Backlash to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is putting vulnerable Republicans in a tough spot, forcing them to shift their tone to appease frustrated Hispanic voters — or risk losing key battleground seats.

It’s a delicate pivot for Republicans in South Texas, who spent years taking a hardline approach on immigration and flipped historically blue districts in the process.

Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz, representing a majority-Hispanic district, has gone from calling for mass deportations to focusing on the “worst of the worst.” In lieu of expediting removals, she wants to create new visa categories for undocumented workers to fill jobs in construction and agriculture. And instead of slamming the Biden White House for its “border failure,” she’s setting up private meetings at the Trump White House to plead for temperance in immigration enforcement.

Rep. Tony Gonzales, whose district shares hundreds of miles with Mexico, wants his party to talk more about the border, and said he plans to “continue to advocate that the Republican Party needs to focus on convicted criminal illegal aliens” amid broad outrage over deportations of undocumented people with no proven risk to public safety.

Like other Republicans, they are trying to slowly distance themselves from the massive immigration crackdown that has quickly become political kryptonite for the GOP — but without being seen as disloyal to the president or undercutting their previous positions.

“President Trump made a promise, and he’s kept that promise by securing the border. That was stage one,” De La Cruz said in an interview. “Now we’re at stage two, which is having a conversation of true immigration reform.”

Republicans’ efforts to change the conversation will test their ability to maintain, or even extend, Trump’s 2024 gains with Hispanic voters — and play a pivotal role in the fight for control of Congress in November. A slew of polls in recent weeks has shown many Hispanic voters across the country, repulsed by the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign, are souring on the Republican president they supported to a historic degree in 2024.

It’s a warning the White House appears to be taking seriously. In recent weeks, after the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by an immigration enforcement officer in Minneapolis, the White House has signaled openness to paring back its deportation operation. On Thursday, border czar Tom Homan announced the administration’s massive immigration surge in Minneapolis would come to a close.

Latino voters’ embrace of Trump was a political earthquake, and South Texas was the epicenter.

De La Cruz’s district — which sprawls from the Rio Grande Valley on the U.S.-Mexico border up to the San Antonio suburbs — was represented by a Democrat in Congress for 120 years before De La Cruz won her seat in 2022. In 2024, Trump romped to an 18-point victory.

The 15th Congressional District was among those redrawn by the Texas legislature’s redistricting gambit last year, offering De La Cruz an even more favorable electorate. But that bet relies heavily on Hispanic voters sticking with the GOP: Nearly 80 percent of the district identifies as Hispanic or Latino, and if those voters flip back to the Democratic Party or stay home, it could erase much of the new map’s intended friendliness to Republicans.

“With the border secure and Latinos responding to ICE raids and government overreach, the districts that Republicans thought were their future a year ago are likely to be their undoing,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who is a frequent critic of Trump. “Hard to find another situation in the past 50 years where a political party has squandered a generational opportunity like this.”

Flipping De La Cruz’s district is a top objective for House Democrats this cycle, who are salivating at the prospect of winning back Latino voters. She’ll face either Bobby Pulido, a Tejano music star with widespread name ID recruited by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or Ana Cuellar, an ER doctor who has an impressive penchant for fundraising.

Local Republicans have begun sounding the alarm.

Daniel Garza, president of the LIBRE Initiative, a grassroots conservative group based in South Texas, said “Biden’s border chaos” was directly responsible for Texas Republicans’ victories in recent election cycles, including De La Cruz’s, but that moving toward the other extreme — a harsh crackdown — could again dissuade Hispanic voters who might otherwise support the GOP.

“We don’t have to be a nation that has to decide between an ‘everybody-in’ or an ‘everybody-out’ approach,” Garza said. “I honestly feel that the counties across the entire Texan border shifted to the right because of the border chaos. … But this sort of everybody-out approach, I think, is also causing some reflection.”

The immigration crackdown has wreaked havoc for the area’s business community. Greg LaMantia, who runs a major beer wholesaler in the region, said his company’s sales are down as a result of the raids. “You have people that are legal that are scared to death to get caught up in this fiasco and deported,” said LaMantia, who voted for Trump and has donated recently to both Republican and Democratic lawmakers. “It’s caused sales to go down, no doubt about it. It’s chaos.”

Daniel Guerrero, CEO of the McAllen-based South Texas Builders Association, said rampant ICE activity has sent a shiver through the construction industry, leading to massive delays. He said ICE is notorious for following concrete trucks to job sites, then apprehending workers as they begin pouring a foundation, leaving half-poured concrete slabs.

“The sentiment is pretty clear across the table, that nobody really expected this magnitude of enforcement,” said Guerrero, who voted for Trump and De La Cruz in 2024.

He said the Hispanic Trump supporters he knows are souring on this administration, an observation supported by recent polling. In the latest warning sign, Latino voters helped a Democrat flip a reliably red seat in Fort Worth last month. Taylor Rehmet, who picked up a state Senate seat in a special election, won about 4 out of 5 Hispanic votes across the district, a massive 26-point improvement over Kamala Harris in 2024.

Many Republicans are trying to steer the discussion around immigration to focus on how border crossings have dropped to historic lows under Trump — which they hope will remind Hispanic voters why they should stick with the GOP.

“The Hispanic population gives President Trump and Republicans a lot of leeway with just how bad things were before and where they’re at now,” said Gonzales, whose sprawling border district is majority Hispanic. “They have a lot of leeway to get a lot of runway, if you will.”

De La Cruz successfully ran in 2024 on deportations and the “worst border security crisis in our nation’s history.” Now she’s proposing a new visa category, H-2C, allowing employers like those in construction and hospitality to hire foreign workers. She also introduced legislation which would expand the H-2A visa category for seasonal agricultural workers.

In recent weeks, De La Cruz said she has taken constituents to meet with the Labor Department, the White House and House Speaker Mike Johnson, pitching them on her bills and encouraging the administration to change its tact on immigration enforcement.

“There’s limited resources, period. And we want those limited resources to be focused on the worst of the worst, the criminal immigrants that have come in,” De La Cruz said. “We have legal immigrants in our district who have work visas that they don’t want to go out to work because some may have fear about the process that is currently being administered.”

But De La Cruz’s shift in messaging has simultaneously earned skepticism from some industry leaders and frustration with the base, underscoring the political tightrope she must walk until November.

Guerrero, the construction nonprofit leader, said he sensed political opportunism in De La Cruz’s newfound interest in helping his industry.

“People feel abandoned because you never showed face, and now that there’s an actual crisis, you want to show face?” Guerrero said. “It’s like, dude, it’s a little too late, man.”

The MAGA base, meanwhile, doesn’t love the shift, either. Patricio County GOP Chair Rex Warner thinks De La Cruz has become too soft on deportations. “I align with some of it, but very little,” he said.