Dan Soza has seen the harsh realities of Donald Trump’s immigration policies up close and so he is alarmed that many Latino voters in Saginaw, Michigan, do not take seriously the former US president’s threats of mass deportations.
As a child welfare officer in Saginaw, Soza places young unaccompanied refugees in foster families and watched the Trump administration’s separation of children from their parents at the Mexican border in 2018 with alarm. He said the cruelty of that policy, and the former president’s threats against refugees legally in the US, should serve as a warning that Trump might do what he says.
“A lot of people who are Latino or Hispanic – whether it be in Saginaw, Michigan, or in the country – when they hear him say those things, they don’t think he’s talking about them,” said Soza.
“What really worries me is that people don’t remember their history. This has happened before. We’ve seen mass deportations before and when it happened American citizens were deported.”
For all that, support for Trump is rising among Latinos, who account for about 15% of voters, across the US. A recent Siena poll for the New York Times showed that nearly one in 10 Hispanic voters – people with roots in Spanish-speaking countries – who backed Biden in 2020 will vote for Trump this year.
Support for Democratic presidential candidates among Hispanic and Latino voters has been sliding for years. Barack Obama won about 70% of their votes. Polls give Harris just 56% support.
The Siena poll identified Harris as losing ground among Hispanic voters over immigration, the economy and crime. Meanwhile, Trump has strengthened his backing even as his anti-immigrant rhetoric has become more threatening – and, with some Hispanic voters, because of it.
Two-thirds said that they “do not feel like he is talking about me” when Trump calls Mexican migrants rapists, claims immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and threatens to invoke wartime powers to deport millions of people. More than 40% back Trump’s pledge to finish building a wall on the border with Mexico and his deportation policy.
Andrea Paschall, a Republican who founded Latinos for Trump of Saginaw county, is among them. She said the former president speaks for large numbers of Hispanic voters in the swing county which Trump narrowly won in 2016 before Joe Biden took it back for the Democrats four years later by just 303 votes.
“When I created the group, I woke up the next morning and straight away I had 35 people that also believe what I believe, that were also feeling like they were shamed and that they couldn’t talk about who they supported,” she said.
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In what is expected to be a knife-edge US election decided by a few voters in a handful of key battleground states, the Guardian is exploring Saginaw, Michigan. It is a swing area in a swing state whose voters will bear an outsize influence on the outcome of the fight between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Chris McGreal is on the ground in Saginaw in the run up to November’s election examining the issues that voters of all political backgrounds care about.
Saginaw voters: tell us which issues will decide the US election
“I’m conservative. I’m voting for Donald Trump. I’m an outlier because I don’t hide that fact. I got involved in the Republican party because I felt I wasn’t being represented, not only in my ethnicity but in my thought. I feel like we, as Latinos, are traditionally conservative.”
Paschall, a customer success manager who ran for county commissioner earlier this year but lost a Republican primary race in August, said Trump’s threats target only those who are in the country illegally and that Trump’s more extreme statements are no more than political rhetoric that should not make Latinos feel afraid.
“The tone is sensationalism. The tone is to get people aware. He gets people to listen. Your ears are all perked up. You have an emotional reaction, and that’s the purpose of that,” she said.
“I’m not necessarily offended by those things. Number one, we love immigrants. I’m definitely a proponent of immigration but I don’t care what colour you are, I don’t care where you are coming from, if you enter into this country illegally that is a problem for me and for many of the people who believe what I believe, including many Latinos.”
But Trump’s attacks have not been limited to undocumented people. Soza noted that his false claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating family pets were aimed at people with permits to be in the US.
“Many immigrants Trump’s attacking have what’s called legal presence. The Haitians Trump attacked are under temporary protected status. I work with refugees. I see Haitians, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans. Honestly, when I see the rhetoric, it’s so ignorant because they are here legally. But I fear what will happen to them if Trump gets back in,” he said.
Still, Paschall continues to defend Trump’s claims about the Haitians.
“I didn’t learn this from Donald Trump. I actually learned it from citizens on TikTok saying: ‘This is what’s happening in my town. There are serious issues where there are animals are being eaten alive in our streets.’ Ignoring that is not okay just because we’re afraid to say that they’re from a particular country or they have a particular skin colour,” she said.
Paschall said that if there is racism, it comes from white liberals who tell her that, as a Latina, she should not support Trump. She describes that view as “so deep-rooted that they don’t even realise they’re being racist”.
Latinos account for about 9% of Saginaw county’s population. Most are of Mexican descent whose families were drawn to the area by the once-booming American car industry and other factory jobs during the first half of the 20th century.
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Soza said that with several generations born in the US, the link with their forebears’ experience as immigrants is diminished or broken. In addition, many are struggling financially in parts of Saginaw city that have been in long economic decline with abandoned and bulldozed homes peppering once bustling neighborhoods.
“When you compare immigration to the economy, to healthcare, those issues affect your typical Latino a lot more right now. Obviously somebody who’s first generation, been here a short amount of time, maybe they have more at stake in the game but overall it doesn’t affect us to the level that you would think, other than psychologically,” he said.
There are other factors at play. The proportion of Mexicans crossing the border to work without visas has dropped sharply in recent years with much larger numbers of people now coming from Central and South America as refugees. They sometimes face hostility from more established Latino communities, about 60% of which are of Mexican ancestry.
Shifting religious allegiances may also account for some of the increased support for Trump. Paschall left the Roman Catholic church for an evangelical congregation. She is not alone. The number of Latinos in the US who identify as Catholic has fallen from 67% to 43% since 2010. More than 20% say they are Protestant, the majority members of evangelical churches which tend to lean more heavily toward support for Trump.
But Paschall said Trump’s support was driven by the same issues that win him votes in the rest of the country.
“When Trump was president, we saw lower gas prices, groceries that I could afford. Also, we’re tired of being told one thing and then not getting delivered what you told,” she said.
“People are voting on the difference we want. We don’t want the same old, same old. We’re tired of the same politicians being in the same places, giving us the same thing, the same spiel, and then we get the same zero result.”
For some, though, the immigration issue overshadows everything. Angel Gomez, a clinical therapist, said he was afraid of what another Trump presidency would mean for his family.
“I’m white-passing but there is still a fear that I might get wrapped into that. I have family that’s here undocumented and there is a fear that not only would they cause harm to my family by splitting it up but also potentially cause harm to me,” he said.
“As much as people go, ‘Oh, that’s not a real fear,’ it’s happened twice in our history. It happened right under President Bush as well, where he had soldiers who were undocumented who went and fought in a war for him, and then he deported them when they got back.”
Gomez pointed to a Florida law criminalising the transportation of undocumented immigrants into the state, since blocked by a federal court earlier this year. He said that if the Trump administration passed such laws, it would make him a criminal for driving members of his family on holiday.
Soza said he and some other Latinos felt all the more vulnerable because the Democrats were not defending them sufficiently. He accused some Democrats of playing Trump’s game, including the party’s US Senate candidate in Michigan, Elisa Slotkin.
“She said specifically in her ads here in Michigan she wants to make it harder to come here as a refugee, which is really, really saddening because it reflects this idea that there’s way too many refugees coming when, in reality, the United States sets a number of refugees who can come here per year and we’re usually under that number,” he said.
“I’ll be very honest, the Democrats have not inspired me to want to go and do voter drives and do outreach, do phone banking, just because of their stance on immigrants and refugees has been so pulled so far to the right this election. It’s been very disheartening. It’s been demotivating. But the alternative is so far worse to me on all of those subjects that I would never consider voting for them.”
