At a critical moment in the U.S. midterm elections, President Trump‘s (Donald Trump) proudest policy — “immigration enforcement” — has come under criticism from one of his own in the traditionally conservative state of Florida, and the voice speaking out is not one of Trump’s political opponents.
Republican incumbent U.S. Representative María Elvira Salazar, whom Trump endorsed both in 2024 and this year, recently used a campaign ad to tell Trump that his immigration policy has gone too far. The incident immediately made headlines across mainstream U.S. media.
Salazar directly addressed Trump, saying: “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement actions have gone too far.” She also warned Trump to be careful about the advice from his advisers, saying “the Hispanic voters who helped you return to the White House in 2024 now feel betrayed.”
However, what some media outlets have overlooked is that Salazar’s ad was not purely critical. In the latter part, she emphasized to Trump that she is not seeking amnesty, but rather hopes to give these immigrants a life of dignity — something only Trump can accomplish. “On immigration, Trump can be the Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln) who abolished slavery, or the Reagan (Ronald Wilson Reagan) who defeated communism.”
Salazar represents Florida’s 27th district, a key district where Hispanics make up 74% of the population. In the 2024 election, Hispanic voters here shifted sharply to the right, helping Trump win the White House, and Salazar herself won re-election that year by an overwhelming 20-point margin.
But according to internal polling recently released by her Democratic opponent, Salazar, who is seeking a fourth term, is now locked in a tight 50-50 race with the Democratic candidate, Eliott Rodriguez, who is also a former news anchor. As a result, the race in this deep-red stronghold has begun to draw attention.
However, Salazar’s deliberate distancing from Trump’s immigration enforcement this time has also put her past voting record in Congress under renewed scrutiny.
Salazar has consistently argued that the border must be secured and illegal entries must be enforced against, but that undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States for many years cannot all be handled the same way.
Looking at her voting record, last year Salazar voted for a bill that provided tens of billions of dollars in funding for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and she strongly supported the Laken Riley Act signed by Trump, which authorizes the mandatory detention of undocumented immigrants who commit crimes such as theft. On the other hand, Salazar is also a leading champion of the bipartisan Dignity Act, which seeks to strengthen border security while providing a path to legal status for some long-term, qualifying undocumented immigrants in the U.S. She considers this a pragmatic “two-track approach,” but in her opponents’ eyes it is flip-flopping and hypocritical — and after the ad was released, Rodriguez suddenly had even more material to attack her with.
Is the Trump administration’s border policy really “too extreme”? The House Freedom Caucus subsequently issued a statement supporting Trump, stressing that immigration enforcement “must continue” and opposing any form of legal status for undocumented immigrants. The Department of Homeland Security also responded, saying ICE is simply enforcing laws passed by Congress and will not stop deportations just because individual lawmakers dislike them.
According to the latest figures released in mid-September by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin, the Trump administration has set a record of 16 consecutive months of “zero releases” at the border. That means that over the past 16 months, not a single illegal border crosser was easily released into American communities. Compared with the Biden era, daily border arrest numbers have plummeted 94%, hitting a 30-year low. In addition, drug smuggling seizures at the border in July this year, including heroin and fentanyl, showed double-digit increases.
The restoration of law and order is evident to all, but swift, iron-fisted enforcement has always come with political costs from the opposing side. Salazar’s main point in this ad is that of the 50,000 people detained by ICE in July this year, as many as half had no criminal record — a phenomenon that is now causing panic in parts of the Hispanic community.
The key indicator to watch next will be the voting intentions of South Florida’s Hispanic population in this year’s midterm elections, which will not only affect whether the Republican Party can hold its congressional majority, but may also shape the direction of both parties’ illegal immigration enforcement policies around the 2028 presidential election.
