Trump’s Ice Crackdown Broke Miami. Will It Tank This Cuban Republican’s Campaign?

MIAMI — For nearly an hour, dozens of the local Republican Party’s most loyal Colombian voters bided their time, piled into a conference room in a small hotel right off the airport near Miami Springs, surrounded by tables full of empanadas, tequeños and small Colombian flags. The event’s emcee, Weston City Commissioner Fabio Andrade, in town for the event, hyped up the crowd and warned of a “Machiavellian plan” by Democratic socialists to take over the U.S. He moved about the room, turning the mic to voters one by one.

“Porque apoyan a Maria Elvira?” he asked. Colombians of all ages easily made their case for why they support Maria Elvira Salazar.

“A favor de los inmigrantes!” 

“Defendie a los Latinos!”

“Se faja para el residente, y no para el partido.” 

She’s in favor of immigrants. She defends us Latinos. She works for the residents, not for the party.

A salsa beat came in hot over the speakers. Right on cue, through a backdoor coming off the hotel parking lot, the congresswoman walked in. As if in complete coordination, the group lifted out of their seats and crowded her, whipping out cell phones to snap photos of her rapturous entrance. Sporting a white campaign shirt and white Golden Goose sneakers, her signature blowout slightly puffy from the excess humidity, Salazar was greeted like a celebrity.

“I wish Washington would welcome me with this, and with this music!” she told the small crowd, taking her seat and signaling to one of her aides to grab her a water bottle. More members of her team funneled in, along with Toby, Salazar’s small but feisty King Charles Spaniel.

The room quieted as she launched into a passionate defense of what has become her core policy proposal, the Dignity Act — the immigration reform measure that has put her at odds with President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement. Not long after, an older woman named Beatriz Parga, clad head to toe in red with a “TRUMP 2024” hat, stood and grabbed a mic: is the Dignity Act actually a mass amnesty?

No, Salazar interjected quickly. It’s not.

“Son ilegales y se quedaron, es verdad,” she said. They came illegally and they stayed. But, Salazar pleaded, “vamos a hacer algo salomónico.” Let's do something Solomonic.

“Trump could be for immigration what Lincoln was for slavery and Reagan was for communism,” Salazar told the crowd, a pitch she’s given so many times it’s become a cliché.

For decades, Maria Elvira Salazar has been a rock star of the 305. A veteran of Spanish language television, her name has become synonymous with the Cuban American conservative tradition that provides one of the Republican Party’s most reliable bases of support. She’s a “Cuban Lauren Bacall,” as one political operative put it, so personally popular that in 2024 she won more votes in her Miami-based district than President Donald Trump himself.

But in the second Trump era, the forced exodus of thousands of Venezuelans, Colombians, Nicaraguans and even Cubans has upended Miami’s immigrant community. It’s a policy that stands to unravel the broader GOP coalition that played a key role in Trump’s victory — and it’s threatening Salazar’s political survival.

Interviews with more than two dozen lawmakers, lobbyists, former staffers, GOP operatives, Democratic organizers and Miami voters who know Salazar revealed the extent of the damage to her once-glittering political brand.

Suddenly, she is as despised by some in her party as she is loved. Local Democrats loathe her, viewing Salazar as a hypocrite who has betrayed a vibrant city remade by an explosion of Latino culture and language. Those who support the administration’s mass deportation agenda view her as an existential threat to Trump’s restrictive immigration policies.

Salazar’s predicament is unmistakable in the final days of the midterm campaign. She is facing what appear to be gale force Democratic winds while at the same time navigating the political hazards of one of the GOP’s most radioactive issues.

She’s privately called James Blair, who heads Trump’s political operation, and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, to warn them that the party is at risk of losing Latino voters, she told POLITICO Magazine. “Right now in 2026, the polls are indicating that we may be losing some of that pot of gold if the Republican Party wants to stay in power and continue winning elections,” Salazar said.

Neither Blair nor the White House responded to requests for comment.

At the airport hotel event, as the crowd of Colombians swarmed Salazar after her remarks, squeezing up to the front to try and get a selfie with her, Parga held back. Parga told me she still supports Trump, and is a massive fan of Salazar. Yet when asked if she believes the congresswoman will win re-election in November, Parga shrugged. She wasn’t sure if voters would show up for her.

