What does a crackdown ask of the people who welcomed it?

Benny Melendez voted for Donald Trump in 2024. He had supported Joe Biden in 2020, but Trump's promises to help small businesses and control the border won him over. Two years later, the construction company owner in South Texas has installed fences around his job sites—not to keep out thieves or trespassers, but to require ICE agents to produce judicial warrants before entering. "If I don't install fences, ICE is going to come into my property and take my workers away," he told CBS News. Building a home now takes his team a year, up from four months before the crackdown .

Melendez's disillusionment is not an isolated case. Across the Rio Grande Valley, Latino voters who helped deliver a political earthquake for Republicans in 2024 are turning away from the party in numbers that have alarmed local officials and prompted Vice President JD Vance to travel to the region this week. A recent CBS News poll found nearly 60 percent of Latinos believe the Trump administration has deported more people than they expected. In more than two dozen interviews conducted by the New York Times, voters described anger and a sense of betrayal over an immigration crackdown that has reached into their families and their livelihoods .

Jessica Vuittonet, who runs a coffee shop in San Benito, cast her first ballot in 2024 for Trump. Her brother was taken to an immigration detention center earlier this year, days after a scheduled check-in with an official. "They betrayed me, they turned their backs on us," she told the Times. "Nobody cares about us here, I see that now clearly" . She had expected deportations of violent criminals, not of people who had lived in the United States for decades. "Your world truly does go upside down because now it's not just hurting you—it's hurting your parents, it's hurting his children, his grandchildren" .

The political consequences are still taking shape. Texas Republicans redrew several House districts last year on the assumption that the Latino voters who moved toward their party were part of a durable coalition. Now, Democrats lead among likely Hispanic voters by roughly 35 percentage points on the generic congressional ballot. Javier Villalobos, the Republican mayor of McAllen, called the ICE crackdown the number one issue among his constituents. "What hits you immediately, what hits personally is the crackdown, when you see the ICE agents, masked, and pulling people out of vehicles," he said. "It is not a good picture" .

The economic ripples are visible in the construction industry, which has depended on immigrant labor for decades. Ariel Salinas, who owns a construction company in McAllen, can no longer reliably find laborers for his work crews. Melendez, the contractor who built the fences, says he is down to two workers on a job that would ordinarily require a full crew. The crackdown has not only removed workers but has made those who remain afraid to show up. Customers stay home to avoid being stopped. Small businesses lose revenue. The machinery of daily life in South Texas has slowed .

For some voters, the turn away from Trump is not a turn toward the Democrats but a turn away from politics altogether. Luis Cabrera, a pastor who once mobilized his congregation in Harlingen to vote for Republicans, is now trying to keep Hispanic evangelicals from giving up on voting entirely. The enthusiasm that propelled the 2024 realignment has curdled into something quieter and more corrosive: a sense that neither party is working for them, that the promises made were not meant to be kept .

The midterms will test whether that disillusionment translates into votes, or into absence. For Melendez, the answer is already clear. "I regret my vote for Biden," he said. "Now I regret my vote for Trump. What other options do we got? They're not working for us, neither party" .

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Sources: CBS News, The New York Times, Texarkana Gazette