Donald Trump won over more Latino voters in the 2024 election, but in Phoenix and surrounding Maricopa County, the shine is already wearing off as immigration enforcement and rising prices hit ordinary people first. Recent polling and interviews in Arizona suggest that support may be softening as his second term continues and Republicans look toward the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential race.
Who Pays for Power
In Phoenix and surrounding Maricopa County, where a third of residents are Latino and one in four of them is an immigrant, voters and activists described a mix of continued support, regret and concern over immigration enforcement and rising prices. The people living under the boot of enforcement are not abstract numbers. Sandra Ramirez said she broke from her Democrat-voting family to vote for Trump in 2024, but after watching footage of immigration officers cracking down on migrants over the past year, she said, “There are a lot of people who are being harassed for the color of their skin, and that’s not right.” She added, “I’ll never go Republican again.”
Trump’s gains among Latino voters were significant in 2024. A majority of Latino voters still supported Democrat Kamala Harris for president, but 43% of Latino voters nationally voted for Trump, compared with 35% in the 2020 presidential election. The shift was attributed in part to concerns about the economy. Trump returned to office pledging to crack down on immigration, and that promise prompted arrest sweeps in homes, workplaces and schools, often against Latino migrants. An AP-NORC poll found that more than half of Latino adults report knowing someone impacted by the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement.
The Apparatus at Work
Polling from the Pew Research Center showed support for Trump falling among Latino voters who backed him in 2024. In an April poll, 66% of Latino Trump voters approved of his job performance, down from 93% at the beginning of his second term. Among non-Latino voters, support fell from 95% to 79% between February of last year and April of 2026. The numbers point to a familiar pattern: promises from above, enforcement below, and the people caught in the middle paying the price.
The national drop could matter in swing counties such as Maricopa, the largest battleground county in the nation. Arizona has also seen a slight increase in Latino support for Trump in 2024, and the state has long been a flashpoint in the immigration debate. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio conducted high-profile raids in Latino communities, and later the state saw large influxes of migrants during the Biden administration.
In south Phoenix, Albert Rodriguez, a Phoenix tattoo artist, said he once supported Trump but changed his view after seeing enforcement operations in Chicago, Minneapolis and Los Angeles. He said Trump promised to go after immigrants who were criminals, but instead Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been “hitting the paleta man,” referring to ordinary people trying to make a living from selling frozen treats. “Big time, I regret it,” Rodriguez said of his 2024 vote for Trump.
Ronnie Martinez, an Army veteran in Phoenix, said he backs Trump’s effort to stem crossings at the southern border. “The border is only a hop, skip and a jump to our south. And I don’t want illegal alien criminals coming from Guatemala, Venezuela, Central America,” he said. He said he did not like some images of ICE arresting people in front of their children, but he was sympathetic to ICE officers and blamed Democratic officials for not cooperating with immigration enforcement. He also cited the removal of taxes on tips and overtime as reasons for his continued support.
Guadalupe Alaffa, another Phoenix resident, blamed President Joe Biden’s policies for prompting Trump’s immigration crackdown. “He left that damn border wide open,” Alaffa said.
Organizing Against the Crackdown
Democrats in Maricopa County have benefited from more than a decade of political organizing among Latinos mobilizing against hard-line immigration enforcement. In 2010, the Republican-controlled Legislature passed SB1070, which required police to check the immigration status of anyone they suspected of being in the country illegally. Around the same time, Sheriff Arpaio was building a national profile on the right with immigration sweeps in largely Latino neighborhoods.
Salvador Reza, a longtime activist in Phoenix who advocates for the rights of day laborers, said, “We were the lab where they implemented a lot of this with Sheriff Joe and now it’s all over the United States.” For over two decades, Arpaio was repeatedly elected while his department faced accusations of racially profiling Latino drivers and conducting sweeps in Latino neighborhoods and day labor areas. Deputies often stopped residents for traffic violations and turned noncitizens over to ICE, according to rights groups. In 2013, a federal judge ruled his office had illegally profiled and detained Latinos, and a 2011 Justice Department report found widespread discrimination. After losing reelection in 2016, Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt for defying court orders and was later pardoned by Trump.
Former Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, who signed the controversial 2010 bill, said the GOP is at risk of losing some of the Latinos that Trump won over. “With the inflation and the cost of living and the gasoline and the wars, I don’t know if they can afford to be a Trump Republican,” Brewer said.
Earl Wilcox, a longtime activist and restaurant owner in Phoenix, said affordability issues and immigration enforcement are causing Latino support for Trump to wane. Wilcox’s restaurant hosted Biden in 2024 when he launched an initiative meant to rally Latino support for the Democratic ticket. “I don’t think the Republican Party will have the support it did the second time around,” Wilcox said, “and I think it started with the raids.”
The story here is not subtle: the same political machine that courts Latino voters at election time also leans on immigration enforcement, police power and economic pressure to keep people in line. The people in Maricopa County are left to navigate the fallout while the parties and their officials count votes and trade blame.