Florida Republican Maria Elvira Salazar criticizes Trump over immigration enforcement in ad

Florida lawmaker María Elvira Salazar rebukes president in TV ad for heavy-handed immigration policies

Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) accused President Trump of going “too far” with federal immigration enforcement operations in a campaign advertisement released Thursday. “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today,” said Salazar, who's running for reelection in November, in the new clip. “You can be for immigration...

A Republican congresswoman running for reelection in Florida’s 27th congressional district has come out with an ad criticizing President Trump. “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, whose district voted for Trump by 15 percentage points in 2024, said in the ad. She cited statistics pointing out that 50 percent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 50,000 detainees in July had no criminal record. A Message to President Trump on Immigration | María Elvira Salazar pic.twitter.com/memcf4jags— María Elvira Salazar 🇺🇸 (@MaElviraSalazar) September 17, 2026“Be careful what your advisers are telling you about immigration policy. The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today,” Elvira Salazar said. “You can be for immigration what Lincoln was for slavery and Reagan was for communism.” That point makes no sense, as slavery ended with Lincoln and Reagan presided while the Soviet Union fell, and Elvira Salazar is not proposing an end to immigration. But the Cuban-American representative’s main point with the ad appears to be saving face with her Hispanic constituency. The district she represents is 54.2 percent foreign-born and more than 70 percent Hispanic, many of whom are of Cuban descent like her.If a member of Congress in a solidly Republican district is afraid of being associated with Trump, that doesn’t bode well for November’s midterms. Trump and Republicans keep polling lower and lower, and ICE’s violent mass deportation tactics, paid for by billions of dollars in government funding, are among the many reasons why.Elvira Salazar herself voted for that funding, and now she’s trying to run away from it. Meanwhile, ICE arrests of Cuban nationals have gone up by a staggering 463 percent since December 2024. One political ad might not be enough for her to survive at the polls in November.