‘Oh, I’m Very Happy’: Latinos Living Along Southern Border Rave Over Trump’s Crackdown

Many Hispanic Americans living along the U.S.-Mexico border are voicing strong support for President Donald Trump’s handling of 🛂Immigration enforcement, adding that they got exactly what they voted for.

In the 2024 presidential election, Trump managed to flip several border counties that had not voted for a Republican president in decades, and in one particular case, for more than a century. President Joe Biden’s mismanagement of the border was cited by members of these Latino communities as one of the defining reasons for this change, and Trump’s historic crackdown on illegal 🛂Immigration has kept them satisfied with their choice.

“Oh, I’m very happy,” Perla Bazan, a lifelong resident of Starr County, Texas, told the 🏢Daily Caller News Foundation about Trump’s handling of 🛂Immigration enforcement.

Starr County voted for Trump in the 2024 election, the first time the county had favored a Republican presidential candidate in 132 years. The last time a GOP presidential contender won the county was in 1892.

Starr County is heavily Latino — with Hispanics making up more than 97% of the locality. Despite media narratives of Latinos fearing Trump’s 🛂Immigration crackdown, many in Starr County are embracing his heavy-handed approach.

Having experienced many ebbs and flows of illegal migrant activity during her decades living near the southern border, Bazan said the crisis she witnessed under Biden was unequivocally the “worst.” The Starr County resident recounted one moment, in particular, when she was home with her daughter and they were terrified their roof would fly away because of a nearby helicopter chasing down a group of illegal migrants.

“My daughter was like, ‘Mom, what’s happening?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know,’” Bazan remembered. “So she went through the back door, we didn’t see when she opened the front door, there were a bunch of illegals running right through the sidewalk. I said, ‘close the door and lock it.’”

During the Biden era, Bazan said she regularly heard gunshots throughout the day — a practice she said was a “signal” to migrants that they could cross into the U.S. later that night. The Texas mom added that, by the end of Biden’s first term, her community was ready to vote for change.

“It’s because we’re tired. We need somebody who’s gonna come in, and he’s gonna tell the facts the way it is and not sugar coat it,” Bazan said, speaking of Trump’s unorthodox approach to public communication. “You need to be told the truth the way it is — you need the facts.”

Bazan, who said her family has been living in the area for seven generations, is far from the only local who feels this way.

“I noticed has died down a lot since Trump’s taken office,” Amanda Garcia, a resident of San Isidro, said to the DCNF. “That border wall — that’s exactly what we need.”

Garcia recounted numerous instances when the border crisis spilled over onto her family’s property, such as when a vehicle ferrying illegal migrants plowed through her ranch’s fence.

“I’m just glad that we weren’t home at the time it happened,” the Texas mom said, adding that her father-in-law living nearby has dealt with the same issue multiple times, costing tons of money in repairs. “They ran right through our fence, tore it all down and ran out through the net.”

In one harrowing incident, the open-border violence nearly killed Garcia’s husband.

While hunting on the family’s property during the holidays, Garcia’s husband ran into suspected cartel gangbangers engaged in a heated argument, according to her account. Upon seeing him walk by, they drew a gun at him at near point-blank range. Luckily for him, they ultimately let him go after he assured them he wasn’t a threat.

“He just put his hands up and walked off, not here to cause trouble,” Garcia said.

Garcia said another rampant issue was migrant mothers showing up at her doorstep pleading to use her phone, but even doing this seemingly-innocuous gesture would result in consequences.

“We’ve had so many incidents where the mothers, you know, are crying and pleading that she needs food for the baby and they want to use your phone, and once you give them the phone — forget it,” Garcia said. “You do that, and you get all kinds of people calling you at all hours of the day, you know, the best thing is just to call Border Patrol, which is what we’ve done.”

“But there were two girls that were, I believe they were abused, and we had to call, you know, the Border Patrol on that too,” she added. “It’s just so many ugly scenarios that come out of the brush that people don’t see.”