“Los cubanos no están con ella,” Parga told me. The Cubans aren’t with her. But why? “Porque creen que ella no está con Trump,” she explained.

They think she’s not with the president.

With the clock ticking down toward Election Day, Salazar rolled up on a Wednesday in late September to a pale yellow warehouse off a back alley in Kendall — with a stack of papers and her dog Toby in tow — to record a podcast.

The “Pichy Boys” are two content creators with over one million followers on Instagram. Though not explicitly a political show, the hosts are a mirror of Miami’s latest generation of Cubans, delivering their news and hot takes via Reels or TikToks. It’s a style of interview the congresswoman has done time and again on the trail this fall — usually friendly, and always with an important Cuban or Venezuelan or Colombian audience that she needs to turn out.

Fixing her hair in the lens of the camera, Salazar appeared to be in her element. The studio had a great setup, she told the hosts. “That’s the most important part of a studio — lighting.”

If there’s one thing to understand about Maria Salazar — core to the signature hair, the color-coordinated outfits, the news anchor posture — it’s that she was a fixture of local television for a very long time. That fact is relevant enough that Democrats chose their own veteran local TV personality to oppose her this year: Eliott Rodriguez, a former local news anchor for CBS, who is also Cuban American.

Her media background places her squarely in a tradition of Spanish broadcasting that is the lifeblood of the Cuban exile community in South Florida. Since the first wave of migration from Cuba in the early 1960s — an influx which included Salazar’s own family — Cuban-led TV and radio has played an outsized role in Miami. First, it served as a source for exiles to understand what was happening to their families on the island, and for those on the island to get information they weren’t hearing from Fidel Castro’s revolutionary regime. It was resistance activism as much as it was news.

Born in Miami’s Little Havana community just two years after Castro took control of the island, Salazar was part of the next generation of journalists. Univision, CNN en Español, Telemundo and then Mega TV — Salazar was everywhere. Over time, the whole Latino set of the city got to know “Maria Elvira.”

“[Salazar] was one of the first people to actually do debate talk shows in Spanish on U.S. television,” said a person close to Salazar, granted anonymity to discuss private details. “She's pushy and she's extremely demanding, both with her producers and with her staff. She knows how to throw the zingers, and she's not afraid of controversy. She leans into it.”

When Miami’s first Cuban representative in Congress, Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, retired in 2018 — opening the seat for the first time in 20 years — Salazar seized the opportunity to leverage her celebrity. She was dragged under by that year’s blue wave, but in a rematch two years later with incumbent Democrat and former Cabinet secretary Donna Shalala, she took advantage of presidential year turnout — and the Cuban exile community’s affinity for Trump — to capture the seat. Notably, Salazar ran ahead of Trump’s performance in her congressional district.

“She was having nightly Zoom shows on Facebook Live with thousands of people, talking about the pandemic,” one of her former campaign staffers said. “The cars would stop in the middle of the street and honk and wave her down,” when they saw her on the trail. “It all goes back to the fact that she is a journalist and she understands TV extremely well.”

It “turned out to be the biggest upset in the country in 2020, because the GOP never really thought, including [former Speaker] Kevin McCarthy, that I could defeat the longest serving member of the Clinton administration with no money from the GOP,” Salazar said. “So yeah, miracles happen.”

From the moment she took her oath in the Capitol, Salazar wanted to “speak and talk and live and walk immigration,” she said in an interview between meetings this week. It formed the crux of her character on the Hill.

In her 2025 book, Dignity Not Citizenship: The Truth About Immigration No One Is Telling You, she described herself as a freshman “with a mission, not to mention a minority woman with a Sofia Vergara accent, who spoke loudly and waved her arms around to drive home a point.”

She quickly made allies of her fellow Miami Cuban lawmakers. “There is a difference between, you know, being a journalist and getting into this crazy process,” Republican Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart said.

“Her work ethic is just outstanding,” he added, calling Salazar “exceedingly intense.”

