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Like millions of people living in the United States, Abigail Solorzano’s parents came to the country illegally.
Crossing the southern border after a long journey from Nicaragua more than three decades ago, they surrendered to the authorities, claimed asylum and raised their daughter in their new home in the Miami suburbs.
Now, Abigail is one of a growing number of Latinos who think people like her parents should be turned away.
“You don’t know their background,” she says, of the millions of illegal migrants who have arrived in the US under the Biden administration. “We don’t know what they’re doing. It’s scary.”
“My parents did come illegally. But they went through the process when they were here. They got caught, [and] they went through the proper steps to become legalised.”
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The Telegraph met Abigail at the Alpha and Omega megachurch in Florida – a vast complex more similar to a concert venue than a traditional place of worship, where thousands of Latinos meet each Sunday. Like her, most of them are supporting Donald Trump.
Polls show that Kamala Harris will be lucky to win half of the Latino population at this election, a fall from the 66 per cent support Joe Biden picked up in 2020.
Trump has experienced an unprecedented surge among voters who were previously considered safely Blue. In Arizona and Nevada, two of the key battlegrounds, the rightward shift in Latino opinion could be enough to win him the White House.
Trump’s core message on illegal migration has had surprising resonance with voters whose families themselves crossed the southern border and made the US their home.
Alberto Delgado, the pastor at Alpha and Omega, arrived penniless from Cuba aged 15 and has since built a multi-million dollar Christian empire that broadcasts his sermons across Florida and South America each week.
During Trump’s 2016 campaign, he was appointed as an adviser to the president on Christian and Hispanic issues, and attended monthly summits at the White House during his first term. A portrait of the two men hangs in a corridor at the back of the church.
“The country cannot absorb this amount of people at once,” he says. “There are legal manners of arriving. And even though we, as Christians, must help those that are already here, something has to be done because of the high level of criminality.
“The gangs, the delinquency…where are we going to put all the people? That’s why we lean towards Trump.”
Mr Delgado is something of a Latino celebrity, reaching cult status among his hundreds of thousands of fans. He appears for our interview in a sharp grey suit and loafers, surrounded by a coterie of advisers and consultants.
“We’re in a time in this country that is really leaning to the Left, extremely,” he says. “As you lean to the Left, you go away from God’s heart more.”
Trump, he says, is a man of Christian values, and his multiple legal issues are nothing more than the condition of sinfulness that all humans share. Moreover, Trump is an ally to the Latino community.
For Abigail, whose own parents would have been turned away or deported under Trump’s border plan, there is no tension between her Nicaraguan heritage and her Republican instincts.
“The current government is offering them free incentives, just like that,” she says, recalling her parents’ struggle after arriving in the US.
“They had to work their butts off to get to where they are. [The Biden administration] is freely giving [migrants] things that hard-working Americans worked hard to be able to have. I don’t think people should be able to come in that way.”
Her friend Nazareth Lacayo, whose grandparents came to the US from South America in 1973, agrees.
“I’m going to vote for Donald Trump,” she says. “I believe in his values…and I think he is a very good representation of the Christian community.”
Trump’s 2016 campaign centred on illegal migration and his promise to build a wall on the southern border, to block the route of millions of economic migrants and asylum seekers looking for a better life in the US.
Since then, migration has become the second most important issue to voters, beaten only by the economy.
An overwhelming majority of voters say they trust Trump more on border security than Ms Harris, who was given partial responsibility for border issues by Mr Biden and has since been unable to shake off accusations she secretly hopes to run an open border and hand greater welfare benefits to migrants.
On the campaign trail, arguments about migration have ranged from the arcane to the ridiculous.
Policy experts say illegal migration is a complex problem, fuelled by the underfunding of border security, long processing times for asylum seekers, and criminal gangs who smuggle hopeful immigrants across South America to the Mexican border.
Many illegal migrants who arrive on the border surrender immediately to the authorities and announce they intend to claim asylum. These claims can take years to process, allowing them to live in the US while waiting for a ruling.
Others are trafficked across the border by clandestine means, travelling to a nearby town to seek work. Many who are caught by Border Patrol are immediately released because the state has no facility to house or deport them, and the courts have a backlog of cases that has more than doubled in the last four years.
Some who are caught in border states are instead bused across the US to seek shelter in northern, Democrat-controlled cities like New York, Washington and Chicago.
Under pressure to fix the issue before the election, Mr Biden proposed a package of reforms in February that Democratic officials say would have resolved many of the problems and brought down the record number of crossings.
A Border Patrol center in Lukeville, Arizona as migrants continue to head to the USA – John Moore/Getty Images
But the legislation was blocked by Republican congressmen, in what Ms Harris claims was a cynical move to sustain the border issues until this year’s election.
Mr Biden has since taken more limited steps to curb the numbers by executive order, capping the number of migrants who can enter the US and claim asylum when the border becomes “overwhelmed”.
Polling data show Latino voters are among the most likely to be concerned about illegal migration, especially where they believe it has an impact on their pocketbooks.
In Arizona, one of the seven key battlegrounds of this race, arguments about migration ring true for white, black and Latino voters alike who are concerned about the number of people crossing into their state from Mexico.
Many voters are scathing of the border plan proposed by Ms Harris, who until recently had made just one visit to the southern border as vice-president. As a senator in California, she supported greater rights for illegal migrants.
