BUYER'S REMORSE

Trump Voter Switches Sides After Fiancée Deported by ICE

Wayne DeMario’s Cuban partner was sent to Mexico.

A Florida man who twice voted for Donald Trump to crack down on immigration says he has switched sides after ICE deported his fiancée.

Wayne DeMario, 57, runs a guitar shop in Miami and twice backed Trump, hoping the president would deliver the immigration agenda he thought a state with one of America’s largest Hispanic populations needed.

Then Immigration and Customs Enforcement came for his fiancée, Yamile Alcantu, who had been living and working legally in Miami since fleeing Cuba in 2000. She was arrested at a routine check-in months after Trump began his second term.

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“If I had voted Democrat, I wouldn’t have lost her,” DeMario told The Times of London. “That second vote, what was I thinking? Well, I am no political scientist. But this is not some sports game.” He added, “Now I know better.”

DeMario said he voted Democratic “up and down the ticket,” won over by David Jolly, a former Republican who defected to the Democrats because of Trump. Jolly is courting independents and moderates in his old party by promising to end the state’s mandatory cooperation with ICE.

Alcantu came to the U.S. from Cuba through the State Department’s visa lottery program. A 2008 traffic stop, in which police found three Xanax pills in her handbag, left her with a deportation order. She kept reporting to immigration authorities, attending check-ins for years without being detained.

That changed in June 2025. “Once Trump became our president, ICE called her in for a routine check and told her, ‘We want to finish your case today.’ Instead, they put her in shackles and chains. She’s Cuban, [but] they deported her to Mexico,” DeMario said. “I didn’t think anyone could be that cruel. I guess we all learn.”

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The Department of Homeland Security has characterized her as among the “worst of the worst,” citing drug-related offenses. Local10 News reported she has misdemeanors on her record from the early 2000s.

DeMario disputes that she is the kind of dangerous criminal he believed the administration had promised to target.

Rather than be apart, DeMario decided to buy an apartment in Cancun, Mexico, so they could be together. “I don’t think there’s an American dream,” he said. “It’s an American nightmare now.”

DeMario started a GoFundMe to pay legal fees after his partner of 20 years was detained. Alcantu was “kidnapped,” he said, when she went to a check-in as she had done annually for years.

“I am no Trump supporter,” DeMario wrote on his public Facebook account. “I vote Republican. And I will never f--king vote Republican again.”

“I’m sorry I voted for that a--hole. If people can’t accept my apology, f--k them,” he said. “And it’s not about my life anyway, it’s about hers.”

Trump promised during the campaign to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” and told a rally in April 2024 that immigrants are “not humans, they’re animals.”

“Help me get Yami home or go away... It’s not about right or left. It’s about right and wrong,” he added.

DeMario continues to work overtime at his guitar store, having spent his “life savings” on efforts to free his partner.

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