Texas voters who helped give President Donald Trump a record share of the Latino vote in 2024 now say they want a secure border and a way for many undocumented immigrants to stay in the country.
A Marist poll released this week found 61 percent of likely Texas voters say immigrants living in the U.S. without legal permission should have a way to stay legally if they meet certain requirements. Thirty-five percent say they should be required to leave. The majority includes 68 percent of independents and about a third of Republicans.
The poll follows more than a year of aggressive immigration enforcement in a state that holds more people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention than any other. It also lands as Democrats are competitive in the races for U.S. Senate and governor, with early voting set to begin Monday.
Matt Angle, a Democratic strategist and director of the Lone Star Project, told Newsweek the crackdown has changed how many Texans see the issue.
"I don't think there's any question that it's softened people's attitudes," Angle said. "They really did buy Trump's lie that they would only go after the worst of the worst. And of course, that's not what happened at all."
The polling history is messier. Texans have backed some form of legal status for years, and Republicans still beat Democrats with voters on border security.
"Voters' views aren't softening, just shifting," Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, told Newsweek. "Supporting a secure border does not necessarily mean supporting mass deportations."
Voters Sour on ICE Tactics
A ReconMR poll of 617 likely voters, conducted October 5-8, found 56 percent of Texans say the tactics used by ICE have gone too far. Twenty-nine percent say they have been about right, and 11 percent say they have not gone far enough.
Fifty-four percent oppose the way ICE agents are working to arrest people. The agency's favorability rating stands at 43 percent favorable and 53 percent unfavorable, slipping from 45-50 in June.
Independents drove the result. Sixty-nine percent of them said ICE had gone too far, against 16 percent of Republicans, most of whom called the tactics about right.
ICE arrests in Texas nearly doubled between February 2025 and February 2026, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis of federal data. About a third of those arrested had criminal convictions. The state held 18,734 people in ICE detention as of February, according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
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Three detainees died within weeks of one another at Camp East Montana, the tent facility at Fort Bliss in El Paso. In July, an ICE officer fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Houston construction worker who federal officials acknowledged was not the target of the operation.
"You've got parents being separated from kids and you've got kids being detained in Texas," Angle said. "And that's, I think, really horrified people in a way that they didn't anticipate."
Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican strategist in Texas, separates the border from what happens in the interior. Texas voters, independents and Hispanics included, "have long supported border security," he told Newsweek. "They support law enforcement. They support putting the troops on the ground to deter crime and human trafficking."
"Some of that aggressiveness has caused some political problems for Republicans and for the president, and that is clearly reflected in the data that we see," Steinhauser said. The damage shows up among Hispanics, independent white voters and college-educated women, he said, "exactly the types of voters that can swing an election to the Republicans or the Democrats."
Texans still give Trump and the GOP credit at the border. A University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll released this month found 48 percent approve of his handling of border security and 40 percent disapprove. In the same survey, voters trusted Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton over his Democratic rival James Talarico on immigration and border security by 5 points, and Governor Greg Abbott over his challenger Gina Hinojosa by 9.
A Majority That Predates the Crackdown
Marist's 61 percent sits close to where Texans were before the crackdown. In January 2025, before most of the new enforcement took hold, a University of Houston Hobby School poll found 64 percent of Texans believed undocumented immigrants who meet certain requirements should be allowed to stay. That included 44 percent of Republicans.
Appetite for deporting everyone has slipped, though. In Texas Politics Project polling, the share of registered voters agreeing that undocumented immigrants should be deported immediately fell from 58 percent in October 2024 to 50 percent a year later. Republicans barely budged, holding near 86 percent.
Immigration has also lost ground as a priority. In April 2024, 68 percent of Texas Republicans named immigration or the border as the state's most important problem, according to the Texas Politics Project. By April 2026, 20 percent did, as inflation and the economy moved to the top.
Angle traced the legalization majority to an older Republican tradition in the state, one that ran through both Presidents Bush and, at times, former Governor Rick Perry.
