Benny Melendez voted for President Donald Trump in 2024. But since Trump returned to the White House, it has been increasingly difficult for Melendez to run his small construction company in south Texas. He says immigration officers have detained workers at his job sites and while driving his company trucks. Since the beginning of 2025, more than 10 of those workers have been deported.
The chaos of the past year-and-a-half has convinced Melendez to abandon his support for Trump and Republicans, and instead back the Democrat in this year’s U.S. Senate election, state Rep. James Talarico.
“How can we continue voting for someone that is targeting our community?” Melendez said. “There’s no way possible we’re going to support that. No way.”
Melendez is not alone. One in five Hispanic business owners in Texas say they’ve had an employee deported in the past year, according to a new survey commissioned by the U.S. Hispanic Business Council and shared first with POLITICO. Seven in ten said their businesses had been impacted by Trump’s tariffs. Among those surveyed, Talarico holds a seven-point lead over Attorney General Ken Paxton, the GOP nominee, even though a plurality of the over 1,000 respondents self-identify as Republican. Almost one quarter who supported Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary now say they’ll back Talarico, while over half say they’ll back Paxton.
The survey is the clearest sign yet of Paxton’s vulnerability among Texas’ robust Hispanic business community amidst broader signs that Hispanic voters around the country are swinging hard against him, thanks to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and the shaky economy. The survey was conducted from June 2 to 15 and included 1,012 Texas-based USHBC members. Respondents included business owners in construction, food services, retail, manufacturing and other industries.
Those business owners pointed to the fear the deportation push created in the community, as well as their bottom lines, for why they were turning on Trump and toward Talarico.
“The fear factor that it creates, the disruption that it creates, the environment that it creates, is debilitating,” said Javier Palomarez, president and CEO of USHBC. “If you’ve got a small business of 10 people or so, and you get even one person deported, you can imagine what that does to the morale of that business unit and to the fear of the business owner.”
Meanwhile, Paxton, long an immigration hardliner, has doubled down, touting his support for a controversial Texas immigration law and suing to stop publicly funded legal defense for undocumented immigrants.
The Texas Senate race will be one of the nation’s most watched — and most expensive — this cycle. Early polling shows it in a dead heat: A New York Times/Siena poll released last month showed Paxton and Talarico tied. Among Hispanic voters, Talarico led by 32 points. In 2024, Trump won Texas Latinos by 10 points.
In a statement, Paxton spokesperson Madison Cercy said Hispanic voters want “lower taxes, less regulation, affordable energy, and a strong economy.”
“Ken Paxton has a proven record of fighting for those priorities, while James Talarico has consistently opposed the tax-cutting policies that help Texans thrive, declares that ‘God is non-binary,’ and said that there are ‘six biological sexes,’” Cercy said. “Texans deserve to hear the truth about Talarico’s radical record and the damage his agenda would do to families and businesses across our state. Once they do, it will kill Talacreepo’s campaign for their vote.”
In a statement, Talarico offered an olive branch to Hispanic voters: “We should be supporting Hispanic small businesses — not crushing them under the weight of high costs and failed immigration policies,” he said. “Here’s my message to Hispanic communities across Texas: if you feel like you’ve been conned, if you feel like you’ve been let down by both political parties, if you feel like politicians aren’t doing anything to lower your costs or fix this broken immigration system — you’ve got a place in this campaign.”
Across south Texas, business owners say immigration enforcement is a major reason why they’re turning on the GOP. In 2024, Trump rode concerns over former President Joe Biden’s border policy to victory in the heavily Latino communities along the U.S.-Mexico border, a massive shift in the historically deep-blue region. Trump won 14 of those 18 border counties, including Starr County, a 90-percent Latino county that Hillary Clinton won with 79 percent of the vote in 2016 and hadn’t gone for a Republican since the 1890s.
But now, many feel the Trump administration’s interior enforcement policy has gone too far. 70 percent of those surveyed in the USHBC poll had a negative view of the immigration raids on the workforce, and that impact on families and businesses risks kneebuckling Republicans running in those same border districts.
“I didn’t like what Biden was doing here on the border,” Melendez said. “But now with Trump, it’s all the opposite, 180 degree change. He doesn’t let us work. He’s taking the best we have.”
Earlier this year, construction executives in south Texas sounded the alarm on immigration enforcement. Some trade association leaders met with officials in the White House and Congress to discuss concerns in February.
Immigration enforcement at worksites subsided for several months, executives said. But activity ticked up again last month. Now, Melendez says, immigration officers are again rounding up workers at construction sites and pulling over vehicles that have work equipment like ladders. The Department of Homeland Security didn’t immediately respond to request for comment on this characterization of enforcement.
“It just seems now more than ever, if you’re brown, they’re gonna stop you,” said Mario Guerrero, a three-time Trump voter who leads the South Texas Builders Association. “And I know that sounds really racist, but it’s what we’re facing, man.”
Across the state, story after story of the immigration crackdown consume local media: An undocumented man in Houston shot and killed by an ICE officer; a mariachi musician in San Antonio detained after playing at a birthday party; a Catholic nun in McAllen detained while walking to Sunday Mass.
Even some Republican officials have denounced the activity. “As I have repeatedly said, our immigration enforcement should target violent criminals,” GOP Rep. Monica de la Cruz, who represents a battleground district in the Rio Grande Valley, wrote on Facebook. “A Catholic nun on her way to church is not a threat to our community.”
One construction company owner in south Texas, granted anonymity to speak openly, said the nun’s arrest — which was plastered all over local news last month — was “the final nail in the coffin” for many Hispanics in the community who had voted for Republicans.
“We’re pissed off at the current administration. Everybody’s pissed off down here in south Texas,” the construction executive said, noting that most Hispanics in the area are Catholic. “Remember, we’re conservative, we’re not far left. We’re in the middle, conservative Latinos in south Texas. It doesn’t make sense.”
Guerrero, who leads a trade group with over 160 members across south Texas, said the idea that deportations will create jobs for American workers is ill-informed. “When people say, ‘Why don’t you hire American citizens to do foundation or to do concrete?’ I’m like, ‘Dude, tell me what f—ing United States citizen is gonna want to go and pour concrete at 103 degrees down here in the valley,’” Guerrero said.
Palomarez echoed that sentiment.
“This notion that these immigrants are taking American jobs is bullshit,” said Palomarez. “The districts in South Texas that swung decidedly Republican are paying the price, because that fear-mongering has come home to roost. And now you don’t have employees, or enough employees, to get that project done.”