President Trump promised to end border chaos, but deadly ICE shootings and high-profile raids have shaken many voters. Senator Ruben Gallego said, "They wanted the chaos to be done, but what is happening now is not what they wanted." These enforcement actions now pose a major challenge for Republican candidates.
President Trump promised to end the chaos at the southern border. But deadly ICE shootings and high-profile raids have shaken many voters.
President Trump returned to the White House calling for "mass deportations now," after anger over illegal immigration drove his voters to the polls in 2024. But two years later, amid high-profile raids and deadly ICE shootings, immigration politics have been scrambled once again, creating unpredictable fault lines in the hours leading up to Election Day.
Public polling suggests that voters are now more likely to trust Democrats on immigration policy, although Republican voters remain more motivated by the issue. And while some Latino voting-rights activists worry that recent immigration raids in California and elsewhere could suppress Hispanic turnout, others are optimistic that the opposite is true in some of the most competitive congressional districts in the country.
"Republicans are really out of step with where Americans are with immigration, just like how Democrats were out of step in 2024," said Senator Ruben Gallego, a Democrat who won in Arizona two years ago while calling for stricter immigration enforcement. "They wanted the chaos to be done, but what is happening now is not what they wanted. They are not for heavy-handed immigration forces. They are not for racial profiling; they see the sob stories."
In the first two years of his second term, Mr. Trump has moved aggressively to overhaul the nation's immigration system, and the southern border has largely been shut down. Attempted illegal border crossings have plummeted from a peak of nearly 250,000 in November 2023 to about 11,000 this past August.
But the administration also unleashed an enormous enforcement apparatus that has drawn widespread criticism. Large-scale raids have unfolded in Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis. Federal detention capacity has more than doubled through a network of local jail contracts, retrofitted warehouses and tent cities.
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