"Before Trump came on the scene, a lot of Texans, even a lot of Republicans then, thought that there should be immigration reform," he said. "It was only Trump coming on the scene and then the Texas Republican leadership from Abbott down just completely just submitting to Trump's will on immigration."
For Rottinghaus, the current polling is "not a shift from 2024, but evidence that immigration attitudes are more nuanced than campaign rhetoric suggests."
Steinhauser added Dreamers, immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, to the mix. Hispanic and independent voters tend to think "those young people in particular should be viewed with some sympathy and compassion," he said.
Latino Voters in South Texas
Trump won about 55 percent of Texas Latinos in 2024, according to exit polls. He carried Starr County, which is 97 percent Hispanic, becoming the first Republican presidential candidate to win it since 1892. Last year, Republicans redrew the state's congressional map in a bet that those gains would hold.
Current polling shows Democrats recovering much of that ground. The Texas Politics Project survey found Talarico leading Paxton among Latino likely voters 54 percent to 41 percent. An NBC News poll put the margin at 54 to 36. In March, Democratic primary turnout more than doubled from 2024 in the Rio Grande Valley.
The recovery is uneven. ReconMR found Talarico ahead by 18 points in San Antonio and South Texas, down from 33 points in September.
"They feel like they've been targeted and persecuted," Angle said of Latinos along the border, a group that includes some of the most conservative Democrats in the state. "A lot of Hispanics on the border do believe in border enforcement and do believe in law and order."
Steinhauser doesn't dispute the shift. "I think Hispanic voters have moved away from the president quite a lot in the last two years," he said. "We've seen a movement from historic positive numbers for the GOP down there to a huge swing against the GOP."
He conceded that "a lot of political damage has been done," but thinks the party can win those voters back with "a better policy agenda on the issues that Hispanic voters care about."
How Texas Candidates Are Responding to Immigration Enforcement
Talarico, a state representative, calls himself a border security Democrat and backs a path to citizenship for many long-term residents. Asked at a CNN town hall on Wednesday whether he supports abolishing ICE, he said, "No, and I never have," while calling the agency under Trump a "secret police force." Republicans have pointed to his remark in February that it was time to tear that force down.
Hinojosa, a Brownsville native, has credited Trump with reducing border crossings while criticizing enforcement in Texas communities. "I want a secure border, but what is happening with these ICE raids is making us less secure, not more," she said at a candidate forum.
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Abbott has kept Operation Lone Star running at a cost of more than $11 billion and signed a law last year requiring sheriffs who run jails to seek agreements to work with ICE. After an ICE shooting in Minneapolis in January, he said the White House needed to "recalibrate." Paxton, who led the state's legal defense of its 2023 border arrest law, has not changed his position and is endorsed by the National Border Patrol Council.
At least one border Republican has broken ranks. Texas Representative Monica De La Cruz is the only Republican in the state's delegation backing the bipartisan Dignity Act, which would grant temporary legal status to longtime undocumented residents. She called ICE's detention of McAllen high school mariachi students "troubling."
A Close Race at the Top
Marist found Talarico leading Paxton 47 percent to 45 percent among likely voters, with Abbott ahead of Hinojosa 49 to 45. ReconMR had Talarico up 48 to 44 and Abbott up by a single point.
"Paxton is underperforming Abbott because of his personal baggage," Rottinghaus said. He added that Abbott benefits from strong Republican loyalty, while Paxton's scandals make him less appealing to moderate Republicans and independents. "Ticket-splitting voters could decide the Senate race," he said, describing them as likely suburban Republicans, independents and college-educated voters.
"Talarico's moderate tone and emphasis on common ground give these voters permission to cross party lines," he said.
Republicans can still win, Steinhauser said, though "it might be closer than we all expected." His worry is enthusiasm. "This doesn't necessarily mean that a bunch of Republicans have become Democrats in Texas," he said. "It's more that Republican voters might not be as enthusiastic to vote this year as they have been in the past."
Angle is keeping expectations in check. "It's fair to be skeptical, and even Texans, we are not counting any chickens here," he said.
"Texas is still a state that favors Republicans," he said.
Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here. Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Jason Lemon and Gray R. Thomas