A Republican state lawmaker in Florida who founded Latinas for Trump condemned the administration’s sweeping immigration arrests across the state despite the president’s months-long campaign that promised the largest “mass deportation operation” in American history.
“This is not what we voted for,” state Sen. Ileana Garcia said in a statement Saturday. “I have always supported Trump, through thick and thin. However, this is unacceptable and inhumane.”
She said her Cuban-refugee parents “are now just as American, if not more so, than Stephen Miller,” among the architects of Trump’s anti-immigration agenda demanding 3,000 daily immigration arrests.
“I understand the importance of deporting criminal aliens, but what we are witnessing are arbitrary measures to hunt down people who are complying with their immigration hearings — in many cases, with credible fear of persecution claims — all driven by a Miller-like desire to satisfy a self-fabricated deportation goal,” she wrote.
“This undermines the sense of fairness and justice that the American people value,” Garcia added.
Her remarks follow arrests across the country targeting immigrants at work sites and inside courthouses, sparking widespread outrage and protests accusing the administration of targeting immigrants who were following the law.
But her statements — coming from the Miami-area lawmaker with a years-long history with the president — seemingly ignore Trump’s countless campaign promises of a “mass deportation operation” and years of warnings from immigrant advocates who cautioned against these exact scenarios playing out across the country.
Garcia has supported Trump since his first campaign in 2016 and created Latinas for Trump to rally Hispanic women behind the president.
She also served as a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term.
Throughout his 2024 campaign, Trump promised to combat what he called an “invasion” of undocumented immigrants who are “poisoning the blood of our country,” relying on stories of violent crime to support a brutal crackdown that could impact millions of families.
Trump repeatedly promised to arrest, detain and deport people living in the country without legal permission as part of his “day one” agenda. He first pledged to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” nearly two years ago.
“Lawless mobs of unscreened unvetted illegal alien migrants are stampeding across our border by the millions and millions, including hordes of criminals, terrorists, human traffickers, child smugglers, gang members and inmates emptied out of their prisons and insane asylums and mental institutions,” Trump said in Iowa in September 2023.
“It’s actually worse than that,” he added. “This is an invasion and I’m one candidate who from day one knows exactly how to stop it.”
In office, the president rescinded immigration enforcement policy limiting arrests in sensitive locations like courthouses, workplaces, schools, hospitals and places of worship, or at events like funerals, weddings and public demonstrations.
Homeland Security officials have also revoked humanitarian protections for roughly 1 million people with temporary legal status — including thousands of people from Venezuela and Cuba, which have large populations in Florida, whose support for the president helped deliver him the state in 2024 elections.
Now, thousands of people in those communities have lost protected status, making them vulnerable to immediate removal from the United States.
In a recent survey of hundreds of Florida Venezuelans, Florida International University’s Latino Public Opinion Forum found roughly 80 percent of respondents — half of whom are U.S. citizen voters — said the administration’s rescission of temporary protected status for Venezuelans is unjust.
Public criticism from one of Trump’s longtime supporters arrived one day after another Republican lawmaker in Florida spoke out against the administration’s immigration enforcement.
Republican state Rep. Elvira Salazar said people navigating the nation’s byzantine immigration system — including their pending asylum claims or green card petitions — deserve to “go through the legal process.”
The Cuban-American state lawmaker said she is “heartbroken” about the “uncertainty” gripping her district.
Courthouse arrests and the termination of temporary protected status for tens of thousands of immigrants “all jeopardize our duty to due process that every democracy must guarantee,” Salazar said.
After taking office, the president issued an executive order that greenlights fast-track deportation proceedings for immigrants who cannot prove that they have continuously lived in the United States for more than two years.
That “expedited removal” process — historically used at the U.S.-Mexico border — is now being expanded across the country, with masked federal agents standing outside courtrooms to arrest immigrants moments after their immigration cases are dismissed.
The American Immigration Lawyers Association says courthouse arrests are a “flagrant betrayal of basic fairness and due process” for people who are simply following the rules.
“Immigration courts are being weaponized, judges are coordinating with ICE to dismiss cases and immediately funnel individuals into the fast-track deportation pipeline known as expedited removal,” the group said in a statement. “These are not fugitives. They are individuals, many who are seeking protection from torture in their countries, complying with the law.”
