11 months ago
MIAMI — Florida’s Latino Republicans aren’t comfortable with Donald Trump’s claim that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the United States. But they’re prepared to give him a pass on it anyway.
Trump, they say, isn’t a traditional politician. The situation at the border is chaotic. And they disagree with President Joe Biden’s campaign that Trump is echoing Adolf Hitler.
“I don’t agree with the rhetoric,” Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-Fla.) said of Trump’s comments, noting his own family immigrated to the U.S. from Cuba. “While I support the president, I certainly don’t support everything he says.” Yet, he added, the immigration system is broken, and he accused Biden of doing nothing to stop the surge.
“I know he’s not Hitler,” Giménez added of Trump, though he said he planned to discuss the comments with the former president the next time he saw him.
Giménez’s response highlights the dynamics at play among Latinos in the state, one of the most important and influential constituencies in South Florida. Republicans and Democrats have fought to gain traction among Venezuelans, Cubans, Colombians and other Latino communities throughout the state who have fled repressive regimes and economic instability in the past decades and made Florida their home.
Ernesto Ackerman, of the advocacy group Independent Venezuelan American Citizens and a GOP committeeman in Florida, dismissed the possibility that Trump’s comments might have any effect among Hispanics in Florida.
“We know that Trump is not a diplomatic politician,” he said. “He has his way of saying things that sound very rude and very aggressive, but that’s the way he talks.” If Trump were to use more diplomatic language, he added, “that won't change that people are coming here through open borders and we don't know who's coming.”
Biden lost Florida in 2020 in part by slipping among Hispanics in South Florida who backed Trump despite his family separation policy and his attempted ban on people traveling to the U.S. from certain Muslim-majority countries. While Biden won Miami Dade that cycle, it was only by 7 percentage points — a dramatic tumble from Hillary Clinton’s 30-point margin over Trump in 2016, when he compared some unauthorized immigrants to rapists and murderers.
Trump, who resides part time in Florida, has tried to woo Hispanic voters. After he was arraigned in Miami on federal charges in the classified documents case in June, Trump made a pit stop at the famous Cuban restaurant Versailles, where he was mobbed by supporters and shook people’s hands in the Little Havana landmark, seeking the sympathies of people who’d fled political persecution from the left and dictatorships in their home countries.
Then, rather than attend the GOP debate in Miami in November, Trump drew a crowd in the Cuban-majority city of Hialeah to underscore his dominance over his rivals.
Republican Hialeah Mayor Esteban Bovo, who attended the November rally, said he and other immigrants see what has been happening in other U.S. cities, where resources are strained due to a surge in migrant arrivals. He accused Democrats of trying to ignore the issue and of comparing Trump to Hitler as a “political narrative” to “vilify him” given Biden’s poor polling on issues such as the economy.
“Perhaps the choice of words or the description might not be the one one would like to hear, but make no mistake: It does hurt us as a country when people are coming not to be part of the American dream but to take and to be reliant on public housing and health care and government handouts,” he said.
In contrast, Democrats have quickly moved to condemn Trump’s comments, noting similarities to Hitler’s autobiography “Mein Kampf.” After Trump said he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for Day One” by working to “close the border,” Biden’s campaign last week launched $25 million in bilingual ads in battleground states that compared Trump to Venezuelan leftist leaders Nicolás Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez. Those ads, however, did not air in Florida.
Instead, the Biden campaign aired two Spanish-language ads in South Florida during the Miami GOP debate and during a Trump interview on Univision. The ads were targeted to Cuban- and Venezuelan-Americans, highlighting “how President Biden has proven to be unafraid to stand up against dictators, and is fighting for freedom and opportunity.”
When Trump was president, he sought to deter illegal immigration by building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. He has promised to reassert his first-term policies if reelected, to deport massive numbers of undocumented people and to end a policy that gives citizenship to those born to undocumented immigrants in the U.S.
“It’s very hard to believe as many people voted for him when he says they are all rapists and murderers. How people support that, I don’t understand, but it is what it is,” said Hendry County Democratic chair Keith Richter. His small rural community has a Hispanic-majority population that’s still growing “by leaps and bounds” given an influx of new residents from increasingly unaffordable Miami Dade.
Richter, who was a longtime Republican before becoming a Democrat after Trump was elected in 2016, predicted the former president’s words might not move the base but would sway Independent voters.
“Every time the man goes out on the campaign stump he says something that puts his foot so far in his mouth,” he said.
Democrats running for national office in Florida are already tying Trump’s divisive comments to their GOP opponents. Former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel Powell (D-Fla.), who’s vying to unseat Trump ally Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), characterized his “alignment with this platform” as “dangerous.”
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesperson Justin Chermol accused GOP Reps. María Elvira Salazar and Anna Paulina Luna of supporting Trump’s immigration agenda, saying they have "taken cues from their wannabe dictator-in-chief” devoted to “destroying democracy and taking away fundamental freedoms.”
Democrats also point out that Biden is working with congressional Republicans on a package that would boost border security in exchange for providing aid to Israel and Ukraine.
Democratic Florida House Minority Leader Fentrice Driskell conceded that it often “doesn’t seem to matter” what Democrats say about Trump when it comes to his base, but urged colleagues to “speak up even louder and tell the truth of this man.”
“When Republicans had control in Congress they refused to solve this issue … Immigration is a very complex issue,” she said. “It requires sensitivity, compassion and nuance, and not cheap talking points to score points with his base.”
But Democrats are contending with an on-the-ground reality that’s translating to negative polling and appearing to work in Trump’s favor: U.S. officials have reported more than 10,000 arrests a day along the Southern border, and immigration judges are facing a backlog of more than 1 million pending asylum cases.
Scott’s campaign didn’t address Trump’s comments when asked about them by POLITICO, but Priscilla Ivasco, his communications director, accused Mucarsel Powell of wanting “open borders.” She provided statistics about the surge of crossings and nearly fivefold increase of seizures of fentanyl, a deadly opioid, and said it was important to Scott to “secure the border” and “build the wall,” while welcoming legal immigrants.
Giménez said he would still advise Trump to talk about illegal immigration often. Hispanics, he said, are also focused on the economy, education and safety.
“President Trump has said a lot of things all throughout his career and all that and he always kind of survives them,” he said. “So I don't think that this is going to be anything that will change the minds of many people here in Florida.”
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