A Republican congresswoman has accused Donald Trump of betraying his supporters with his hardline immigration tactics.
In a video released Thursday morning, South Florida Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar disavowed the 80-year-old president’s immigration policies, alleging Trump had gone “too far.”
“The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today,” she said. Salazar, the representative for the moderately red Miami-Dade County, noted that half of immigrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in July had no criminal convictions or pending charges, a figure attributed to the Deportation Data Project.
Salazar addressed Trump directly, cautioning him to be “careful what your advisers are telling you about immigration policy” and pleading with him to “be for immigration what Lincoln was for slavery, and Reagan was for communism.”
“I’m not talking about giving them amnesty. I’m talking about giving them a dignified life in this promised land,” she said.
The former Telemundo host released a similar video in Spanish. A spokesperson for the campaign did not immediately respond to questions from the Daily Beast.
The video comes a week after Salazar, who is locked in a tight race against Democratic opponent Eliott Rodriguez, was noticeably absent from Trump’s inaugural midterm convention in Dallas, Texas.
In 2024, Trump won Salazar’s district by nearly 15 points. Now, polls show the president is ten points underwater. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The county has been heavily impacted by his administration’s hostile immigration crackdown. In addition to having a robust immigrant community, Miami-Dade County was home to the hellscape dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” the now-shuttered Florida immigration detention center that was accused of committing human rights violations.
Just this week, a bombshell report from the Department of Homeland Security revealed that detainees were kept in cages at the facility and that the facility failed to comply with most federal detention standards to provide basic human needs. The facility was shuttered over the summer, and the county took back the land in the Everglades.
Salazar is not the only Republican distancing herself from the president.
“I’m fearful that the president’s numbers are a ball and chain that will be hard to overcome,” Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, a moderate Republican not running for re-election in his battleground district, told the New York Times earlier this month.
Despite Republicans’ unpopularity being largely attributed to Trump’s record-low approval ratings, that has done little to quell his involvement in tight races.
“You got to get out and vote, and you’re going to pretend I’m on the ballot because, in a way, I am on the ballot,” Trump said at the convention last week. “Because if [Democrats] get in, they’re going to take away all of the things that we got, we can’t let that happen.”
