GOP Senators and Candidates Break With Trump Over ICE Raids as Midterm Nerves Spread

Since Rep. Thomas Massie's primary loss earlier this year to Trump-backed challenger Ed Gallrein, the split between the president and vulnerable Republicans has widened. The newest flashpoint: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency most of these same politicians defended without hesitation a year ago.

The clearest case is Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas. After ICE launched an enforcement operation targeting southwestern Kansas towns with large meatpacking-industry workforces, local officials complained about the lack of coordination, and schools and businesses scrambled to deal with the fallout, according to CNN. Marshall posted on X that "when ICE operates in Kansas, it needs to coordinate with our local law enforcement," adding that he'd been in touch with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

That's a sharp turn for Marshall. Days after federal agents killed Renee Good in Minneapolis in January, Marshall told CNN's Jake Tapper that "sometimes there's collateral damage" and that "we could be just as easily talking about the death of ICE agents." He praised ICE again on Fox Business Network days later and authored an op-ed in March defending its apprehension tactics, per CNN's reporting. His Kansas Senate colleague, Jerry Moran, had raised concerns about the Good killing at the time; Marshall did not.

In Maine, former Gov. Paul LePage, now a congressional candidate, is objecting to what he calls the wrongful deportation of a family member. LePage has a long history of hardline immigration rhetoric, including calling asylum-seekers liabilities who "bring disease and drain public resources." After an ICE agent shot and killed a man in Biddeford, Maine, in July, LePage initially defended law enforcement, saying officers are "often in situations where they have to make split-second decisions," and accused critics of trying to "politicize" the incident, according to CNN and KESQ News. He's since changed his tone.

In Florida, Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar released a general-election ad citing data that 50% of the roughly 50,000 people ICE detained in July had no criminal record, warning that Trump's enforcement approach risks alienating the Hispanic voters who helped him win the state in 2024, according to reporting aggregated by Ground News. Barry University political science professor Sean Foreman called the move notable, saying Salazar is targeting independent and moderate voters upset by the administration ending Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans and Haitians.

Trump's response, as reported by Ground News, was not to attack Salazar. He said Friday he still supports her reelection despite disagreeing with her criticism. Her Democratic opponent, former CBS Miami anchor Eliott Rodriguez, dismissed the ad as contradictory given her voting record.

Byron Donalds, running for Florida governor, has quietly scrubbed major Trump references from his campaign website, and Democrats now lead Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, according to reporting cited in coverage of Rep. Thomas Massie's CNN appearance with Kaitlan Collins. Massie, who is not seeking reelection after his primary loss, predicted a GOP "shellacking" in November and compared the moment to 2006, when George W. Bush fired Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld the day after Republicans lost badly in the midterms. Massie said he wants to see whether Trump makes a comparable move: "We'll see if he does something like that and other measures to show that he got the message." Massie has his own grievance against Trump after losing his seat to a Trump-endorsed opponent, which gives him reason to want the president embarrassed.

Republicans have a real counterargument, and it deserves a fair hearing. RNC Chair Joe Gruters told Fox News the midterms are a choice between Trump's "American dream" agenda and Democrats' "socialist" vision, and Fox's own reporting lists six factors, from Democratic brand problems to a GOP financial edge on advertising, that could help Republicans defy the historical pattern of the president's party losing seats. Trump has argued on social media that "gas prices were much higher under Biden than under 'TRUMP,' so were almost all other prices." That's a fair point of contrast, even as AAA data cited by Fox shows gas near $4.50 a gallon and diesel above $6.50 currently, driven partly by the Iran conflict and attacks on Russian refineries. Recent Reuters/Ipsos and NBC News polling found the two parties roughly tied on the broader economy, though Fox's own polling shows Democrats with a wide edge specifically on inflation.

Democrats, meanwhile, are not unified either. The Los Angeles Times reports that Democratic National Committee members approved dueling messages last month, one calling to abolish ICE and one to reform it, with candidates like Michigan's Abdul El-Sayed pushing the abolition line and California's Randy Villegas favoring reform plus prosecuting ICE agents who break the law. Villegas is challenging Rep. David Valadao, who voted to triple ICE's budget and has said little publicly about raids in his Central Valley district, according to the Times.

What happens next is straightforward to track: does ICE change how it coordinates with local law enforcement in places like southwestern Kansas before November 3, and does Trump respond to a bad midterm result the way Massie predicts, or dig in. Neither has an answer yet.