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President Trump’s move to deploy border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota – replacing Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino – may help Republicans with Hispanic voters ahead of the midterm elections, GOP leaders told The Post Thursday.
Trump signaled this week that Homan plans to “de-escalate” the immigration crackdown in the North Star State following the deaths of two anti-ICE protesters, who were shot by federal law enforcement officers earlier this month.
The move also coincided with mounting concerns the GOP is losing Trump’s historic gains with Hispanics as a result of the administration’s deportation arrest tactics.
“The strategy of going after the real bad people first and foremost is crucial to keep the support of the American people, including Hispanics,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) said in a brief interview.
“Everybody supports that.”
“If there’s the perception that the administration would be going after hard working people who have been here for decades, who have been working hard, paying taxes … you lose the support of not only the Hispanics, but the American people in general,” the Cuban-American congressman added.
Asked if putting Homan in charge of Minnesota would help alleviate concerns Hispanics have with “Operation Metro Surge,” Diaz-Balart responded, “I’m hoping it does.”
More than half of Latino voters, 51%, disapprove of the Trump administration’s immigration policies – 7 points higher than the percentage of white voters who harbor the same feelings, according to a Daily Mail/J.L. Partners poll conducted on Monday.
When asked about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) specifically, 58% of Latinos disapproved of the agency, again higher than the percentage of white registered voters, and 57% of Latinos indicated that ICE should pull out of US cities
“Personally, I don’t think it will be such a big problem,” Jaime Florez, the Republican National Committee’s Hispanic outreach director, said of the negative polls heading into campaign season.
Hispanic voters view immigration as a process that must be “legal, organized and responsible,” Florez asserted, “and none of those three things happened during the Biden years.”
“So someone has to fix this, and this administration is fixing it.”
Here’s the latest on the Minneapolis ICE protests
Florez acknowledged, “In terms of the form – how they’re doing it – [Hispanics] may not agree with that, but it’s something that the administration is starting to fix.”
The RNC official predicted that as the November elections draw closer, Hispanic voters will notice the “solutions to these problems have already been taken to place.”
But some Republicans aren’t convinced.
Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.), who expressed her worries about the GOP hemorrhaging Hispanic support last November, reupped those fears earlier this week.
“I warned about this months ago, before the headlines caught up,” Salazar wrote on X. “Today we are watching it unfold in real time.”
“Hispanics are leaving the GOP in large numbers, and pretending otherwise won’t fix it. As Republicans, we must reverse course and act now.”
Florida state Sen. Ileana Garcia, a Republican and the co-founder of Latinas for Trump, laid blame on Trump’s polarizing deputy chief of staff.
“I do think that he will lose the midterms because of Stephen Miller,” Garcia said in an interview with the New York Times.
Diaz-Balart and Florez both refused to single out Miller as a reason why Hispanics may be souring on Republicans.
“This is a big administration, a very large team of very well-intentioned and very well-prepared people trying to fix many problems that we inherited from the last administration,” Florez said. “It is kind of irresponsible to find one person and try to place the guilt of everything on just that one person.”
Despite downplaying the negative polls, the RNC spokesman viewed Trump’s decision to replace Bovino with Homan as a move that Hispanic voters may appreciate.
“That’s a good sign and it’s going to improve very much, very soon,” Florez said.
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