Latino House GOP Members: Oops, You Can’t Be Against Indiscriminate Mass Deportation, Then Vote for It
You’ve got some explaining to do with your constituents.
A number of Latino House Republicans will have some explaining to do to their constituents in the next election. They are trying to have it both ways when it comes to mass deportation architect-in-chief Stephen Miller’s maniacal preoccupation with hunting down, detaining, and purging our immigrant neighbors.
On one hand, they want us to think that they think that Miller’s agenda has overreached, issuing a letter politely urging the Trump administration to instead focus on individuals who actually do pose a public safety threat. “Every minute that we spend pursuing an individual with a clean record is a minute less that we dedicate to apprehending terrorists or cartel operatives,” they say in the June 12 letter. “Diverting limited resources to other objectives puts our national security at risk.”
On that, they’ve got a point. When Miller shifts public safety money and manpower away from combating drug and human trafficking and toward abducting Dreamers, a father of U.S. service members, and other long-settled contributors, all of our communities are less safe and our tax dollars are wasted.
But the letter screams public relations stunt considering all six signatories – Reps. Tony Gonzales (TX-23), Monica De La Cruz (TX-15), Nicole Malliotakis (NY-11), David Valadao (CA-22), Maria Elvira Salazar (FL-27), and Gabe Evans (CO-08) – voted in support of the ugly, bloated budget bill that will only turbocharge the kinds of arrests they’re now claiming should be deprioritized. To be clear, their words did not match how they actually voted. Miller got all he wanted from the House bill they supported.
Under the House bill that all six helped to pass in May, ICE would become the highest-funded law enforcement office in the nation, giving this rogue agency’s masked officers $75 billion in taxpayer funds to turbocharge unsparing arrests, mass family separation, and for-profit detention with a goal to imprison more than 100,000 immigrants on any given day.
Billions will go to mass camps, deportation flights, even doling out nearly $850 million in bonuses to the masked, warrantless agents stalking neighborhoods and workplaces for immigrant neighbors to abduct.
All together, the budget demands up to $175 billion to turbocharge Miller’s nativist vision while gutting healthcare and food assistance for poor Americans – and Reps. Gonzales, De La Cruz, Malliotakis, Valadao, Salazar, and Evans all voted for it despite knowing perfectly well of the dire impacts it will have in their districts and on their constituents. They can’t absolve their complicity by sending a letter when their votes hurt the very people they purport to care about - and no one in the media should let them.
Rep. Valadao, for example, represents an agriculture-rich district in Central California, where Miller’s raids have had such a major impact on this essential industry that farmers apparently placed frantic calls to Brooke Rollins, Trump’s Agriculture Secretary, to please give their workers a break. Trump, who is beholden to his wealthy pals and is quite aware of the importance of immigrant workers to businesses, initially claimed that his administration was pausing raids that had been aggressively targeting restaurant and hotel workers in addition to agricultural laborers.
It was an open confession that, yes, the administration’s overreach has in fact been hurting these critical businesses, just as we said mass deportations would do. But soon after the announcement, Miller pulled the rug out from under his boss and walked back on the walkback, making it clear it’s Miller who’s running the show. Valadao, a self-styled champion for Dreamers, also provided a key vote for the anti-immigrant funding in the budget bill despite Miller’s escalating attacks on young immigrants who’ve only known the U.S. as home. Valadao’s vote will turbocharge those kinds of arrest. But maybe Miller could be swayed by another letter, right?
On the opposite side of the country, Rep. Salazar has tried to walk a balancing act on immigration that is more clown show than Olympic gymnast. Salazar represents the most populous majority-Latino county in the nation, with many constituents hailing from Venezuela, Cuba, and Honduras. Florida is also home to thousands of Temporary Protected Status holders, many of whom are critical to industries such as healthcare and could face dire situations if they’re deported back to their countries of origin, as Salazar herself has previously stated. She is perfectly aware of the fiscal and human costs of mass deportations.
Yet Salazar still shamelessly endorsed Trump’s mass deportation candidacy, and has even tried to blame the Supreme Court for Trump moving to end TPS for Venezuela. In a real doozy following Election Day, Salazar even tried to tone down his mass deportation agenda, which was his signature campaign promise of 2024.
“I am sure that the Trump administration is not going to be targeting those people who have been here for more than five years,” Rep. Salazar claimed in November, “that have American kids, that don’t have criminal records, that have been working in the economy and paying taxes.” How’s that working out?
“Now, anyone who understands politics will get that these members are putting out this letter so their local papers will report on how ‘concerned’ they are about removals hitting their districts’ local businesses,” as The New Republic’s Greg Sargent wrote June 13. “In the end, they’ll enthusiastically back whatever Trump does. But this is nonetheless a revealing moment.”
What they’ve revealed, Sargent continued, is that “in places like Miami and the suburbs of Los Angeles and Denver—home to those GOP districts, where control of the House will be decided—opposition to cruel and indiscriminate mass deportations is growing.”
And the next several days and weeks will be telling for this group of Republicans because they’ll have one more chance to either stand with their constituents and their words, or with Miller and his mass abductions. Right now, the Senate is debating the reconciliation bill, and should it pass, it must return to the House for a final vote. Without this group of Republicans, it simply won’t pass. If these six are so concerned over Miller’s agenda going after Dreamers and parents and long-settled contributors instead of actual public safety threats, now’s their chance to prove it. Because writing letters is one thing. How they vote is what really matters. It’s all that matters here.
But if they cave and again side with Miller, we won’t be shocked that their letter was nothing more than performative politics – and at the expense of families everywhere.