The expansive laws crafted to facilitate the settling of Cubans in the U.S. have always made them an exception among immigrant groups. Yet Salazar was convinced that the next wave of Latinos that came flocking to South Florida in the 2000’s weren’t as fortunate. So she formed the beginnings of a framework that could legalize the swaths of immigrants who had moved without papers to the U.S. decades ago, but had never gotten status. She called it the Dignity Plan.

Together with Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar of Texas, she pushed to establish a new “dignity” status for immigrants who’d been living in the U.S. for years, where they would never be eligible for a green card and would agree to pay thousands of dollars in fines. Salazar argues that the bill would clear backlogs in the courts, help immigrants to fill gaps in the workforce and secure the Southern border.

Escobar remembers that when they first met, she was “not a fan” of Salazar.

“She said, ‘You need to do something about immigration,’ and just started laying into me. And I remember just thinking, ‘Who the hell does she think she is to walk up and confront me in this way?’” Escobar said.

But the Texas Democrat also acknowledged that only Salazar came to mind when she looked for a Republican to partner with on a bipartisan immigration proposal.

“She has determination that is almost superhuman,” Escobar said. “She is different from a number of legislators that I've worked with over the years, in that respect that she is almost relentless to a point of obsession.”

But the latter years of the Biden administration saw an immigration crisis that completely shifted the calculus in Congress. A constant stream of headlines about caravans of immigrants entering through the Southern border inflamed a Republican Party that already viewed the president as dangerously lax on immigration policy.

To them, Salazar’s bill amounted to a “mass amnesty” that would worsen an already chaotic situation on the border. And with the GOP taking control of the House in 2023, it was a complete nonstarter.

It wasn’t just Salazar’s Republican colleagues in Washington who were enraged by the idea of letting in more immigrants. Back in Miami, Cuban Republicans — the oldest of whom had spent half their lives in the U.S., by that point — were also convinced the influx had to stop. Nicaraguan, Colombian and Venezuelan immigrants, the ones who had become U.S. citizens, were thinking the same thing.

Those frustrations helped power Trump, who was promising the “largest deportation program of criminals” in American history, to a sweeping victory in Miami-Dade County in 2024. More than two-thirds of Cubans voted for him.

Salazar, who had campaigned against the chaos at the border and messaged her immigration reform proposal as a tool for shutting the border, won re-election by an even greater margin — 20 points.

Just two years later, however, Miami — and Salazar’s winning coalition — is at risk of fracturing.

Away from the loud, music-filled storefronts of Little Havana’s Calle Ocho, the tourists looking for coffee and the older Cubans loyal to their game tables at Domino Park, the surrounding neighborhood remains one of the last real working or middle class enclaves of Salazar’s district. And amid relics of Spanish architecture and sprawling murals of the Cuban flag, the streets are largely quiet these days.

Almost everyone has a story of someone they know who left out of fear of ICE. Ask your Uber driver to take you to Little Havana, or to Doral, a small immigrant-dominated city outside Salazar’s district known as Doral-zuela, and many will flat out tell you no. They can’t risk being stopped in their car there. It’s a level of fear, of frustration, of wariness, that’s unlike anything residents have experienced here — I grew up here, and felt it myself when I returned to report for this story.

“They’re treating everyone like criminals, but we built Miami,” Martha Cabrera, a Cuban canvasser with the UNITE Here local 355 chapter, told me while knocking doors.

I told her that Salazar was born in this neighborhood. “It seems like she forgot,” responded Martha, who was doorbelling for an independent offshoot that has backed Eliott Rodriguez.

The shadow cast by federal immigration enforcement and the detention sweeps has been impossible to avoid. As mass ICE detentions swept the country in 2025 and plunged major cities into protest, Miami registered the highest number of ICE arrests of any field office. That included Cubans — who for much of Miami’s recent history were thought to be untouchable. The converging factors of existing city agreements to cooperate with ICE enforcement, and the sudden termination of status for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, living and working in Miami legally under Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation, created a perfect storm for removals. Nearby loomed the makeshift detention center established by Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. Dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” for its location near the Everglades, the facility was widely condemned for inhumane detention conditions until it was shut down in June.

“The word is decepcionado,” explained Ana Sofia Pelaez, a local activist and executive director of the Miami Freedom Project, when asked how Latino voters felt about the detention policies. “In English it can mean you were deceived or you were just disappointed.” In Spanish, it means both.

