Labrador was among the 68% of Cuban Americans in Florida who voted for Donald Trump two years ago, a decision he roundly regrets today.
Few could accuse Trump of hiding his plans on immigration. On the campaign trail in 2024, he touted his policy of mass deportations of undocumented migrants.
“On Day One, I will launch the largest deportation programme in American history”, he said repeatedly at rallies, including in Florida.
Labrador – and many thousands of disillusioned Latino voters like him – thought the administration would only deport people with criminal records.
“I think we got blindsided by the administration,” he argues.
“Personally, I voted for Trump because I wanted to get criminals out of the country,” he says, alleging that “communists came in from Cuba under Biden.”
“We wanted to have a safe America. We never thought that he was going to go after everybody.”
“This isn’t what I voted for,” he insists.
Labrador is far from the only Cuban American in Florida to experience buyer’s remorse over President Trump.
Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar, who represents Florida’s 27th Congressional district, recently released a video filmed outside the White House in which she distanced herself from his deportation policy saying it had gone “too far”.
“The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today,” she said, addressing President Trump.
Salazar is locked in a tight race against another Cuban American, the Democratic Party’s candidate, Eliott Rodríguez. Her close association with Trump on immigration could potentially cost Salazar her congressional seat.
Florida remains a Trump stronghold. At a recent gathering of Cuban American entrepreneurs in Miami, the atmosphere remained staunchly pro-Trump. “Miami loves Trump, Cuban Americans love Trump,” says real estate businessman, Juan Omar Sixto, motioning at the other guests behind him.
“They agree with Trump that anyone who crossed the border illegally should be out,” he says, despite acknowledging he illegally entered the US himself six decades earlier.
A poll released on Thursday, external by Florida International University found that not all South Florida Cubans agree – 76% said they disapprove of the Trump administration’s deportations of Cubans with no criminal record. But their support for the Republican Party remains steadfast, with 68% saying they plan to vote Republican in November.
In other parts of the country, support amongst Latinos is declining.
In the last election, Trump beat Kamala Harris by 56.1% to 43% – the biggest margin of victory for a candidate in the state since 1988 – in part because of the support of Latino communities. But a recent NBC News/Telemundo poll of 8,000 registered Latino voters showed nearly 60% favour seeing Congress come under Democratic Party control to just 35% wanting a Republican victory.
The high cost of living is a big factor for people’s discontent, as residents feel supermarket and petrol prices are impossibly high for working families.
But for many Hispanics, it’s also partly because of stories like Heydi Sanchez’s.
Sanchez left Cuba in 2019 as the island spiralled into economic collapse and illegally crossed the border from Mexico into the US. After nine months in a detention centre, she was released under an i-220B Order of Supervision which grants the right to remain in the US but carries the constant threat of deportation.
