Border wall and immigration restriction: Latinos for Trump have their eye on November

New Mexico lawmaker Alonzo Baldonado is Hispanic, and he’s campaigning on behalf of President Donald Trump in advance of the Nov. 3 election. 

In fact, Baldonado is a national-level member of the Latinos for Trump 2020 campaign outreach to Hispanic voters.

Baldonado, 46, owns a realty and property management business. He lives with his family, including his two daughters, in the 16,000-person city of Los Lunas, a growing community along the Rio Grande just south of Albuquerque. There, nearly 60% of people are Hispanic or Latino, according to the U.S. Census.

Both of Baldonado’s parents are of Hispanic descent, but their families have been in New Mexico for a long time.

“My roots are traced several generations in New Mexico,” he said. “I don’t feel I identify as Mexican-American although you can at some point trace roots in that direction. I’ve just always grown up as being an American.”

Since 2011, Baldonado has served as GOP state representative for District 8, representing Valencia County in the state capital of Santa Fe. He is seeking reelection this year. He was motivated to get into politics after the results of the 2008 election, when New Mexico’s five-person congressional delegation shifted from red-and-blue to simply blue. Baldonado said he felt more balance was needed.

“Eventually, I talked myself into running, and it was history from there,” he said.

‘He wants to win’

Although a longtime Republican, Baldonado wasn’t always a Trump supporter. During the 2016 primary election, he backed the candidacy of Marco Rubio, the U.S. senator from Florida. But Baldonado’s interest in Trump grew as it became clear he was the likely frontrunner. Baldonado also attended Trump’s rally in Albuquerque in May 2016 — a campaign event that grabbed headlines for the unruly protests it sparked.

A certain statement of Trump’s stood out.

“One quote I always remember from that night was: ‘We’re going to win so much you’re going to get sick of winning,’” Baldonado said. “And I think that kind of exemplifies his attitude toward life and what we see from him. Obviously I don’t know him personally, but that’s what I see from his attitude: He wants to win. He wants to make our economy successful and make our people successful, whether they’re Hispanic or Black or White or Asian or White, it doesn’t matter.”

He continued, “I walked away from that knowing that Donald Trump was going to be a phenomenal president just because of his energy and his background in the business world and his desire to make America successful.”

Unwavering support

Nearly a full presidential term later, Baldonado’s support hasn’t wavered. He approves of Trump’s record on immigration, the economy and law enforcement and “his ability to negotiate with other countries.” Baldonado said immigration is “something that I have been concerned with for a long time.”

He said, “I feel like our immigration system is broken. It does need serious intervention. And many times people will come to me as a state legislator and say ‘fix this.’ Well, it’s a federal issue. It’s not something a state can just take care of.”

Baldonado said he thinks a faster pathway to citizenship is needed for immigrants, but “there’s also an element of danger.”

“When you have thousands of people pouring over the border, surely there’s people in that group that are here to do harm to our citizens, whether they’re affiliated with gangs or cartels or whatever it may be,” he said. “It’s disingenuous and irresponsible to ignore that.”

Though Trump was widely criticized for his administration’s approach to asylum seekers, including the separation of immigrant children from parents upon their arrival to the United States, Baldonado said he thinks the president was dealing with an “impossible situation.” Barack Obama, too, had a tough approach to immigration, and it would “be fair to judge everyone equally and not just use that as a negative against President Trump.”

One in three Latinos approve of Trump

Although not an insignificant percentage, Latinos who support Trump are a minority among their demographic. Roughly one-third of Hispanics nationwide approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while about two-thirds disapprove, according to the Pew Research Center. In late 2019, nearly 70% of Hispanic adults in the United States said they thought Trump’s policies had been harmful to Hispanics. 

The Latino population in the United States reached 60.6 million last year, about 18% of the country’s overall population, according to the Pew Research Center.

“Of the nation’s 41 million Hispanic adults, roughly half are immigrants and about another 23% are the U.S.-born adult children of immigrant parents,” the organization’s website states.

Although the Latino and Hispanic population is a growing part of the U.S. electorate, Republicans have lost traction within the demographic. Roughly one in three Latino voters is Republican or leans Republican. Two in three are Democrat or lean Democratic.