In D.C., Salazar started sounding the alarm about what she was hearing back home. Latino voters were angry, she told her colleagues. The indiscriminate enforcement wasn’t what they voted for. Her Miami Republican colleagues, from Diaz-Balart and Carlos Gimenez to local Republicans, raised the same red flags.

She warned GOP leadership that if the enforcement continued, they would lose Latino voters in the midterms. “That's a mistake that is going to cost us dearly, and I've been telling my Trump administration. I've been telling ICE,” she told reporters in July.

She explained to fellow House Republicans that, thanks to Trump, the Southern border was now closed. She saw an opening for the Dignity Act, which she had re-introduced along with Escobar in 2025.

“I'm trying to make the GOP the party that will send the message to the Hispanics that they're welcomed and that they have the same values that are entrenched in the Republican Party: God-fearing, law-abiding, tax-paying, good people, hard workers,” Salazar said. “They are here, so let's just give them dignity so they can stay.”

Instead, she found herself in what she called a “two-front war”: Democrats wouldn’t work with her without the promise of a path to citizenship, and many Republicans simply rejected her plan outright.

In fact, top administration allies, key Trump confidants and Salazar’s own GOP colleagues on the Hill lead the charge against the measure. “The Dignity Act is mass amnesty and would constitute a terrible betrayal of our voters,” Republican Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas, one of the bill’s biggest critics, wrote on X. One of her Florida delegation colleagues, Republican Rep. Randy Fine, wrote on X that it “should never see the light of day” in the House.

Several far-right advocates came together to form a Mass Deportation Coalition at the height of the backlash, and some formed a PAC to specifically attack “pro-amnesty” candidates who backed the Dignity Act.

The congresswoman is “first and foremost, an ethno-lobbyist,” said Mike Howell of the Mass Deportation Coalition.

“What are you doing here, Maria Salazar? Go join the other party,” he added. “How can the president endorse somebody who is boldly opposing his central thesis?”

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the right-leaning Center for Immigration Studies, called the proposal “so preposterous” that the party shouldn’t even engage with it. Even if it was viable, Krikorian said, Salazar should not be the face of it because “she’s incredibly obnoxious and aggressive, and turns off people even on our own side.”

Salazar said she received death threats for her departure from MAGA orthodoxy. There were calls for her to be primaried. “I don't want the Republicans to lose the House, but at this point in time, like, what's the difference between Maria Salazar and a Democrat?” Laura Loomer told POLITICO back in April.

Democrats have been just as hard on her, for voting along party lines to allocate billions of dollars to the agency behind the ICE detention sweeps, the Homeland Security Department.

“Maybe at one time she was known as a tough journalist and someone who could be trusted, but by now people know her as a politician who cannot be trusted and who doesn't tell the truth,” Rodriguez, Salazar’s Democratic opponent, told POLITICO Magazine. “She votes with MAGA all the time, and they're not fooled by it.”

Caught between two pincers, Salazar went back to her roots in September: She got on TV. This time, with a message for Trump himself.

Standing in front of the White House, speaking directly to the camera, Salazar told the president that “some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far.” The campaign ad went on: “Be careful what your advisers are telling you about immigration policy … The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”

In Miami, almost no one was surprised by the spot. But back in Washington, it hit like a political earthquake, a rare rebuke of a president who tolerates no dissent from the party line. The video went viral, racking up millions of views.

“I wanted him to hear directly from me,” Salazar said. “[I was] not attacking him. I was forewarning him.”

“He's a construction and hospitality guy. He's a businessman. He is the one to fix this 40-year problem,” she added.

To the far-right — the “America First” believers in Trump’s campaign promises — her position had already represented an “existential threat” to the future of the Republican Party. But the ad? Name-checking the president? Right in front of the White House? It crossed a line.

Angry callers inundated Miami’s Cuban radio shows, phoning in to say Salazar went too far. Ninoska Pérez Castellón, host at “La Poderosa” and one of the giants of the Cuban conservative airwaves, was among the radio hosts fielding the calls. Whoever wrote the ad, she said, did Salazar “un gran mal” — a disservice.

