A Hispanic woman in Texas who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 has disavowed the president after her brother got caught up in the administration’s hardline immigration policies.
Jessica Cantu Vuittonet, 38, told The New York Times that she originally supported Trump’s “mass deportation” policy, believing it would only target “true hardcore criminals, rapists, killers.”
However, her optimism for Trump and the GOP evaporated earlier this year when her brother was taken to an immigration detention center just days after a scheduled check-in with an immigration official.
“They betrayed me, they turned their backs on us,” she told the Times. “Nobody cares about us here, I see that now clearly.”
“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,” Vuittonet added. “I started to hate. I started holding resentment and grudges, especially from those people that I rallied with for Trump.”
Trump’s 2024 election victory came after he made significant inroads among Hispanic and Latino voters.
The 80-year-old president, who is recording a near-record-low approval rating in his second term, quickly destroyed much of this support with his hardline immigration policies, which have seen scores of people wrongly rounded up and affected businesses reliant on migrant labor.
The backlash could have significant implications in the crucial Senate race in Texas, a usually solid-red state that Democrats believe they could flip in the November 3 election.
If Democratic candidate James Talarico pulls off a shock victory against the scandal-plagued, Trump-endorsed Republican Ken Paxton, it would go a long way toward Democrats gaining control of the upper chamber in the midterms.
Vuittonet said she has become so disillusioned with Trump following the incident involving her brother that she will not bother casting a vote in November.
“At this point with the way things went, it’s hard to trust now—that has been broken,” she told the Times.
“We see that red and blue are just two colors. They’re both after the same thing and don’t care about people here.”
Ariel Salinas, who owns a construction company in McAllen, Texas, also said he blames Trump’s policies for the financial hardships he is now suffering.
He said ICE raids sweeping up his workers are affecting his business more than the mortgage crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic did.
The raids have become so frequent that his company now erects fences around housing developments under construction to keep the masked ICE goons out.
“Years ago, you put a fence up because people were stealing stuff,” Salinas told the Times. “Now you put the fence up because ICE is stealing the workers. There was even a fence shortage in the summer. It caught all of us off guard.”
“To us folks—conservative, Hispanic, God-fearing—this doesn’t make sense,” he added. “You take away folks that are contributing to society, and there’s nobody to replace them. My circle, my family, we feel betrayed by this.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
