Phoenix resident Sandra Ramirez watched immigration videos over the past year and said she realized her 2024 vote for Donald Trump was a mistake, citing harassment she said targeted people for their skin color. In her neighborhood in south Phoenix, views of Trump were split: some voters said they backed enforcement and border security even as they disliked some images, while others said enforcement operations and everyday costs pushed them away from the president. The question for Republicans heading into midterms this fall and looking toward the next presidential election is whether Latino voters who helped deliver Trump a second term will remain in the coalition as the administration continues its immigration crackdown.
Ramirez, a voter who broke from her Democrat-voting family to support Trump in 2024, said she saw officers cracking down on migrants after watching footage. “There are a lot of people who are being harassed for the color of their skin, and that’s not right,” Ramirez said. She added, “I’ll never go Republican again,” according to the reporting.
The shift the president made among Latino voters during the 2024 election remains central to how Republicans are assessing their path forward. The Associated Press reporting cited Pew Research Center data that said 43% of Latino voters nationally voted for Trump, compared with 35% in the 2020 presidential election, a change attributed in part to economic concerns. Trump returned to office pledging to crack down on immigration, and the AP reported that the administration has carried out arrest sweeps that often targeted Latino migrants in homes, workplaces and schools.
More than a year into Trump’s second term, polling cited by Pew Research Center suggested a significant drop in support among Latino voters who backed him in 2024. According to the AP, Pew found that support for Trump among non-Latino voters fell from 95% to 79% between February 2025 and April 2026, while the drop-off was described as more dramatic among Latino voters who cast their ballot for Trump: the AP reported that 66% approved of his job performance in April compared with 93% at the beginning of his second term.
Other survey findings cited by the AP focused on how widely enforcement has reached socially and personally. The AP reported that an AP-NORC poll found more than half of Latino adults said they know someone impacted by the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement.
In Arizona, where Latino voters increased their support for Trump in 2024 and where enforcement has been a long-running campaign focus, the potential change is especially relevant in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and its suburbs. The AP reported that a third of Maricopa County residents are Latino and that one in four of them is an immigrant, citing the Latino Data Hub at the University of California, Los Angeles. The AP also said that in recent years Arizona became a flashpoint in the immigration debate, including through the high-profile raids in Latino communities conducted by former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
In south Phoenix, the AP described conversations and daily life that reflected those divisions. Albert Rodriguez, a Phoenix tattoo artist, said he had once supported Trump but later regretted his 2024 vote after seeing images of immigration enforcement in cities including Chicago, Minneapolis and Los Angeles. Rodriguez said the president promised to go after immigrants who were criminals but that he instead believed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were “hitting the paleta man,” referring to ordinary people selling frozen treats. “Big time, I regret it,” Rodriguez said, according to the AP.
Other residents described a different blend of support and concern. Ronnie Martinez, an Army veteran, backed Trump’s effort to stem crossings at the southern border, and said the border was “only a hop, skip and a jump to our south.” He said he did not want “illegal alien criminals coming from Guatemala, Venezuela, Central America,” while also saying he disliked some of the images he had seen of ICE arresting people in front of their children. Martinez said he was sympathetic to ICE officers and blamed Democratic officials for not cooperating with immigration enforcement, and he pointed to economic changes that he said helped him, including removing taxes on tips and overtime.
Still others put blame for Trump’s crackdown on earlier policy choices. Guadalupe Alaffa, another Phoenix resident, said she blamed President Joe Biden’s policies for prompting Trump’s immigration crackdown, saying, “He left that damn border wide open,” according to the AP.
Republicans’ challenge in Arizona is compounded by the political shifts that have already weakened decades of GOP dominance. The AP reported that both of Arizona’s senators are Democrats, as are the state’s top officials. It also said that winning back some of the Latinos who shifted to Trump could matter for Democratic officials first elected in 2022, including Gov. Katie Hobbs, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Attorney General Kris Mayes.
The AP’s reporting also traced how Arizona politics has been shaped by long-running mobilization and earlier immigration enforcement controversies. It said that Democrats in Maricopa County benefited from more than a decade of organizing among Latinos mobilizing against hard-line immigration enforcement, including after the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2010 passed a law known as SB1070 requiring police to check immigration status if officers suspected someone was in the country illegally. The AP said Sheriff Arpaio later drew national attention for raids in Latino neighborhoods and day labor areas, and it cited court and Justice Department actions in which his office was found to have profiled and detained Latinos, followed by his criminal contempt conviction and a later Trump pardon.
Alongside enforcement, economic strain is emerging as a second pressure point. Former Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, who signed the 2010 bill, said rising prices and the cost of living could be part of why Latinos might pull away, saying, “With the inflation and the cost of living and the gasoline and the wars, I don’t know if they can afford to be a Trump Republican.” Another Phoenix resident, Earl Wilcox, an activist and restaurant owner, said he believed Latino support for Trump was waning as affordability issues combined with immigration enforcement, and he said his restaurant hosted Biden in 2024 as part of an effort to rally Latino support for Democrats. Wilcox said, “I don’t think the Republican Party will have the support it did the second time around,” and added that he believed the raids helped start the shift.