Donald Trump returned to the White House with a significant increase in support among Latino voters. In 2024, 48% of Latino voters backed Trump, compared with 36% in 2020 and 28% in 2016, according to Pew Research Center’s analysis of validated voters.
But that political alliance is beginning to show cracks.
In April 2026, 66% of Latinos who had voted for Trump in 2024 approved of his performance as president. That was still a majority, but it represented a 27-point drop from the early months of his second term.
Immigration is one of the areas where that relationship has become particularly complicated.
The deportations Trump promised during his campaign are not simply a policy affecting people who oppose him. In several documented cases, they have reached immigrants who supported Trump, voted for him or, at the very least, shared some of his views on immigration enforcement.
The stories are different. They do not prove, by themselves, that Latino voters are abandoning Trump. But together they illustrate a contradiction that could become increasingly relevant as the country heads toward the midterms.
Roberto Mosquera: A Trump Supporter Deported to Africa
Roberto Mosquera del Peral, a Cuban immigrant, was deported from the United States to Eswatini in July 2025.
He was one of five men sent to the small African country as part of the Trump administration’s program to deport certain immigrants to third countries, meaning countries that were not necessarily their countries of origin. Mosquera was subsequently held in a maximum-security prison in Eswatini. His attorney said he had spent months there without charges and without adequate access to legal representation.
The case took on a particular political dimension because Mosquera had been publicly identified as a strong Trump supporter.
There is an important distinction, however. U.S. authorities did not say Mosquera was deported because of his political support for Trump. The administration defended the deportations as part of its immigration enforcement policy and pointed to criminal records among those sent to third countries.
The contradiction is elsewhere: a man who supported the president ended up on the other side of the world because of an immigration policy implemented by his administration.
Joe Ceballos: He Voted for Trump. Now He Faces Deportation
José “Joe” Ceballos was born in Mexico and came to the United States at age four. He became a permanent resident and a prominent figure in Coldwater, Kansas, where he served twice as mayor.
Ceballos acknowledged that he had voted in U.S. elections despite not being a citizen. In 2024, he voted for Trump.
According to his attorney, Ceballos believed that permanent residents were allowed to vote. During his 2025 citizenship process, he acknowledged participating in previous elections. In 2026, he reached a court agreement involving an illegal voting charge.
In May, Ceballos appeared for an ICE appointment and was taken into custody. He now faces immigration proceedings that could ultimately lead to his deportation to Mexico.
His case carries another political irony: the immigrant who voted for Trump now faces the immigration consequences of an administration that has made immigration enforcement and citizenship central elements of its agenda.
Ceballos has not publicly disavowed his vote for Trump.
Jensy Machado: He Supported Trump and Ended Up in ICE Handcuffs
Jensy Machado, a Salvadoran-born naturalized U.S. citizen in Virginia, voted for Trump in 2024.
In March 2025, he was on his way to work in Manassas when ICE agents stopped the vehicle in which he was traveling. The agents were looking for another person who had a deportation order and, according to Machado, had connected that person to his address.
Machado told the agents he was a U.S. citizen and offered to show his identification. He was nevertheless handcuffed and temporarily detained. He was eventually released after authorities verified his identity.
Machado later said the experience made him reconsider his support for Trump.
He had voted for the president because he believed the immigration crackdown would primarily target people who had committed crimes. What happened to him, he said, forced him to reconsider that decision.
Machado was not deported. He was a U.S. citizen and was released.
But his story represents another dimension of the tension: for some Latinos who supported Trump, immigration enforcement stopped being an abstract political debate and became a personal experience.
Roberto Beristain: The Case That Foreshadowed the Contradiction
The story has a precedent from Trump’s first term.
Roberto Beristain was a Mexican immigrant who had lived in Indiana for nearly two decades. He had four U.S.-born children and owned a restaurant.
Beristain had a deportation order dating back to 2000, after he was detained following a crossing from Canada. For years, he remained in the United States under immigration supervision.
In 2017, during Trump’s first term, he was detained during one of his immigration check-ins and eventually deported to Mexico.
The political contradiction was inside his own family.
His wife, Helen Beristain, had voted for Trump and supported his immigration policies. After her husband was deported, however, she began questioning the consequences of the policies she had supported.
CBS also documented how relatives and friends of the Beristains, several of them Trump voters, began reconsidering their support after the deportation.
An Alliance Heading Into the Midterms Under Pressure
These cases do not establish that Latino voters who supported Trump are abandoning him. Nor can a potential decline in his support be attributed solely to deportations.
But the numbers show that approval among his own Latino voters has fallen.
According to Pew, 93% of Latino voters who supported Trump approved of his performance in February 2025. By April 2026, that figure had fallen to 66%. Among Trump voters who were not Latino, approval fell from 95% to 79% over the same period.
The difference matters because Trump entered his second term after substantially expanding his support among Latino voters.
Now, some of those voters are seeing the consequences of the immigration policies that helped bring Trump back to the White House.
For Roberto Mosquera, that consequence meant ending up in a maximum-security prison in Africa.
For Joe Ceballos, it means facing an immigration case that could end with his deportation to Mexico.
For Jensy Machado, it meant being handcuffed by ICE agents despite being a U.S. citizen.
And for the family of Roberto Beristain, it meant watching a vote for Trump collide directly with the consequences of his immigration policies.
They are individual stories. The midterms will show whether they also become an electoral story.
