Some Republican candidates start taking their distance from President Trump’s mass-deportation policy.
Rep. María Elvira Salazar, a Republican from Miami whom President Trump endorsed just months ago, has turned to the camera in a new campaign ad to tell him his immigration crackdown has gone too far — and the Trump administration answered within hours, telling her, in effect, that it does not need her permission.
“Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Rep. María Elvira Salazar says in the spot, which her campaign released Thursday and began airing across South Florida television, digital and streaming, according to Politico and the ad-tracking firm AdImpact. Speaking directly to Trump, she adds, “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”
The Department of Homeland Security pushed back sharply.
In a statement provided to Fox News and posted by the network’s congressional correspondent, Bill Melugin, the department said it is “focused on delivering the most HISTORIC mass deportation campaign in American history, exactly as President Trump promised,” according to Fox News. It went on to address the congresswoman by name: “Whether Congresswoman Salazar likes it or not, the men and women of ICE are enforcing the laws passed by Congress.” The spokesperson rejected any softening of the policy, saying the “only thing America should be giving” people in the country unlawfully is “a one-way ticket home” or a $3,000 payment to leave voluntarily.
The video, recorded outside the White House and released in both English and Spanish, is the first general-election ad of Salazar’s re-election bid, her campaign said. In it, she urges the president to “be careful what your advisers are telling you about immigration policy,” and, in an animated passage reported by CNN, insists she is not calling for “amnesty” but for immigrants to be able to lead a “dignified life.” She also cites a figure: about half of the roughly 50,000 people ICE detained in July had no criminal record. Independent tallies by the Syracuse University tracking project TRAC put the share of people in ICE custody without any criminal conviction even higher, at roughly 70 percent this summer.
The rebuke did not come only from the administration.
Within the House, the conservative Freedom Caucus condemned Salazar’s ad, and the Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren called on Trump to strip his endorsement, according to CiberCuba, which first reported the DHS response. That backlash underscores Salazar’s bind: a Trump-endorsed incumbent publicly distancing herself from the president’s signature issue in the final weeks before the election.
Salazar represents Florida’s 27th Congressional District, a heavily Latino, Miami-Dade seat that Trump carried by more than 14 points in 2024, according to calculations by The Downballot, and which the nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates as leaning Republican. The district is not considered a core battleground, but her Democratic opponent, Eliott Rodríguez, has circulated internal polling showing the race is closer than its history suggests and has argued that Salazar has failed to stand up to the president. Trump endorsed her in February; she has never fully embraced his immigration agenda in return, and is a lead sponsor of the bipartisan Dignity Act, which would offer some long-resident immigrants without criminal records a path to legal status — a bill its Republican critics call amnesty and Salazar insists is not.
Her decision to confront the president on camera reflects a broader unease rippling through the Republican Party ahead of the November midterms.
Party strategists worry that anxieties over the economy and the scale of the deportation campaign could erase the gains Republicans made with Hispanic voters two years ago. Trump’s strong immigration message helped carry him to the White House in 2024, but his standing on the issue fell sharply after a botched enforcement surge into Minneapolis last winter left two American protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, dead at the hands of federal agents.
Even so, the shift among Trump’s own supporters has been more gradual than his critics might expect. In a Politico poll in August, only about a quarter of the president’s 2024 voters said his deportation drive had been too aggressive — a figure roughly unchanged from surveys in January and April. That leaves Salazar staking out a position ahead of much of the Republican base, betting that in a district like hers, enforcement politics have already turned.
Salazar is not the only Miami Republican navigating that squeeze. She, along with Reps. Mario Díaz-Balart and Carlos Giménez, have faced criticism at home over the administration’s move to strip legal protections from hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians and other migrants — pressure that has included a Miami-area billboard branding the lawmakers “traitors,” CBS Miami reported. Her ad tries to thread that needle: loyalty to the party paired with distance from its harshest immigration tactics.
For South Florida’s Haitian and Caribbean communities, the stakes are immediate. Miami-Dade is home to a large Haitian population directly affected by the end of Temporary Protected Status and the sharp rise in deportations to Haiti, and Salazar’s district sits at the center of that reality. Whether her appeal marks a genuine turn among elected Republicans or a single candidate reading her own electorate remains to be seen — but the administration’s swift, unyielding reply made clear it has no intention of changing course.
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Source: Politico
