GOP Rep. Maria Salazar Breaks With Trump in Ad, Says ICE Sweeps Have Gone Too Far in Miami

Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, a Miami Republican whom President Trump endorsed in February, released a campaign ad this week telling him directly that his immigration crackdown has gone too far. "The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today," she says in the ad, according to The Hill. She compared Trump's current approach to Lincoln on slavery and Reagan on communism, and insisted she's not pushing amnesty, just a path to "a dignified life."

Salazar is a sitting Republican in a Trump-endorsed seat, running for reelection against Democrat Eliott Rodriguez in Florida's 27th District. Decision Desk HQ, The Hill's election forecasting partner, already downgraded her race from "solidly Republican" to "likely Republican" before this ad even dropped.

Miami-Dade is not an abstraction here

Axios reports Miami-Dade County is 62% Hispanic among its 1.3 million registered voters, and Hispanics make up 76% of registered Republicans there. Trump carried the county in 2020 and 2024 on the strength of Latino turnout, especially Cuban Americans. Axios also notes the discomfort isn't confined to Salazar. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, whose district runs from Doral, nicknamed "Doralzuela" for its large Venezuelan population, to Naples, has been part of behind-the-scenes talks with the administration too. Not every prominent Cuban American Republican agrees, though. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has stayed publicly supportive of the administration's enforcement policies, per Axios, despite the local backlash.

The case that pushed Salazar public

Salazar's break followed the ICE detention of Luis Galeano, a Venezuelan exile journalist in Miami whose asylum application has been pending seven years, according to The Hill. Venezuela's government stripped his citizenship over his reporting critical of the regime. Salazar said in a statement that the administration should "enforce the law and deport dangerous individuals, but do not treat political exiles like criminals." Axios reports her office spent days in discussions with the administration and Diaz-Balart's office over the case before the ad went up.

A similar dynamic played out in South Texas. KRGV reported that Sister Leticia "Letty" Ugboaja, a 56-year-old Nigerian-born nun, was detained by ICE while walking to Mass in McAllen on a Sunday and released the same day after members of Congress intervened. Immigration authorities have not said why she was detained. The League of United Latin American Citizens started a petition demanding oversight, with CEO Juan Proaño saying, "if they can detain Sister Letty on her way to church, they can literally stop and detain anyone."

The other side of the enforcement record

None of this means the crackdown has only swept up sympathetic cases. Breitbart's coverage catalogs actual criminal enforcement actions, including the arrest of a previously deported sex offender in Philadelphia and the deportation of gang members convicted of murder, attempted murder and statutory rape. That's the core of what Trump campaigned on, targeting undocumented criminals, and it's the argument the administration and its allies make when defending the pace of operations. The tension in Miami and South Texas isn't over whether criminals should be deported. It's over cases like Galeano's and Sister Letty's, where the person detained had no criminal record and, in Galeano's case, a pending legal claim to be in the country.

Ripple effects beyond Florida

The friction is reshaping civic life elsewhere too. The Texas Tribune reports that La Unión del Pueblo Entero, a South Texas civil rights group, saw membership convention attendance nearly double from 99 people in 2024 to 197 this year, driven largely by members under 45 who cited immigration enforcement and the group's "Valle Fuerte, Valle Libre" know-your-rights campaign as their reason for joining. And PBS NewsHour, marking Constitution Day on September 17, reported that the naturalization process itself has grown more demanding under the administration's added vetting requirements, even as new citizens took their oath in an Alexandria, Virginia, courthouse the same day.

What's unresolved

Galeano's asylum case status has not been publicly clarified. ICE has not explained why Sister Letty was detained or released. LULAC says it plans to present its petition to elected officials, and Salazar's campaign says more ads breaking with the administration's messaging are coming ahead of November. Whether her Trump-endorsed colleagues follow her lead, or whether the White House responds to the pressure from its own Miami-Dade base, remains an open question heading into the midterms.