All of the chaos ultimately resulted in Starr County — consistently rated as one of the poorest counties in Texas — breaking its streak of Democrat Party dominance. The partisan swing over just a few years was incredibly pronounced.

A mere 19% of voters in the county pulled the lever for Trump in 2016, which was a fairly typical result at the time. In 2020, that number exploded to 47%. Another four years later, Trump raked in 57% of the vote, beating then-Vice President Kamala Harris by double-digit margins.

Toni Trevino, chair of the Starr County Republican Party, said the border was one of several factors that finally pushed residents to spurn the Democratic Party.

“All seemed to be worried about were fringe issues,” Trevino said to the DCNF. “People here are very conservative people and that message just didn’t resonate with them.

“The other thing is that they had already seen what President Trump had done before, and they liked it, so he was not an unknown entity, and they saw what Biden was doing, and they didn’t want more of Biden,” Trevino continued.

Trevino’s husband, Benito, pointed out that the tipping point for Starr County was local Democrats going to the polls like usual, but this time not choosing to vote for a candidate at the top of the ticket.

“Two thousand Democrat voters did not vote for Kamala,” Benito said, noting the 6,800 votes Harris received in 2024 compared to the roughly 9,100 votes Biden received in 2020.

“They voted for their sheriff, but did not vote for Kamala,” he explained. “Not that many new people voted for Trump from 2020, but to my surprise, there were almost 2,000 people who did not vote for Kamala, but they voted in the local elections, for sure.”

What happened in southern Texas on Election Day 2024 was largely emblematic of what took place across the country. Latinos, a voting bloc that has historically favored the Democrat Party, swung heavily toward the GOP.

Trump garnered a paltry 28% of the national Latino vote in the 2016 presidential election, losing the demographic to Hillary Clinton by a 38-point margin, according to election analysts. He made modest gains with the voting bloc in 2020, winning 36% of their vote to Biden’s 61%. However, by the time November 2024 arrived, the three-time election contender nearly won Latinos outright, capturing 48% of their vote.

The president’s showing with Latinos in 2024 was the best performance by a Republican presidential contestant in modern times, election results show.

Trump’s historic gains with Latinos shine as a seemingly-counterintuitive result of a GOP which was — just a few years ago, in the wake of Mitt Romney’s loss — broadly encouraged to moderate its tone on 🛂Immigration enforcement in order to win a larger share of a voting bloc considered to be the future of the U.S. Trump, of course, has kept 🛂Immigration enforcement as his signature issue since coming down the golden escalators at Trump Tower in the summer of 2015.

“Polling illustrates that speculation that Trump’s rhetoric and positions on 🛂Immigration and border enforcement would alienate the lion’s share of Latino voters proved fatally wrong for Democrats,” stated a January 2025 report by the Texas Politics Project.

Polling conducted by the University of Texas and the Texas Politics Project found that Latinos in the state were not just warm to Trump overall, but more receptive to his 🛂Immigration policies. At least 43% of Latinos in Texas agreed with the idea of immediate deportation of all illegal migrants in the U.S. and as much as 49% of them said the U.S. takes in “too many” legal immigrants.

For Latinos who have lived in the U.S for generations and those who arrived the legal way, many simply are not offended by his hardline position. In fact, they largely value his law-and-order approach on 🛂Immigration and other issues.

“People are supportive of what they have seen Donald Trump do so far in the country, including the border area,” Trevino said of her community. “And certainly, I mean, people here don’t want drugs and all human smuggling and everything else. They don’t want that.”

For many Latinos who lived on the front lines of the border crisis, there is little sympathy left for those openly defying the law.

“There’s no problem if you come into our country, but do it the legal way,” Bazan said to the DCNF.

“And don’t come in here and say you’re being deported, and use your kids, you know, putting your kids out there crying and all this,” Bazan continued. “Don’t do that. Don’t use your kids because when it really comes down to it, it’s your fault — you as a parent, it’s all your fault.”

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