Rio Grande Valley, Texas – Leaning over plates of tamales, pan dulce, and sugar skulls, community organisers and local residents in the border city of Brownsville remembered the dead. This year’s Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, vigil honoured victims of state violence, including those killed in immigration enforcement and detention. Just days before the US midterm election on November 3, the event reverberated in a region long subject to Washington, DC’s shifting political winds.
Garcia’s aunt, a well-known member of the community in the nearby border town of Progreso, was deported just weeks ago, after being called to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) hearing. There she learned she had missed a court date related to her immigration status. In the stress of the moment, she signed a voluntary deportation form.
That complexity has only increased in recent years as border policy and immigration enforcement have become increasingly partisan, leading, reformers say, to dramatic policy swings that prevent more sustainable solutions. It is not difficult to find Latino – or Tejano, the local term for Texans of Latino descent – residents wary of the years preceding Trump’s return to office. After the restrictive policies of Trump’s first term, border crossings increased dramatically under US President Joe Biden, fuelled in part by the end of a COVID-era policy that made asylum seekers wait for their cases to be processed in Mexico.
Some felt the border region was left to deal with the fallout from the influx. That discontent has been credited, in part, with Trump’s success in the once-reliably Democratic region in the 2024 presidential election. In Hidalgo County, home to the city of McAllen, Trump won 51 percent of the vote in 2024, a three-point margin over Kamala Harris.
In 2020, Biden beat Trump in the county by 17 percentage points. In neighbouring Cameron County, Trump won by about five percentage points in 2024, despite a 13-point loss in 2020. Voter Jose Arizpe, a 40-year-old resident of Brownsville, assessed the two years since Trump took office as a “positive change”, with fewer asylum seekers waiting in the US for their cases to be processed.
Upon taking office, Trump declared a state of emergency at the border, staunching asylum claims in what rights groups say runs counter to US law. The US Supreme Court has since ruled that US border agents can physically block asylum seekers from reaching US soil to claim asylum. And they don’t want to do it, right?” On border policy, “at first, I supported Trump,” said Martin Torres, a 55-year-old who cast his ballot for Democrats at a public library in Brownsville as part of the state’s early voting.
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