In the wake of Republicans’ historic midterm wipeout, there’s a narrative push underway in Washington that it was Trump’s immigration policy, especially ICE deportations, that drove Latino voters who voted for Trump in 2024 to vote Democrat this time around.
This narrative is demonstrably false, but it’s being pushed by Washington Republicans who want to return the GOP to its pre-Trump form once the president leaves office (which is a fantasy because the pre-Trump GOP is completely dead, never coming back). In the meantime, they’d like to cut an immigration deal with Democrats to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants — specifically, to illegals who work in certain industries.
They are of course denouncing the term “amnesty,” as DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin did in a recent interview, even as Trump himself did in his 60 Minutes interview with Ross Douthat. But what they describe — granting legal status to foreign nationals who came to the U.S. illegally and allowing them to remain and work here legally — is amnesty, plain and simple.
What’s really happening here is that the GOP establishment, the people who have always hated Trump’s America First coalition and the MAGA agenda, are trying to ram through amnesty as a way to secure cheap foreign labor for favored industries before Democrats take over completely.
First, consider the argument they’re using to push amnesty. As my colleague Jordan Boyd explains in these pages, the idea that Latinos voted Democrat in the midterms because of Trump’s immigration policy isn’t backed up by polling data, which shows that economic issues, not immigration, drove Latino voters into the arms of Democrats. “One NBC exit poll found that 45 percent of Latino voters said the economy was their biggest concern going into the 2026 election,” wrote Boyd. “Only 15 percent reported ‘immigration’ as ‘the most important facing the country.’ Of those who prioritized immigration, six in 10 voted Republican.”
The vast majority of Latino voters — 94 percent — said cost of living was a crucial or major factor in their midterm vote. And as Boyd noted, exit polling showed that the more a Latino voter said that immigration was an important factor in how they voted, the more likely they were to vote Republican. Another Federalist colleague, Shawn Fleetwood, broke down exit polling data last week that showed the same thing. In one CNN exit poll, 73 percent of respondents said Trump’s immigration enforcement was a “crucial” or a “major factor” to their vote. Republicans won this group 51 to 47 percent.
For Latino voters, as for voters generally, the main concern was the economy — which was a concern precisely because gas and grocery prices spiked after Trump decided to attack Iran. It was the unpopular and costly Iran war, not ICE deportations, that turned voters away from the GOP (along with a host of lesser issues like corruption and lack of transparency around the Epstein files).
The Washington Republicans who blame the midterms on immigration of course have little to say about the Iran war. When they say anything at all, it’s to claim that the real problem is Trump didn’t go after Iran hard enough, that Vice President J.D. Vance tried to negotiate an end to it, that we didn’t pursue an insane policy of arming the Kurds or invading with ground troops. They will say almost anything, however untethered from reality, before they admit that the war was a terrible idea to begin with and we never should have done it.
And now they’re saying that what the American people really want is for Republicans to strike an immigration deal with Democrats and grant some form of amnesty to entire classes of illegal aliens. This week on Fox News, Rep. Marlin Stutzman of Indiana, a Freedom Caucus Republican, argued for a Republican immigration reform that includes amnesty for certain illegal aliens and no mass deportations.
“What’s happened is first President Trump did what he said he was going to do by securing the border. That was step number one, that’s happened. And now we need to look at our laws,” he said. “I think we should be focusing on those who are here that haven’t broken criminal laws, that are working, that could be paying taxes, they would be willing to be sponsored by somebody. There’s room for that, I believe, and that’s what people are looking for.”
Stutzman went on to denounce the idea of mass deportations, which Trump campaigned on successfully in 2024. “I just don’t think it’s possible,” he said. “You’re looking at 20 million people that you would have to deport out of this country.” Never mind that Trump explicitly promised 15-20 million deportations during his 2024 campaign, even vowing to use the military to accomplish it. That was a popular message.
Unfortunately, Trump himself is now talking about an immigration deal for “the good ones,” as he calls them, immigrants who came illegally but are now working in certain industries. Indeed, there seems to be a broad agreement among GOP officeholders that illegal immigrants who provide cheap labor for farms, hotels, and construction companies should be exempt from U.S. immigration laws.
For example the GOP-backed farm bill, filed back in June, would allow illegal immigrants working in a variety of agricultural-related industries to obtain H-2A visas and avoid deportation. The bill, H.R. 9535, called the “Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act,” is sponsored by House Agriculture Chairman Glenn Thompson, a Republican, and has a total of 52 Republican cosponsors. It basically creates a permanent underclass of foreign agricultural workers who will be issued H-2A visas and be employable on a permanent year-round basis. Whatever the Trump 2024 coalition voted for, it wasn’t that.
Time and again, Republicans pay lip service to immigration enforcement but advance policies that ensure big business has access to cheap foreign labor. They don’t really care what their voters want, they care what their donors want. That’s why Sen. John Thune was just reelected majority leader by Senate Republicans after an historic midterm wipeout. Voters spoke, they said they were angry with the GOP, they handed control of the Senate to Democrats, and effectively destroyed the Republican Party for a generation. The message was clear. Republican senators responded by saying, we don’t care.
They’re saying the same thing about immigration. Voters support mass deportations, they support ICE enforcement, they support Trump immigration policy. And in response, Washington Republicans are falsely claiming that immigration was a major cause of the midterm route, and then using that as a pretext to do what they wanted to do all along: pass amnesty for their friends and donors in big business.
Doing this is worse than doing nothing. Much worse. After a defeat this thorough, the establishment Republicans should resign in shame, not try to cram amnesty down our throats on their way out the door. As pollster Rich Baris said, “Put simply, the best thing people who betrayed voters and cost the party their trust can do, is go away.”
That they refuse to go away is a blatant slap in the face to GOP voters. Whatever comes after these people, it has to be a party that actually cares about what voters want and does what they promise to do. Until Republicans figure that out, they will remain in the wilderness where they belong.
