Latino fury over ICE raids could see Texas gerrymandering backfire on Trump

Earlier this month, embattled Republican congresswoman Monica De La Cruz sought an urgent meeting with local business leaders in her South Texas district.

Re-elected in a landslide in 2024 and with November’s midterms fast approaching, De La Cruz hoped to allay concerns about immigration raids in the Rio Grande Valley and their impact on her angry and frightened constituents. The meeting went badly. The mood was hostile.

“I was pretty blunt,” said Julio Carranza, 40, the owner of a construction company. “I told her straight up: We all voted for Trump. We were the guys on the Trump train. We were the guys with the flags. It’s not gonna happen this time. You’re gonna lose your seat.”

The GOP’s troubles in this corner of Texas are in stark contrast to the triumphalism of a few months ago. On Donald Trump’s orders, state Republicans forced through a controversial redistricting that redrew the Texas congressional map last year.

Emboldened by Trump’s historic gains among Latino voters in 2024, the move was expected to pick off five Democrat-held seats at the 2026 midterms, bolstering Republican hopes of keeping their slender majority in the House of Representatives. Instead, the GOP is haemorrhaging support from Latinos appalled by Trump’s migrant crackdown and its impact on a n increasingly stagnant economy. In the majority-Latino cities jutting up against the Mexican border in the Rio Grande Valley, the backlash has given Texas Democrats renewed hope before the midterms. The Republican redistricting threatens to backfire.

“That’s the word on the street –vote Democrat, vote Democrat, vote Democrat. I’m not saying that I agree 100% with their agenda, but it’s the only way to make this stop,” said Benny Melendez, 32, a Rio Grande building contractor and community leader. “We’re being targeted. We see raids in the valley every day. We’re not only defending our livelihoods, we’re defending our dignity as Hispanics.”

More than 9,000 people have been arrested in ICE raids across the valley in recent months, crushing the construction and hospitality trades. In the face of the crackdown, much of the local workforce – legal and undocumented – has gone to ground.

“It’s ridiculous. How do you find 9,000 hands?” said Mario Guerrero, executive director of the South Texas Builders Association, at his office in McAllen. “We have sites across the valley that are supposed to be full throttle on construction right now and instead they’re ghost towns.”

Employers complain of the same heavy-handed, indiscriminate tactics that have terrorised migrant communities across the US in the past year. Many here backed Trump’s campaign pledge to deport convicted criminals, only to see innocent family, friends and neighbours swept up by ICE and vanish into  the administration’s lawless network of gulags. Videos of ICE vehicles pursuing Latino workers through residential neighbourhoods or dragging them away in handcuffs from restaurants have been shared up and down the valley.

“We’re all for deporting bad people, but they’re not showing up to construction sites saying, ‘Hey, we’re here for this rapist, or this murderer, or this drug dealer’,” Guerrero said. “They’re barging into places without a warrant and taking everybody, whether they have proper documentation or not. People are terrified.”

At Silverado Moon, a cul-de-sac of new homes near McAllen, the aftermath of a raid was evident last week. Half-built houses stood abandoned. A solitary man in a pickup collected tools and materials discarded at the plot where ICE agents stormed the project days earlier.

“We can’t find skilled workers. Before, we could finish a house in four months. Now, it could be twice that, maybe more, and then the house sits on the market for longer,” said Melendez.

“All that time is costing me, costing my workers, costing my clients. We’re all losing money.”

Trump won 48% of Latino voters in 2024, the highest share by a Republican candidate in modern times. That swing in Democratic strongholds – including 55% of Latino men – was pivotal in sending him back to the White House.

It has taken only a year for that support to crumble. Many here approve of Trump’s steps to close the border, halting the surge of migrants who flooded into McAllen, Harlingen and Brownsville under Joe Biden’s presidency. But there is mounting horror at the images from Minneapolis, scene of two fatal shootings by ICE agents in recent days. The outrage around the hundreds of migrant children held at a detention centre in Dilley, outside San Antonio, has resonated across the state and beyond, cementing the sense of persecution in Latino communities.

