Is the Florida GOP in denial about an immigration backlash in South Florida?

Some of Florida’s highest-ranking Republicans have attributed last week’s electoral results mostly to concerns about affordability and the Iran war, and not as much to the reaction —specifically in South Florida — to the Trump administration’s mass deportation policies.

Policies that Gov. Ron DeSantis has done much to facilitate.

“I don’t think that was a major issue,” the governor said during a press conference in Tallahassee last week. “I don’t think it was a driving factor in South Florida, even though you did have some people that were concerned about it.”

Miami-Dade County Republican U.S. Rep. Maria Salazar certainly seemed worried when she aired an ad in September telling Trump his deportation policies had gone “too far” (Salazar officially was declared the winner in her race against Democrat Eliot Rodriguez after the machine recounted ended on Tuesday afternoon).

In Florida’s 26th Congressional District, which encompasses communities near Hialeah and Doral where 70% of residents are foreign-born, Republican incumbent Jose Diaz-Balart narrowly survived a challenge from Democrat Nicole Locklin. The race was not called for Diaz-Balart until Monday.

Miami immigration advocate Thomas Kennedy argues the reaction to Trump’s immigration policies has been“radioactive.”

“This is a community where you have hundreds of thousands of people — Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, Hondurans — being stripped of their temporary protected status,” he said. “You’re having people discriminately being denied their asylum claims. UCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) is not processing applications for really any immigration process. You have people getting arrested during their marriage petition interviews. And people are getting hunted down like animals.”

Survey results

A survey from UnidosUS and BSP Research released Tuesday of 516 Latino Florida voters taken last month showed 57% looking unfavorably at Trump. Although affordability was the defining issue for Florida Latinos, 81% said ICE had gone over the line and 50% were angry at the agency’s aggressive tactics and lack of accountability. Among Cuban Americans, 78% said ICE had gone over the line. (The survey had a +/- 4.3% margin of error.)

Meanwhile, Democratic Senate candidate Angie Nixon, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, won Hispanic-rich Miami Dade County over Republican U.S. Sen. Ashley Moody by nearly 56,000 votes. Nixon narrowly won in Doral, the city Trump won overwhelmingly in 2024, carrying half of its precincts by more than 20 points, according to the Latin Times. Moody won over Nixon statewide by nearly 3%.

“That massive swing really spoke to the way that people were seeing on the ground when it came to the economy and immigration policies,” Jared Nordlund, Florida state director with UnidosUS, said Tuesday. “For months, ICE raids have been all over Doral and targeting Venezuelan families, asylum seekers with work permits, and then the end of TPS really shook that community hard.”

Another survey showed that 67% of Cuban Americans in Miami disapproved of the Trump administration’s increased deportations of Cubans with no criminal records. That was from a Florida International University poll of 1,004 Cuban Americans in South Florida conducted in September.

In recent months, community leaders in Doral have asked city officials to rescind their 287(g) agreement with ICE, and Kennedy said Tuesday that City Councilwoman Maureen Porras had submitted an agenda item to revisit the decision to sign that agreement.

ICE tactics were a huge factor in Texas last week, Kennedy said, but it was equally powerful in South Florida. “It really motivated a lot of Hispanics to go out and be like, ‘You’re not going to treat us like this.’”

Opinion shift

Cracking down on illegal immigration was a winning issue for President Trump in his election over Kamala Harris in 2024. But public opinion has shifted dramatically since then, with many Americans saying they disapprove of ICE’s enforcement of immigration laws.

Speaking Sunday night on CBS’ 60 Minutes, Trump acknowledged his crackdown had both “helped and hurt” him in the midterm elections.

“Now, there is a large part of the country that think they should be put out,” he said of undocumented immigrants. “And there’s a large part of the country that think that they should be allowed to stay if they’re good people working in a landscape company, or working in a hotel, or doing something, right? And in some cases, paying taxes. And there’s a large group of people who think that they should be allowed to stay.”

Appearing on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” Monday from Jacksonville Beach, Moody was asked whether she agreed with the president that his deportations of undocumented immigrants who have not committed any criminal offense may have gone too far.

She replied, “At all times, I worked with law enforcement to make sure that we were getting criminals off our streets so that we were the most pro-law enforcement, safest state in the nation,” she said.

“I know, but do you believe the president?” Fox’s Brian Kilmeade interrupted. “He says, ‘I regret a little of that.’”

“I can tell you, in Florida, we led the nation,” Moody responded. “Every single one of our sheriff’s departments signed up to work with the federal government to immediately go in and start removing people who were here illegally committing crimes.”

She did not note that although many Florida sheriffs had already signed 287(g) agreements pledging them to work with ICE in detaining undocumented immigrants arrested for crimes, it became state law in 2025 that all 67 sheriffs were required to do so.

On NPR’s “Here and Now” program Monday, host Indira Lakshmanan interviewed Republican Party of Florida Chair Evan Power, who said the lesson he took from last week’s elections was that “when we lead boldly, like we have here in Florida, the voters have backed us up. I think in a lot of other places, especially Washington, D.C., Republicans haven’t led as boldly as they could.”

Lakshmanan countered, “There was a whole slate of things that voters said that they did not like about President Trump, including by the way, his immigration policy, which affects Florida heavily.”

Power declined to address the issue.

Elaborating further last week during his press conference in Tallahassee, DeSantis acknowledged, “You did have some people that had been here for a lot longer than just when [President Joe] Biden let everybody in in. So, it was an issue, but it was not the overriding issue.”

The governor has shown little concern for undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States without committing crimes. Earlier this year, a group of Florida sheriffs and police chiefs said they planned to urge the Trump administration to create a citizenship path for crime-free undocumented immigrants. “Some came here inappropriately only to do better for themselves and their family,” said Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd.

But the governor would have none of that.

“[To say] you come illegally and then you stay until you commit a really violent crime — that just doesn’t work. It’s incoherent, and it’s not what the president ran on,” he said during an event in Bradenton a few days later.