamline University.
Current polls show that Latinos are angry at Trump — and they’re not alone.
“A lot of swing voters, including Latinos, who leaned toward Trump in 2024 are now moving away from him on a number of issues,” Schultz said.
Republican Party leaders also worry that the Trump administration’s actions in Minneapolis will have national ramifications.
“This has gone too far,” Ileana Garcia, co-founder of “Latinas for Trump” and a Republican state senator in Florida, told The New York Times after Preti’s murder.
Garcia blamed any potential midterm loss on senior Trump aide Stephen Miller, a key architect of the immigration crackdown.
No matter who is at fault, Feliza in Minneapolis agrees that “this is going too far.”
The 42-year-old devout Christian, whose grandfather was Mexican, declined to give her last name because she works to help the city’s undocumented residents stay hidden.
In the last three presidential elections, his anti-abortion views led him to vote in support of Trump.
Now, after seeing immigration policing up close, he regrets it.
“I wish I had never voted for him,” he said.
