For nearly two years, US President Donald Trump's heavy-handed deportation drive has sowed fear in immigrant communities and created a flood of grim headlines and social media videos.
Now, with midterm elections looming, many Latino voters who helped propel Trump and his Republican Party to power in 2024 say they are fed up.
In southern Florida's Doral, a mostly Latino community near Miami that is also home to one of Trump's golf clubs, residents told AFP that worries about potential raids have left businesses without staff and classrooms with fewer pupils.
Known as "Doralzuela," the area is home to a large Venezuelan population and could be a bellwether for whiplashing Latino sentiment nationwide.
"I feel sad and disappointed," restaurant-owner Maria Fernanda Perez told AFP.
"My thinking was that the economy would improve," the 32-year-old said of her vote for Trump.
Three of her employees stopped showing up over fears of being deported, she said, with sales falling 40 percent as people in the community pull back from going out.
"My whole family, all my friends are going through immigration proceedings, and they're no longer working, they're no longer going about their daily lives."
Trump campaigned on promises of a historic deportation drive, but emphasized the targeting of hardened criminals.
With over a thousand people being taken into immigration custody every day, many Latino voters feel misled.
Like other communities around the country, residents in Doral have begun exchanging messages to alert one another to the presence of immigration agents or to someone being detained.
A New York Times and Siena College poll conducted last month showed 66 percent of Hispanic respondents disapproved of Trump's performance, and 78 percent said they would prefer Democrats take control of Congress from Republicans.
Perez declined to say how she would vote in the upcoming election, but said emphatically: "Anyone but Trump."
- Psychological pressure -
Carlos Bermudez, a lawyer also of Venezuelan origin, receives constant calls from desperate people going through immigration proceedings.
"They don't go out, they can't go to work... It's constant psychological pressure, and it affects the whole community," the 47-year-old told AFP.
Bermudez, who describes himself as a Republican, expressed concerns about the party's increasingly "extreme" positions.
"I'm a Republican because I come from a country where communism, socialism took hold, and I don't want to continue with that ideology, but I don't agree with what the extreme wing of the party is doing now," he said.
Doral Councilman Rafael Pineyro said he sees the crackdown's impact not only in his city but across southern Florida.
"There's uncertainty, there's fear... It's not just Doral, it's the whole Latino community in South Florida that's affected," he said from his office at city hall.
Pineyro, a Republican, also questioned the Trump administration's immigration strategy.
"This isn't right, because this isn't what was promised in 2024 when we were talking about (deporting) criminals," he said.
Trump's policies could hamper gains made by Republicans in recent years among Florida's Cuban, Venezuelan and other Latino voters, he warned.
"That opportunity has been slipping away more and more in recent months because of bad decisions, in my view, specifically when it comes to the economy and immigration."
AFP