As Trump’s approval ratings tumble, Texas Democrats are eyeing the midterms with optimism. Congressman Vicente Gonzalez, whose seat in the 34th District was targeted in GOP gerrymandering, is confident of hanging on in November.

“Despite extreme gerrymandering in Texas, there is a tangible shift on the ground. South Texans – many who voted for Trump – are realising they were sold false promises,” Gonzalez told The Observer.

“With full control of the White House and Congress, Republican lawmakers have spent the last year raising costs on healthcare and everyday goods, while implementing violent mass deportation policies that are creating labour shortages in our region and across the country.”

In the 15th District next door, meanwhile, De La Cruz looks vulnerable in her race against Democratic challenger Bobby Pulido, a popular Tejano singer, Latin Grammy award winner and a household name in the Rio Grande Valley. De La Cruz’s office did not respond to a request for comment, but up Bicentennial Boulevard in McAllen last week, Pulido’s campaign yard signs were out in force. The Republican assumption that they would retain Trump’s support among Latinos when they redrew the Texas electoral map now looks misguided.

“I think the Republicans have overplayed their hand... because they are constantly pushing things to as far-right extremes as they can,” said Kendall Scudder, chairman of the Texas Democratic party. “Hispanic and gen Z voters have poured away from this administration in droves. Drawing these maps based on an outlier election year like 2024 was just a terrible political decision.”

Texas Republicans remain confident that the redistricting will net three or four of the intended seats, but Latino operatives encountering the anger on the doorstep are nervous.

“The messaging is obviously not there,” Alexis Uscanga, a 22-year-old activist with Texas Latino Conservatives, said of the crackdown. “We should be deporting criminals as the top priority. A lot of voters are saying they want to see a refocus towards the economy.”

The Democrats have , in a sense, been here before. In most recent election cycles they have found reasons to hope for a comeback in Texas, only to be disappointed. The party has not won a statewide race here for 30 years. But the sheer brutality of Trump’s second-term agenda has been unprecedented and so has the scale of the backlash, fuelling Democratic hopes of a blue wave.

After months in the political wilderness, with approval ratings even worse than Trump, taking back the House would give Democrats a government platform to resist and investigate the administration for the first time. After Democrats won a string of landmark victories in last November’s off-year elections, the party’s Congressional Campaign Committee expanded its list of 2026 battleground targets to 40 seats. Pollsters predict fewer than half that number will be competitive in November, but Democrats need only flip three to take back control of the House.

The Republican gerrymandering in Texas has sparked a nationwide race to redraw congressional maps ahead of the midterms. In a bid to carve out a greater advantage, GOP lawmakers in Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio passed new maps expected to net four more seats. Democrats have countered with an aggressive redistricting to flip five Republican-held seats in California.

The deepening crisis in Minnesota has dealt another blow to Republicans’ hopes of holding on to their majority in November. In the wake of Alex Pretti’s fatal shooting by ICE agents in Minneapolis, senior Trump officials began turning on each other last week. Republicans on Capitol Hill have broken ranks for the first time as fears grow that the crisis will condemn them to a defeat that rivals the 2018 midterm bloodbath during Trump’s first term.

Even the president has changed tack in the face of fury at the government’s shifting attempts to blame Pretti for his own death.

At the immigration court in Harlingen last week, the mundane bureaucracy of Trump’s deportation scheme ticked on. After ICE lay in wait outside the courthouse last year, arresting migrants as they appeared for routine asylum hearings, many defendants refuse to come in person. In a deserted courtroom on Monday, a judge and Justice Department lawyer worked through batch after batch of deportation cases.

“We thought he would deport the criminals, and we supported that 110%. We just never thought that it would be at our doorstep,” said Guerrero. A three-time Trump voter since 2016 and longstanding admirer of the president, a fellow “construction guy”, he will vote Democrat across the board in November.

“Even if I don’t know who the candidate is. I’m not even looking at the Republican side,” Guerrero added. “I’m just going Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, all the way down.”

Photographs by Joel Angel Juarez/Getty Images. Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images