“She’s done nothing,” says Debbie Curtis, a Trump precinct committeeman, outside a Vance event in Phoenix. “She hasn’t been here. She can yap, yap yap all she wants, but she didn’t actually do it.”
“She’s always been for open borders,” adds another Trump supporter, wearing a shirt emblazoned with images of the Statue of Liberty and the US Constitution. “And now, just in the last six weeks or so, she’s for closed borders. So you can’t really believe what she says.”
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That argument is a familiar refrain among Republicans. Trump has accused Ms Harris of deliberately ignoring the issues with illegal migration for ideological reasons, and has made a raft of campaign promises to fix the border.
He claims the migrants he calls “the enemy within” are responsible for many of America’s current problems, including high inflation and crime.
The Trump campaign has promised to deport one million illegal migrants if he wins the election, and enforce the border with the US military. Under his plans, some migrants will be rounded up by the National Guard and flown out of the country.
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Last month, Trump declared that Haitian migrants in a small city in Ohio were eating residents’ pets. “In Springfield, they are eating the dogs,” he said. “The people that came in, they are eating the cats.”
JD Vance, his running mate, later acknowledged that the claim was false, but argued it was an effective way to draw voters’ attention to migration.
Behind the campaign rhetoric, the issues at the border are more prosaic.
The unprecedented number of asylum claims and economic migrant deportations in the last 10 years has ballooned the multi-billion dollar immigration law industry.
Mayra Joli, a Dominican-born attorney in Florida, has built her career on defending those facing detention and removal from the US after crossing the border illegally.
She too will vote for Trump, believing that more must be done to stop her clients reaching the US.
“When illegal immigrants are coming through the border, it’s like the red carpet is running out for them,” says Ms Joli, who reveals she occasionally spends time with the Trump family at Mar-a-Lago.
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She has called for the restoration of the “Title 42” ban on asylum seekers entering the US, which was imposed by Trump at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in the name of public health.
“The solution to this issue is to put a moratorium on asylum claims,” she says. “That will really stagnate this uncontrollable list of people coming to the borders and then claiming asylum. It’s like a passport: ‘Don’t touch me, I’m claiming asylum’.”
She argues there is nothing contradictory about her work as an attorney for illegal migrants and her political opposition to their entry into the US.
“The doctor doesn’t help people get an overdose, but after they get the overdose, even if that doctor is not in support of people doing drugs, that doctor will help them,” she says. “I am the doctor of immigration.”
Nevertheless, for a lawyer who petitions the government for migrants to remain in the US, she has surprisingly strong views about border security. In 2021, she ran for election to be Miami’s mayor, but was disqualified for living outside of the city’s limits.
Like many Americans who were not born in the country, she now considers it her duty to protect it from outsiders.
“I have to protect the soil where I’m living,” she says. “I cannot just destroy it, as if it was just a frat party and nobody cares about the house. This is not an Airbnb. This is a home.”
Central concern
The asylum system, while rarely discussed directly by Trump or Ms Harris on the campaign trail, is a central concern of policymakers and law enforcement officials working on border security.
The Title 42 ban was ended by Mr Biden last May, when the final emergency regulations relating to the pandemic were repealed.
Since 2021, when he took office, the number of asylum claims entered into US courts each year has more than quadrupled, with more migrants than ever before arriving from outside South America.
Many of the most recent arrivals are from China, and have been trafficked through Central America to the border by criminal gangs. The share of families as a proportion of total migrants has increased sharply, creating a worsening dilemma for authorities presented with young children at the border.
David Hathaway, the sheriff of Santa Cruz County, Arizona, spends much of his time in Nogales, a city that straddles the Mexican border and provides a point of entry for migrants seeking either asylum or work.
He rejects claims that migrants cause more crime, pointing to lower rates of criminality in his county than the rest of the state.
Instead, he says the issue is the bureaucracy that greets new arrivals, who are mostly looking for work.
“This asylum program is a disaster,” he says. “What we need is a guest worker program.”
“Donald Trump says all Mexicans coming in here are rapists, murderers, drug dealers and criminals. People kind of like that sensational rhetoric, but they don’t know what it’s really like because they haven’t lived here.”
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Mr Hathaway, who was elected as a Democrat in an area with a majority-Hispanic population, believes the Biden administration has not done enough to understand the border.
“We never got a visit here from any member of the Biden administration, to come and actually study what needs to be done – to actually talk to us,” he says.
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Gesturing to the Trump-era border wall behind him, he adds: “There are people that come for photo ops.
“There have been individual politicians from Washington that come and stand next to that fence, have their picture taken, and then they go back on social media and they say, ‘been there, done that’.
“During the Biden administration [there has been] no attempt to actually come here and see what was needed on the border.”
With less than two weeks to go until voters head to the polls, it is clear that voters have irreconcilable differences on the border and the people crossing it.
Trump’s unassailable lead on border security is driven by his ability to turn a complex debate about the policy of asylum and enforcement into a thread that runs through his whole campaign.
It has allowed him to turn many Latino voters, who are traditionally hostile to his party, into allies. His claims of migrants eating cats and dogs eclipsed any other debate on the campaign trail in the crucial final weeks before early voting began.
For Trump, the border is not only about crossings, but about crime, justice, the economy, defence and — above all — patriotism.
Ms Harris’s failure to grip the issue, either in office or during her short campaign, is already seen in Democrat circles as a disaster. It may yet cost her the election.
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Publish date : 2024-10-25 02:00:00
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