It Wasn’t Just Gas Prices. Anti-ICE Sentiment Fueled Republican Midterm Losses.

While President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance blame Republicans’ losses in the midterm elections on their war on Iran — with Trump flippantly saying that the war “drove the gasoline up a little bit short term” — Tuesday’s results also represent a rejection of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign.

In Texas, where Trump won a Latino majority in the presidential election in 2024, the midterms saw a reversal, with Latino votes playing a role in the victories of Democrats James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa. Polls show 6 in 10 Latino voters supporting Talarico over Republican Ken Paxton — and in South Texas, Talarico performed better than Democrats have since the 1930s.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) said that “we haven’t seen this huge a Latino voter surge before,” and stated that “the difference is ICE and the mass deportation campaign.” Talarico had spoken against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, and against ICE’s tactics.

ACLU Texas polling prior to the midterm elections showed that 53 percent of residents in Texas border regions feel that immigration enforcement has made life harder, rather than making their communities safer. The polls also showed that 63 percent of those residents believe that ICE tactics “have gone too far.”

One resident surveyed in the poll — which spoke to 1,031 adults in El Paso and Rio Grande Valley counties — said that “ICE isn’t helping by deporting our hardworking immigrants regardless of their status. This whole region and country has been built on the backs of immigrants.” The resident had voted for Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

In Maine, too, voters expressed that the ICE crackdown over the past year had pushed them to vote against Republican Sen. Susan Collins, with the ICE killing of Johan Sebastian Guerrero in July as a particular flashpoint. Residents asked why Collins had not done more to stop ICE’s violent raids — and why she instead voted for more funding for the agency.

Democrat Troy Jackson, on the other hand, has said that he will “fight to abolish ICE.” In his victory speech on Wednesday, he said: “Masked agents terrorizing our neighbors and ripping families apart should never be accepted in the United States of America.”

And in Minnesota, the site of ICE’s “Operation Metro Surge” at the beginning of the year, which saw federal agents murder Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the early Latino vote increased by 217 percent compared to 2022.

Polling by Pew Research Center in September and October found that a majority of Black (69 percent), Latino (67 percent), and Asian (66 percent) adults in the U.S. have a negative opinion of ICE, while 49 percent of white adults have an unfavorable view of the agency. Pew also found that Americans across racial and ethnic groups view ICE more unfavorably today than they did a year ago, with 56 percent of Americans saying they have a negative view of the agency overall. Only 35 percent say they view the agency favorably.

However, while voters demonstrated their rejection of ICE and Trump’s rule in Tuesday’s elections, it remains unclear if that will lead to sweeping policy changes. The mainstream Democratic Party position — touted by figures like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, who is poised to become Speaker of the House — is to call for reforms of ICE rather than the abolition of the agency. But human rights advocates have warned that reforms to ICE, like reforms to the police, will not quell the repression and brutality inherent to what is now the U.S.’s most well-funded law enforcement agency.