> Bad news for Paxton in Texas

Texas Hispanics swung hard to Trump. A new poll shows they’re furious at his deportations.

A new survey of Hispanic business owners in Texas shows Democratic nominee James Talarico dominating.


Benny Melendez voted for President Donald Trump in 2024. But since Trump returned to the White House, it has been increasingly difficult for Melendez to run his small construction company in south Texas. He says immigration officers have detained workers at his job sites and while driving his company trucks. Since the beginning of 2025, more than 10 of those workers have been deported.

The chaos of the past year-and-a-half has convinced Melendez to abandon his support for Trump and Republicans, and instead back the Democrat in this year’s U.S. Senate election, state Rep. James Talarico.

“How can we continue voting for someone that is targeting our community?” Melendez said. “There’s no way possible we’re going to support that. No way.”

Melendez is not alone. One in five Hispanic business owners in Texas say they’ve had an employee deported in the past year, according to a new survey commissioned by the U.S. Hispanic Business Council and shared first with POLITICO. Seven in ten said their businesses had been impacted by Trump’s tariffs. Among those surveyed, Talarico holds a seven-point lead over Attorney General Ken Paxton, the GOP nominee, even though a plurality of the over 1,000 respondents self-identify as Republican. Almost one quarter who supported Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary now say they’ll back Talarico, while over half say they’ll back Paxton.

The survey is the clearest sign yet of Paxton’s vulnerability among Texas’ robust Hispanic business community amidst broader signs that Hispanic voters around the country are swinging hard against him, thanks to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and the shaky economy. The survey was conducted from June 2 to 15 and included 1,012 Texas-based USHBC members. Respondents included business owners in construction, food services, retail, manufacturing and other industries.

Those business owners pointed to the fear the deportation push created in the community, as well as their bottom lines, for why they were turning on Trump and toward Talarico.

“The fear factor that it creates, the disruption that it creates, the environment that it creates, is debilitating,” said Javier Palomarez, president and CEO of USHBC. “If you’ve got a small business of 10 people or so, and you get even one person deported, you can imagine what that does to the morale of that business unit and to the fear of the business owner.”

Meanwhile, Paxton, long an immigration hardliner, has doubled down…

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/1 … s-00993955