ATLANTA — Alberto Varela crossed the southern border illegally in April 2022, following a perilous journey from his hometown in Cuba. Early on Wednesday morning, just hours after the presidential election was called for Donald Trump, the Cuban national was outside of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Atlanta headquarters, where migrants who entered the country without authorization line up every morning to check in with authorities.

Varela cannot vote in the United States. And if some of Trump’s policies take effect, he could be deported. Still, he believes “the Americans made the right decision.”

In his view, Trump was the better option for the U.S. economy. He also associated his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, with a far-left “Communist” ideology.

Trump’s hard-line stances on immigration, including a campaign pledge to enact mass deportations, weren’t off-putting. Rather, they were a draw.

“Right now, people are coming in who were bad in our countries, and they’ll be bad here,” Varela said, noting that migrants who are in the country working and not committing crimes should have nothing to fear. “Trump doesn’t want to stop immigration; he wants for it to be controlled, and to block criminals from coming in and destroying the country. It’s a mess.”

While Latinos have long been reliable Democrats, in recent years that has changed. Early exit polls — albeit not a foolproof scan of electoral results — found that in Georgia, Trump appears to have won 42% of the Latino vote, up 1% from 2020. Nationwide, Trump seems to have improved his performance among Latinos by a double-digit margin, from 32% in 2020 to 45% this year.

The movement appears to be particularly pronounced among Latino men, various polls show.

One of them is Zeucis Martinez, an immigrant from Venezuela. Martinez has spent roughly 40 years in Dalton, a majority-Hispanic town inside U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s northwest Georgia district. Martinez has helped the local Whitfield County Republican Party launch efforts to court Latino voters in the area, including by manning a booth during Dalton’s annual Mexican Independence Day parade.

In the past, Martinez said he mostly kept quiet about his politics to avoid ruffling feathers inside Dalton’s Latino community. Now, he says he is vocal about his views and finding positive feedback.

“People are agreeing with me,” he said. “They say, ‘Yes, we have to go with Trump.’ They think he’s the only man capable of taking this country forward. So you can imagine, people are thinking differently.

“This was an election that was very important for us to take seriously as Hispanic Americans, and I think we answered the call. This morning I woke up energized.”

Near Varela outside the ICE field office in Atlanta stood Manuel Baez, a migrant from Venezuela who entered the country illegally roughly two years ago. He is temporarily protected from deportation by a Biden administration humanitarian program, but he identifies as a Trump supporter.

“I wasn’t here last time” he was in office, “but they tell me that the economy was better then,” Baez said. “I think he’ll bring taxes down.”

He described the border as “out of control” and “dangerous.”

“Trump is protecting us by making sure we don’t go through that,” Baez said.

Waiting alongside Baez was his girlfriend Isabel Jimenez, a green card holder from the Dominican Republic. She said her entire family voted for Trump because they trust him more on the economy.

“We like that he is a business owner,” she said. “These last four years, prices have gone up too much.”

She also backs Trump’s immigration agenda.

“The law is the law,” she said. “We have to control the border before it gets completely overrun.”

Despite Republicans’ growing appeal among Latinos, there are still moments of tension for conservatives in heavily Latino communities such as Martinez in Dalton.

Amid the celebrations of Wednesday morning, Martinez also fielded comments online accusing him of having voted against his own people.

“I thought that was intense,” he said. “We need to keep having conversations, keep going out on the street with our message, and open people’s eyes. … We are starting to see the fruits of that labor within the community, and we have to keep going.”

Republicans will have a future Latino voter on their side in Andres Castellanos.

The 33-year-old Uber driver arrived from Colombia over five years ago and is getting ready for his citizenship interview later this year. His father voted for Trump, and he would have done the same thing had he naturalized in time.

“Democrats talk about Trump saying he is going to deport everyone, but that doesn’t really scare us. Everybody knows that’s a lie, that he’s not going to do it. We know Trump just says those things to get the gringos’ votes,” he said. “It’s a lie that people will be stopped in the streets and if they don’t have papers, OK, straight to the plane. … If they catch you committing a crime, that’s different.”

Castellanos said he holds Democrats accountable for high inflation. He was also put off by their full-throated embrace of abortion rights and LGBT causes.

Outside the ICE field office on Wednesday morning, some immigrants in the country illegally did express concern over their future — and the future of the country without them in it.

“I think this country is going to go down the drain because if Latinos are gone, who is going to want to work? Gringos won’t do the work Latinos do,” said a woman from Nicaragua, who declined to share her name because she fears deportation.

When Trump becomes president, she said she will stop coming to the mandatory check-ins with ICE, out of fear she’ll be detained and deported.

Another immigrant, Miriam, from Ecuador, said news of Trump’s win made her nervous, though not surprised. She knows many people in her community who voted for the former president.

She said her plan is to put her head down, focus on work (the 49-year-old makes $150 a day working 12-hour shifts in construction) and hope that the next four years “go flying by.” She’s hopeful Trump won’t be able to put his mass deportation pledge in action.

“There’s too many of us,” she said.

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