MIAMI (AP) — In Hialeah, Florida, a city that's 95% Hispanic, only three residents showed up at a recent city council meeting to speak against a partnership with the federal government to enforce immigration laws.
The police departments in Hialeah, where three out of four people were born abroad, and Coral Gables, with a majority of Hispanics mostly of Cuban descent, have entered into agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement with very little visible pushback.
President Donald Trump's doubling of immigration arrests and ramping up of deportations could have a disproportionate impact on South Florida, home to some of the nation's largest communities of Cubans, Venezuelans and other Latin Americans. But reaction here to Trump's crackdown has been far more muted than during his first term, reflecting both the rightward shift of Latino voters and a belief among some that restrictive border measures are necessary.
“I understand some people feel a little bit betrayed because most of us voted him in,” said Frank Ayllon, a 41-year-old sales representative from Miami. “I feel like a lot of these people are taking it very personal. And it’s not personal. It’s just that you’ve got to understand that this has been an open border for many years.”
Ayllon echoed Trump’s attacks on former President Joe Biden, whose administration saw record-high illegal border crossings before falling by the end of his term. Having once been critical Trump's 2020 election lies, Ayllon now says he thought the president has had the most action-packed beginning of a term he has ever seen.
A political shift begins to stick
When Miami-Dade County ordered jail officials in 2017 to hold people suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, dozens lined up to speak against the order at a public meeting, with some shouting “shame on you.” Lawmakers including former Vice President Kamala Harris, then California's junior senator, joined large protests outside a local immigrant detention facility.
Now in Trump's second term, the protest movement is splintered. But there's also been a broader political shift in South Florida and Latino communities.
While Harris in the 2024 presidential election won more than half of Hispanic voters, that support was down slightly from the roughly 6 in 10 Hispanic voters that Biden won in 2020. Roughly half of Latino men voted for Harris, down from about 6 in 10 who went for Biden.
In the November election, 7 in 10 Hispanic voters in Florida said they favored reducing the number of immigrants who were allowed to seek asylum in the U.S. when they arrived at the U.S. border, according to AP VoteCast. That was in line with Florida voters overall.
In 2024, Trump won not just Miami-Dade County but the central Florida counties of Seminole and Osceola, where many Venezuelans have immigrated, and made inroads in heavily Puerto Rican areas of Pennsylvania. He also flipped several South Texas border counties that were Democratic bastions for decades.
What initially catapulted Trump’s popularity in South Florida was his stance on the socialist governments that many exiles and their families fled, along with his focus on boosting growth and reducing prices. But at a rally in Miami days before announcing his third White House bid in November 2022, Trump said that, contrary to the belief of some, Hispanics liked his vows to crack down on illegal immigration.
“When I talked about the border, you know who the biggest fans of that were? (they) were the Hispanics, Latinos,” Trump said. “They knew more about the border than anybody. They knew more about it. Everybody said, ‘Oh, he’s going to hurt himself with Hispanics.’ Actually, it turned out to be the exact opposite.”
Barbara Canales, a 49-year-old certified nursing assistant who lives in Hialeah, said her mother brought her as a young girl from Honduras with a visa and overstayed it. It took them many years to legalize their status and to be able to bring other family members.
“That’s why I totally agree that you need to take illegal immigrants out of the United States. I’m sorry, but they should do it,” Canales said, adding that she feels most of the migrants arriving in the past few years are different. “When you come in with a visa is a totally different story.”
Canales says that while the Republican president has made immigration his signature issue, previous Democratic administrations have been just as willing to enforce immigration laws and deport people who had built their lives in the U.S. Former President Barack Obamaearned the nickname “deporter in chief” from advocacy groups who opposed his use of enforcement.
“It’s the reality that if you’re here breaking the rules, you have to suffer the consequences,” Canales said.
Miami's Cuban exiles are split
Miami is particularly well-known for its community of Cuban exiles who originally fled the government of communist leader Fidel Castro. About two-thirds of Cuban voters in Florida supported Trump in 2024, according to AP VoteCast, while about one-third supported Harris.
Cubans have long prided themselves of arriving here legally through several refugee and family-based programs and have been able to get green cards easier than people from other countries, thanks to a Cold War-era law.
After Obama in 2017 ended the “wet foot, dry foot” policy that considered any Cuban who set foot on dry land to be automatically a legal arrival, Cubans leaving for the U.S. have found more obstacles.
It did not stop many from coming.
Between 2021 and 2022, the U.S. government recorded the largest flight of Cuban exiles since the Mariel boatlift in 1980, when nearly 125,000 Cubans came to the U.S. over a six-month period.
“We are all in favor of legal immigration. My parents are products of legal immigration, like many of your parents, if not you directly,” said Hialeah Mayor Esteban Bovo, a strong Trump ally, during the recent city council meeting about an ICE partnership.
Trump picked up support from new Cuban immigrants such as Luis Boulart, 85, who arrived in 2015, got his citizenship in 2022 and cast his first presidential vote for Trump in 2024. Boulart recently said he trusted the president and believed the Republican party could better handle immigration, the economy, immigration and foreign policy.
“I think the challenges ahead are huge. But he is capable of solving all the problems,” Boulart said.
But those policy changes have meant more recent arrivals have a tougher path to legal status than preceding generations did.
Julian Padron, a 79-year-old who said he was jailed in Cuba, arrived decades ago when President Jimmy Carter negotiated with Castro the release of hundreds of political prisoners to the United States. He said he feels strongly against Trump and considers his actions anti-democratic.
He frequents Domino Park, located on Calle Ocho in Miami's iconic Little Havana, where a lot of the players sitting at four-person tables on a recent day were supportive of Trump. Padron said he typically keeps his thoughts to himself unless he is asked for his opinion. A park employee first told an Associated Press reporter that political questions were not allowed at this park to avoid arguments. But when asked which directive forbade that, the employee said he would find out and then allowed the interviews to continue.
“They are going to be detaining people,” Padron said, looking around the park. “Do they not know that people are still fleeing communism?”
Adriana Gomez Licon, The Associated Press
