‘south Texas Will Never Be Red Again’: Home Builders Warn Gop Over Trump’s Immigration Raids

Home builders are warning President Donald Trump that his aggressive immigration enforcement efforts are hurting their industry. They’re cautioning that Republican candidates could soon be hurt, too.

Construction executives have held multiple meetings over the last month with the White House and Congress to discuss how immigration busts on job sites and in communities are scaring away employees, making it more expensive to build homes in a market desperate for new supply. Beyond the affordability issue, the executives made an electability argument, raising concerns to GOP leaders that support among Hispanic voters is eroding, particularly in regions that swung to Trump in 2024.

Hill Republicans have held separate meetings with White House officials to share their own electoral concerns.

This story is based on eight interviews with home builders, lawmakers and others familiar with the meetings.

“I told [lawmakers] straight up: South Texas will never be red again,” said Mario Guerrero, the CEO of the South Texas Builders Association, a Trump voter who traveled to Washington last week.

He urged the administration and lawmakers to ease up on enforcement at construction sites, warning that employees are afraid to go to work.

The construction industry is one of the latest and clearest examples of how the president’s mass deportation agenda continues to clash with his economic goals of bringing down prices and political aims of keeping control of Congress. Even the president’s allies fear disruptions to labor-heavy industries will undermine the gains with Latino voters Republicans have made in recent years, in large part because of Trump’s economic agenda.

These concerns were the central focus of a White House meeting this week between chief of staff Susie Wiles, Speaker Mike Johnson, and a group of Republican lawmakers, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting, granted anonymity to discuss it. The group talked about growing concerns that Hispanic voters are abandoning the Republican Party in droves, as well as the policies driving these losses — immigration and affordability concerns.

Rep. Monica De La Cruz (R-Texas) was among the lawmakers in attendance on Wednesday. She, alongside South Texas leaders, held two additional meetings this week, one with Johnson and another with the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, to discuss her proposals for new policies to address worker shortages, including legislation to streamline visa programs and address the need for workers in the agriculture and construction industries.

“I will continue to focus on what matters: delivering common-sense policy solutions for the hard-working immigrants who strengthen our communities and making homeownership affordable for all Americans,” De La Cruz said in a statement to POLITICO, when asked about the meetings.

The White House meeting with lawmakers followed others with builders and trade groups this month. A number of industry representatives met at the White House in early February, and the South Texas Builders Association traveled to Washington last week for meetings with lawmakers, including Reps. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.), Andy Harris (R-Md.) and Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), and an ICE official. All three sit on the House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee, with Amodei and Cuellar the top Republican and Democrat on the panel.

“They started off with, ‘hey, we were all Trump supporters, and we thought he was going to secure the border and then kick out criminals, we just never thought that they were going to be coming after our folks, our workers, on that,’” Cuellar said, recounting the message the builders shared the first time he met with them. “They’re builders, contractors, lumber companies, cement companies, in the finance part of it. That type of ripple effect has hurt their economy. Not only individuals, but their economy.”

Cuellar also said that he has asked acting ICE Director Todd Lyons to set up a business liaison to work with the builders, an idea he said the director was receptive to but stalled amid immigration-related clashes in Minnesota.

A spokesperson for Amodei deferred to Cuellar’s office, while Harris’ spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the meeting.

A White House official did not comment on the meetings, but pointed to the president’s efforts to establish and update programs to help Americans fill jobs in key sectors. The official also highlighted the Labor Department’s Office of Immigration Policy, which was set up to help industries by streamlining the visa process for temporary workers.

“There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force, and President Trump’s agenda to create jobs for American workers represents this Administration’s commitment to capitalizing on that untapped potential while delivering on our mandate to enforce our immigration laws,” said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson.

RNC senior adviser Danielle Alvarez said Trump earned the support of Hispanic voters in 2024 because “his policies are aligned with the priorities of our community.”

She pointed to a number of policies, including the elimination of tax on tips, as well as the president’s efforts to lower prices “at the grocery store and the gas pump” and bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. to create “good-paying jobs and pathways to upward mobility.”

“We see our priorities reflected in an agenda focused on higher wages, lower costs, and more opportunity,” she said in a statement.

The meetings this month came after Democrats crushed a Republican in a special runoff election for a state senate seat in a Trump-friendly district in Tarrant County, which includes most of Fort Worth, rattling Republicans nationally. New research from the American Business Immigration Coalition and Comité de 100, first obtained by POLITICO, shows how slipping support among Latino voters could affect Republican-leaning districts in Texas, Pennsylvania, Florida and California.

Trump, whose own businesses have relied on immigrant labor, has been sympathetic to some concerns from industry leaders, including in the hospitality and agriculture sectors. Last summer, the president shifted his immigration policy after raids hit meatpacking plants and dairy farms in rural communities.

Still, Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner and congressional Republicans have blamed inflated housing prices on immigration. (An analysis from Harvard University’s Joint Center on Housing Studies found that while immigrants do drive up housing demand, the surge in home prices and rents predate the recent surge in immigrants in 2022 and 2023.)

Builders are continuing to push for targeted enforcement, and for the White House and lawmakers to look at policy solutions to help their industries find workers, including legislation that creates new temporary visa programs and offers pathways to citizenship.

Guerrero, and others interviewed for this story, complained about what they described as former President Joe Biden’s “open border policies,” and argue that they don’t support amnesty for immigrants who enter the country illegally, a key reason many of them supported Trump. But they do want policies that will help them employ legal workers.

In some of the meetings this month, attendees discussed the Dignity Act, a bipartisan bill spearheaded by Reps. Maria Salazar (R-Fla.) and Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), designed to strengthen border security but also modernize work visas and provide legal status to unauthorized immigrants who meet certain criteria. Another bill from Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa.), backed by De La Cruz, would create a new visa program for certain industries, including construction and hospitality.

Johnny Vasquez, executive officer of the Rio Grande Valley Builders Association, noted that Hidalgo County turned red for the president in 2024 — an example of gains the GOP will lose if the policies don’t shift, he argued.

“For me and for our association, we need workers, whether they’re American or not,” he said. “We just need workers.”

Mia McCarthy and Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.