“She could have said the same thing without using the language that she used,” Pérez Castellón said. “The word she used is ‘betrayed.’ That [Trump] ‘betrayed’ us. I don’t know if I agree.”

At first, Trump showed Salazar a little grace. Rather than revoke his endorsement, he told reporters she was a “nice person” who “got a little bit soft on the border.”

Then he had a change of heart. He re-shared a series of Truth Social posts attacking her, and in some cases, calling for her replacement.

Sitting at the center of a long table, flanked by the Republican mayors from the southern neighborhoods of her district, Salazar held court on a recent October morning. Hundreds of attendees packed the meeting, from prominent Miami industry reps to regular constituents, all gathered at 7:30 am to meet her at Casa Cuba, a classic South Miami spot.

Grant Miller of Miami Community Newspapers, which hosted the breakfast for Salazar, invited the congresswoman up to the small stage and got down on one knee to hold her stack of papers, not long after joking he would marry her. Donning bright red reading glasses, Salazar without delay launched into her immigration pitch. “I do believe Trump will sign immigration reform law, and it will be Dignity,” she told the room. “Once the Dignity Act passes, I will have done my job.”

Even in the final stretch of an increasingly competitive — and contentious — race, Salazar has not backed down from the position that has made her a pariah to many in her party. It’s made her a test case for whether a Republican can win a majority Latino district in the era of mass deportation.

Outside Casa Cuba, sitting at a tiled table after the breakfast, Ramona Tumon and Mirla Loredo lamented they weren’t able to grab a photo with the congresswoman. The pair of friends, both Cuban, moved to Miami in the late 60’s. Loredo told me in no uncertain terms: she’s not a fan of the Dignity Act and she didn’t like Salazar’s ad. Tumon, however, did support the proposal. She tried to convince Loredo to no avail.

Both already voted Republican up and down the ballot, including for Salazar. Why vote for Salazar, I asked Loredo, if you disagree with her signature policy proposal? She said she didn’t want the GOP to lose the House.

Cuban Republicans may be angry with Salazar, Loredo said, but they have to vote GOP in spite of it. “No les queda más remedio,” she said. “They don’t have another choice.”

“Tienen que votar por ella, sino nos toca el otro,” Loredo added. “They have to vote for her, or else we get the other guy,” referring to Rodriguez.

Salazar remains a slight favorite to win. She has significantly outspent Rodriguez, who has gone through the race without any ads on broadcast TV. He’s the beneficiary of a late infusion of support from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and an 11th hour spend by the House Majority PAC, but the GOP has a voter registration edge of about 45,000 voters, according to Florida International University’s Eduardo Gamarra.

The latest FIU Cuba poll, which has been surveying the community for years, found that 76% of respondents disapprove of the administration’s immigration crackdown on Cuban nationals — but 68% of Cubans still plan to vote for the GOP candidate in their district next week.

Yet with significant headwinds buffeting the Republican Party, and Trump’s approval rating plummeting, GOP turnout is by no means guaranteed — in Miami or anywhere else. “They're not enthusiastic about going out to the polls,” Gamarra said. For many Latino Republicans, “they're not switching parties, and they're just simply not going to show up.”

If Republicans do show up on Election Day, said Venezuelan activist Adelys Ferro of Latino Victory, it may be due to the deep loyalty to MAGA that still thrives in Salazar’s Cuban base, an affinity rooted in Trump’s anti-socialist and law-and-order messaging.

“If she loses,” Ferro argued, “it’s on her.”

Should Salazar win on Tuesday, her problems will be far from over. She’ll likely return to Washington as a member of the House minority. A disproportionate number of her Republican Dignity Act co-sponsors may not survive their own re-elections. Trump’s final two years have set a hard deadline to make good on Salazar’s repeated assurances that he’ll sign sweeping immigration reform, but he’s given no indication to date that he’s willing to buck the MAGA base on the issue.

Salazar has demurred from making any grand predictions about what voters will do on Nov. 3. “I know District Number 27 probably better than anybody,” she told reporters after the Casa Cuba event, as a line of constituents formed to get photos with her. “If they think that I've done a good job, they'll bring me back, regardless of the political affiliation.”