GOP parts ways with Latinos

Support among Latinos and Hispanics for Republican candidates peaked during the 2004 presidential election, in which George W. Bush captured more than 40% of the Hispanic vote, said Carlos Algara, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Texas-El Paso. Bush, a GOP governor who hailed from the U.S.-Mexico border state of Texas, had moderated his stance toward immigration. He supported a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and had adopted a moderate tone. In doing so, Bush successfully attracted Hispanic voters.

“You only have to go back to 2004 to say, well, George W. Bush, he even won New Mexico, which would be unthinkable right now,” Algara said. “And he did that because he was able to garner a significant amount of support from Latinos.”

But, he said, in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, the Republican Party became more conservative on immigration, and subsequently lost interest from Latino and Hispanic voters.

“John McCain famously had to walk back his support for a pathway to citizenship,” Algara said. “Mitt Romney famously said his immigration plan was centered around self-deportations. So, the party, independent of Trump, has become more and more conservative on that issue. And as a result, they’ve been hemorrhaging support from their high-water mark in 2004 with respect to Latinos.”

The arrival of Trump in the 2016 presidential election only deepened the divide between Latino voters and the Republican Party, according to Algara.

“You can sort of describe it as putting gasoline on the fire,” he said. “Because not only is Donald Trump a lot more conservative on immigration than even Mitt Romney was in 2012 — and that was a very conservative position — but now Donald Trump has infused a lot of appeals toward his White base about racial resentment and particularly about fostering resentment among Whites vis-a-vis Latinos.”

‘A very powerful tool’

Algara said fostering that racial resentment comes with a certain advantage to Trump.

“A lot of my research shows that’s an effective tool to garner support for Donald Trump among liberal, White Democrats,” he said. “It’s a very powerful tool … his entire campaign has been centered around fostering that sort of out-group resentment.”

The caveat, however, is that it comes at a cost. 

“And that cost is electoral support among Latinos,” Algara said.

As for Latinos who continue to support Trump, Algara said that’s not a specific area of his research. But his take on the situation is that the “president appeals to them based on policy decisions.”

“They’re probably Latinos who are fairly conservative,” he said. “These aren’t Latinos who are explicitly turned off by the president’s rhetoric, and they are supporting him based on some sense of conservatism. They might be social conservatives and care about the judiciary, which is something Donald Trump has played up. They might care about economic conservatism, so they might care about the tax bill that Trump and congressional Republicans pushed through in the last Congress.”

Algara said it may be that some Hispanics feel “cross-pressured,” or pulled in two directions. They may not like the way Trump speaks, but their support for his policies overrides that concern.

“Ultimately, voters are rational,” Algara said. “And those Latinos for Trump who are cross-pressured are going to stick with him based on policy.”

County commissioner: Trump has ‘normalized’ vitriol

Manuel Sanchez is a Democratic county commissioner in New Mexico’s Dona Ana County, which is adjacent to El Paso, Texas, and Mexico. While he said he can’t speak for Hispanic and Latino voters who support Trump, Sanchez disapproves of the president’s divisive rhetoric around immigration and his actions toward immigrants, such as the treatment of asylum seekers and his attempt to exclude undocumented immigrants from the U.S. Census count. 

“I think what it comes down to particularly for me is really his policies and how he has, I feel, demonized immigrants,” Sanchez said. “My family is a family of immigrants. My grandfather came over in the ‘50s as a bracero.” 

The Bracero program of the mid-20th century brought farmworkers to the United States from Mexico on a guest-worker basis.

Sanchez said that a divide between the major political parties began before Trump’s election, but he contended that Trump has deepened it and “normalized” harsh rhetoric, particularly with respect to immigrants. Other local and state politicians have sometimes followed the president’s lead. And constituents have as well, he said. Sanchez recalled recently seeing a Twitter post in which a person told a TV reporter who was Hispanic that she should pronounce her name with less of a Spanish accent.

“There’s just been a lot more vitriol. Things have just escalated. And I think a lot of that I would associate with the president and his associates and his administration,” he said. “It’s made it OK to have the perception that illegal immigrants are either spreading the diseases or they’re rapists or murderers. Being here in Dona Ana County, [immigration] is something we’ve lived with for years. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an immigrant or not, you have people that commit crimes. But we have a large population of undocumented immigrants here in Dona Ana County that are here just trying to provide a better life for their families.” 

Sanchez said Trump’s language and messaging has fueled the idea that Hispanics, even those who are citizens, are somehow lesser people than non-Hispanics. Social media, he said, has helped spread these false narratives.

