OPINION:
Latinos left the Democratic party in a mass exodus last week, costing Vice President Kamala Harris the presidency. The 13-point Latino shift towards President-elect Trump noticed along the Rio Grande indicates Ms. Harris’s campaign failed to make Latinos forget the peril caused by her and Joe Biden’s open border.
The Latino red wave surfaced in South Texas. Mr. Trump won 11 out of 13 Texas border counties. The Rio Grande Valley, with a 91% Hispanic population, flipped, creating a Republican majority for the first time in a century. The Latino base showed up for Mr. Trump, with Hispanic men ranked as the second largest demographic group to vote red, according to NBC exit polls.
America’s Latino voting bloc was previously unpredictable by political analysts until the chaos along the southern border became an issue that could no longer be ignored.
The Biden-Harris administration created an invasion along the Rio Grande, which burdened communities across the nation. The unsecure border drastically increased Latino susceptibility towards transnational human trafficking for commercial sex purposes, drug trafficking, and cheap labor exploitation.
Hispanics know these tragic matters affect their community, which explains why 74% of Hispanics polled earlier this year stated the Biden-Harris administration did a bad job dealing with the immigration crisis.
Instead of addressing this top concern among Latinos, Ms. Harris released a campaign promise titled “Opportunity agenda for Latino Men,” which avoided promising stricter border policies, an aspect Latino men searched for in a presidential candidate.
Kamala’s address to Latinos also failed to account for over 300,000 unaccompanied alien children lost by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). U.S. Customs and Border Protection encountered over half a million illegal alien minors, 98 percent of whom were of Latin American origin.
The Biden-Harris administration endangered Latino children from the start when DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas repeatedly stated that unaccompanied alien children who crossed the border illegally would not be turned away. Cartels capitalized on this, often smuggling the same children through ports of entry multiple times in an endless cycle for trafficking profit.
An estimated 60% of Latin American children who attempt to cross the southern border illegally, unaccompanied or with a smuggler, are abused by cartel operatives for sex or drug trafficking.
Where are these children? HHS guarantees minors are placed with a sponsor. Still, the American people have no way of knowing where so many of them are because HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra has treated the children like widgets on an assembly line, demanding faster processing out the door.
There are corporations in the shadows who benefit from the illegal immigration crisis because of large scale government contracts with HHS and DHS.
MVM, Inc is a company that contracts with the federal government, receiving large sums of money in exchange for providing alien relocation services. Under the Biden-Harris administration, DHS gave the company $824.13 million, while HHS provided an additional $582.77 million to transport immigrants here illegally from fiscal years 2021-2024.
MVM transports illegal aliens en masse, including a significant portion of unaccompanied alien children. Illegal alien minors are often subjected to placement with dangerous sponsors due to lax vetting during the rushed process and volume of placements, according to reporting from Muckraker.
Neither HHS nor MVM has provided transparency on how prospective sponsors are vetted to ensure the safety of unaccompanied alien children, despite requests by House committees.
Ultimately, Ms. Harris fell short of assuring Latinos that a Harris-Walz presidency would benefit them. The left’s management of the southern border created discord throughout America and led to a nationwide plea for a safe and secure border. That plea was heard in the 2024 Presidential election, with some of its loudest voices coming from the Latino community.
• Brandy Perez is a Researcher in the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation.
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