Immigration enforcement reshapes midterm races as voter disapproval grows

Polls show broad voter disapproval as industry fallout spreads

The Trump administration has delivered on his pledge to carry out “mass deportations,” and with midterm elections weeks away, the consequences of that enforcement push are reshaping contests across the country, The Guardian reported Sunday. Trump has cast the November vote — which will determine control of both chambers of Congress — as a referendum on his presidency. Immigration has emerged as the issue that connects voters’ cost-of-living concerns to their personal experience of an increasingly visible enforcement apparatus in workplaces, schools and neighborhoods.

National polling underscores the shift. A Reuters/Ipsos survey released September 21 found that 36% of voters approved of Trump’s handling of immigration. Half of Americans see the administration’s enforcement tactics as too aggressive, according to Pew Research. An October NBC News/Telemundo poll of registered Latino voters — a group that swung toward Trump in 2024 — found two-thirds saying enforcement has gone “too far,” with more than one in four saying they know someone who had been deported or detained by ICE since the president’s second term began. Seventeen percent told pollsters they or someone close to them had considered not voting in person this year because of concerns about ICE.

The issue is straining the Republican coalition. In Florida, Republican congresswoman María Elvira Salazar, who is running for re-election, aired a Spanish-language ad telling the president his enforcement drive had “betrayed” Hispanic voters in her district. Restaurant and hotel owners in the state have said that ICE’s presence is frightening away both workers and customers.

In Maine, the fatal ICE shooting of a 25-year-old asylum seeker has cast a pall over Republican Sen. Susan Collins’s re-election campaign. Collins had supported Trump administration plans to supercharge immigration enforcement.

In Kansas, cattle ranchers told The Guardian that ICE operations are having “a massive chilling effect on the legal, documented, skilled workers that put beef on the table” and warned that meat prices would spike as a result. “So many industry segments are reliant on immigrants, so it’s an issue across the economy,” said Matt Teagarden, CEO of the Kansas Livestock Association. Dairy producers and ranchers have long lobbied the government to create more legal pathways for the immigrant workers who staff their enterprises. But now, the U.S. cattle herd has shrunk to its lowest numbers in 75 years, and ranchers are struggling to keep up with consumer demand, Teagarden said: “But they are not able to expand without the workforce.” Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, who had once vehemently backed Trump’s immigration agenda, started to grow uneasy in a tightening re-election race and softened his hardline rhetoric.

In Texas, a fatal ICE shooting in July and a non-fatal shooting in September are among a series of violent ICE arrests that have helped Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico appear to be gaining momentum against Trump-backed Attorney General Ken Paxton on a message that Trump’s ICE has gone too far. A New York Times/Siena University poll found Texas voters evenly split on which candidate they trust more to handle immigration — a striking shift in a state that has not elected a Democratic senator in almost 40 years.

The national mood shifted after the fatal shooting of two U.S. citizens during immigration raids in Minneapolis sparked massive public backlash. The Trump administration signaled it would take a softer approach, and new Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said his goal would be to keep ICE out of the news headlines. Immigration agents, however, are still shooting people. With enforcement operations across the U.S. gaining momentum and immigration arrests at a record high, voters continue to see a supercharged ICE at work, according to The Guardian.

Workforce disruptions are now showing up far beyond the political headlines. The cost of living, a consistently top-ranking issue for voters in midterm polls, is being reshaped by the enforcement drive. Trump’s immigration raids and his policies stripping legal work permits from thousands of workers are causing disruptions not just in the cattle industry, but also across agriculture, food service, hospitality and construction, according to The Guardian. About two-thirds of U.S. farm workers are non-citizen immigrants; as the administration targets those workers, food producers could struggle to keep up with operations and prices are expected to increase steeply, according to a study by the think tank Fwd.us. At Clavel, a Baltimore restaurant, chef and owner Carlos Raba told a congressional hearing that many of his staff are Salvadorans who have lived in the U.S. for years under Temporary Protected Status. Trump has already revoked TPS for thousands of Haitians and Syrians, and with the administration imminently expected to revoke TPS protections for Salvadorans as well, Raba said he could lose 80% of his staff. “We could not operate the way that we operate today if they are all gone,” Raba said. “I think about the cooks, dishwashers, farmers, bakers, entrepreneurs that I work with. They are my co-workers, my friends and my community.”

In Florida, Katia Rios of Pipo Burgers, owner of a burger restaurant not far from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago golf course, said enforcement operations have affected both workers and customers who are scared to come out and eat due to the constant presence of ICE officers. “Our sales have dropped 70%. We spend hours empty,” Rios said.

Healthcare, a top issue especially for rural voters according to a KFF-AP poll, is facing parallel pressures. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, a nonprofit organization representing physicians in North America, nearly one in four doctors in the U.S. was trained abroad, and those immigrant physicians have been central to addressing medical staffing shortages, especially in rural areas where few American doctors want to move. Senior living and eldercare facilities, which are also heavily staffed with immigrant caregivers, have been left in the lurch. Among the roughly 330,000 Haitian TPS holders who suddenly lost their legal status this summer, about 13,000 work daily as nursing assistants caring for 65,000 patients, the Boston Globe reported.

“It does cause quite a disruption in the community,” Scott Fischer, the Republican party chair in Ford County, Kansas, told Politico. “We don’t want our community disrupted.”

Michigan State University political scientist Matthew Grossman said the broader effect is shaping voter attitudes even where immigration is not the top issue. Even voters who aren’t cattle ranchers or restaurateurs, and who might not clearly see the impacts of immigration policies on their economic reality, are nonetheless feeling the effects, Grossman said. “Even if this isn’t a top concern for voters casting their ballots, it is a part of a general perception that the president’s policies have gone too far, and that they’re affecting people who are not immigrants,” Grossman said. “Regardless of whether people connect the dots between the president’s policies and outcomes, if those policies have real effects, then that’s another channel by which people tend to move against the party in power.”