“The Hispanic population, whether they’re immigrants or not, a lot of times are being stereotyped,” he said. “I think if people would be more open, they’d be able to see through a lot of the rhetoric that’s coming from Washington.”

Baldonado, the Republican state lawmaker from Los Lunas, said he hasn’t been offended by Trump’s remarks about immigrants and rather approves of the president’s track record, such as extending the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and making strides in the economy — at least until the coronavirus struck.

“I don’t take personal offense to the comments made in speeches or things of that nature,” he said. “I think there’s more to the conversation than just a sound bite.”

17-year-old helps Latinos for Trump in El Paso

In the West Texas city of El Paso, Isaiah Solis, 17, will be too young to vote in the November election. But he’s doing what he can to support the Latinos for Trump movement. He’s always had an interest in politics and paid close attention to the 2016 presidential race. At first, Solis supported Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, in the primary. But Solis was persuaded to back Trump upon his primary win. He said he’s impressed by how the president has emboldened the Republican Party. Looking back, he wished he’d backed Trump from the beginning.

“As soon as he came into office ... I saw the results of his actions and I became even more of a Trump supporter,” Solis said. “And now I look back, I think the Republican Party is definitely more outspoken now, where, in the Bush-Obama era, I think they were kind of the silent majority. And they would kind of let themselves be pushed around because we’re a lot of normal people. We stick to the simple life. If Trump wasn’t president, we wouldn’t be as outspoken.” 

Solis, who’s a senior in high school, said his family tends to be Republican because “we’re all Christians and we believe that Christian values align more so with the Republican Party.” But his viewpoints also stem from his maternal grandparents, who immigrated to the United States from Mexico during the Bracero program.

“Many people say that program was something to take advantage of [Mexicans], but my family didn’t see it that way,” he said. “They saw it as an opportunity to not only come, free of oppression, because they were tired of the lawlessness of Mexico. But not only that, they came for the economic opportunity. So, when we understand the whole point of the border wall — and then people say, ‘oh, that’s racist,’ or what have you, we say: ‘Well, the reason people come to America, a country so great, is the same reason my grandparents came to America — not only for economic prosperity but to come free of the lawlessness that we see in other countries, which we still see in Mexico today.’”

Solis said his late grandmother would say in Spanish: “I wouldn’t go back to Mexico even as a queen.” 

“Her reasoning for this was: They never valued her, and America valued her more,” he said. 

A shifting tide

El Paso has been a Democratic stronghold in a state more broadly known for its support of Republican candidates. In 2016, for instance, Democrat Hillary Clinton captured 69% of votes in El Paso County, compared to Trump’s roughly 26%. Statewide in Texas, Trump secured 52% of the vote, while Clinton garnered 43%. 

However, this year, Texas is considered a battleground state.

The dead heat between Trump and Democratic contender Joe Biden in the Lone Star State is a sign of a shift long predicted by political scientists, Algara said. A growing Hispanic population is moving the state in a blue direction — a pattern seen across the Southwest. For that reason, the Latino vote will be a “huge” factor in the upcoming presidential election.

“The strengthening of the Latino vote within the Democratic Party has fundamentally shifted the electoral landscape,” he said. “If you look at 2004, states like Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado — all states won by George Bush — are now firmly within the Democratic camp. And the reason for that is predominantly the growth of the Hispanic population and the fact that not only is that population growing, they’re getting registered to vote, and they’re voting Democrat.”

‘Sometimes it is harsh’

Against that backdrop, the Latinos for Trump movement may be perplexing to many Hispanics. But those Latinos within it seem squarely within the president’s camp.

Solis said he generally approves of the president’s stances on gun rights, tax reform and the economy. As for his reaction to inflammatory remarks by the president, Solis said: “Sometimes it sounds harsh. Sometimes it is harsh.”

Baldonado said he feels Trump “gets a raw deal, in many ways, through the media.”

“But I think, at the end of the day, when you look at the successes he’s had not only in his personal life but as president, I just feel like another four years would be a really good scenario for this country,” he said.

Trump has trailed Biden in the polls, but Solis said he doesn’t think the polls tell an accurate story. He thinks more voters who were unsure about a vote for Trump in 2016 will be swayed about Trump’s track record after nearly four years in office. And he’s very optimistic.

“I feel very confident in his election,” he said. “I think he is going to win.”