David Reyna thought Donald Trump’s return to the White House would lower costs and secure the border. Instead, the president’s immigration crackdown is hurting his businesses.
Trump made immigration enforcement a centerpiece of his 2024 campaign, promising the “largest deportation” effort in U.S. history, pledging to close the border, and moving to restrict birthright citizenship.
But those policies are now hurting the very voters that supported them in the first place, and that could spell disaster for the GOP come the November midterms.
A sharp surge in immigration arrests is removing undocumented workers from industries that rely heavily on their labor.
Construction projects are slowing because of worker shortages, and shrimping operations along the Gulf Coast are also feeling the squeeze. Meanwhile, new restrictions on commercial driver’s licenses for some immigrants have compounded the pressure on an already strained trucking industry.
Reyna is one of the business owners affected.
The 50-year-old Texas businessman runs a lumber yard and a real estate operation in the Rio Grande Valley. Both have slowed sharply. A home he was building has also sat unfinished for months.
“We didn’t think this administration was going to crack down on undocumented workers that hard,” Reyna told the Washington Post. The enforcement push, he added, is “completely devastating the local construction industry.”
Reyna was among the Latino voters who helped Trump turn the heavily Democratic Rio Grande Valley red in 2024, ending a Democratic presidential winning streak that dated to 1896.
He backed Trump in part because of promises to lower living costs, cut taxes, and secure the border. Reyna also said he had personally seen migrants crossing near his gated ranch.
“The borders were wide open” under Joe Biden, he said, “and we saw what that meant firsthand.”
But the immigration crackdown has changed his view.
Reyna knew Trump had promised mass deportations, but said he never expected enforcement to sweep up people without criminal records.
ICE arrests in South Texas rose from about 400 in 2024 to more than 9,000 so far in 2026, according to a Washington Post analysis. Nearly 80 percent of those arrested by the agency’s Harlingen field office had no criminal records.
“I don’t think anybody saw that coming,” Reyna said.
And he is not alone in his frustration.
Laura Leigh Taylor, a 37-year-old Georgia farmer, backed Trump in 2024. But after watching the immigration crackdown reach people she knows, she now regrets her vote.
“I understand getting rid of the rapists and the murderers,” she told the Associated Press this week. “But all the people that fell in between that really weren’t doing nothing but taking care of their family.”
Meanwhile, a new Associated Press-KFF survey of more than 2,000 rural voters, a group that largely backed Trump in 2024, found that four in 10 now say Trump has “gone too far” in restricting legal immigration or deporting immigrants living in the U.S. without authorization.
Trump has sought to justify the crackdown, arguing that undocumented immigration drives down wages for American workers.
But Texas supporters like Reyna say that Americans are not filling the gaps left behind, and that wages remain low.
“It’s easy to see a lot of jobsites aren’t moving the way they normally do,” Reyna said.
Construction payrolls in the Brownsville-Harlingen area have fallen 5 percent from a year ago, while Cameron County’s labor force has shrunk nearly 2 percent, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal data.
And as the arrests continue, they are increasingly becoming a political issue for the GOP ahead of the midterms.
A Cook Political Report-TelevisaUnivision poll found more than one-fifth of Hispanic Trump voters in Texas would not back a generic Republican House candidate. Nearly two-thirds of Hispanic voters said Trump’s deportation policies would make them less likely to support a candidate.
“The whole valley was red,” Reyna told the Washington Post, “and now it’s going to be blue.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
