No, All Latinos Didn’t Vote for Trump Actually. Here’s the Data.

Reports of a Latino Democratic exodus may be slightly exaggerated.

Anxiety was high after exit polls showed that 46 percent of Latinos, and 55 percent of Latino men, voted for Donald Trump. While it is a significant blow—Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton won Latinos at 65 and 66 percent respectively—a more detailed breakdown by heritage offered some pushback to the generalized narrative.

The Americas Society Council of the Americas research showed that of the largest Latino groups in the United States, Cuban Americans were the only one in which over half of voters chose Trump, as they went for him by a decisive 58 percent. Mexican Americans—by far the largest Latino community in the country—only went 33 percent for Trump, with Puerto Ricans at 37 percent and Central Americans at 36 percent.

This poll reminds us that, like any group, Latinos are not a monolith. And the “new coalition” that Republicans are celebrating may not be as solid as they think. Democrats just need to sift through the rubble and reevaluate how they message to Latino voters.

Donald Trump plans to enact the largest deportation in U.S. history, and private prisons are already sniffing the air at the “unprecedented opportunity” for moneymaking that a second Trump administration will offer. 

It seems that investors are betting big on Trump’s plans to detain and then forcibly deport millions of both undocumented and legal immigrants—a move that could send the U.S. economy tumbling while making those who profit off of human suffering rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Geo Group, the country’s largest private prison company, was the biggest winner in the stock market after Trump’s victory was announced Wednesday, according to economic outlet Sherwood. The company saw a 40 percent jump in shares Wednesday alone, and its share price went from $14.18 the day before the election to $24.43 on Thursday.

In 2023, 43 percent of Geo Group’s top-line revenue, more than $2.4 billion, came from contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.  

George Zoley, the founder and executive chairman, could barely contain his excitement during an earnings call Thursday. “We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security as well as interior enforcement, and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals,” Zoley said, according to Bloomberg.

“This is to us an unprecedented opportunity,” he added.

Private prison executives also talked about expanding their services to meet the demand of the government’s plans. Zoley said that GEO Group was “well-positioned” to more than double its number of ICE detention beds, from 13,500 to “over 31,000 beds,” according to HuffPost. 

They also discussed expanding their prisoner transport services, as well as their Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, or ISAP, which presents surveillance programs as “alternatives to detention.”

CEO Brian Evans said that the GEO Group’s ISAP programs currently had around 182,000 participants but could be scaled way, way up, to “several hundreds of thousands of participants, and up to several million if necessary.”

Signs indicate that ICE is already looking to expand this program in anticipation of Trump’s administration. HuffPost reported that CoreCivic, another private prison group, said that ICE had posted a request for information about ISAPs on Thursday, a precursor for contract proposals down the road. 

It’s already begun: On Thursday, a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a vital Biden-era immigration policy that provided a pathway to citizenship for the thousands of undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens.

The policy, which the Biden administration called “Keep Families Together,” applied to those who have been in the country for 10 years or more, were not a security threat, and were safe from deportation under the “parole in place” program. They just needed to be married to U.S. citizens and complete an application for permanent residency. The Department of Homeland Security estimated that the policy would help 500,000 spouses and 50,000 stepchildren.

“Without this process, hundreds of thousands of noncitizen spouses of U.S. citizens are likely to instead remain in the United States without lawful status, causing these families to live in fear and with uncertainty about their futures,” DHS wrote in an August statement.

Trump-appointed Texas-based U.S. District Judge J. Campbell Barker struck down the policy on the grounds that the Biden administration was abusing its power by circumventing Congress to enact the policy.

“The rule focuses on the wrong thing in identifying ‘significant public benefits’—the benefits of aliens’ new legal status, rather than their presence in this country,” Barker said in his decision. “The rule exceeds statutory authority and is not in accordance with law for this reason as well.”

This development is a grim precursor to an administration that has promised to break up more families in the “largest deportation program in American history.”

The Biden administration still has time to appeal the ruling.

Following Donald Trump’s presidential election victory, Black people across the country are receiving racist text messages from anonymous senders. 

Reports have come from locations as widespread as Washington, D.C., Alabama, Michigan, Georgia, South Carolina, and many, many other locations around the United States. The texts include messages telling the recipients that they have been “selected” to pick cotton “at the nearest plantation.” Some of the messages include the person’s name.

Many of the texts are targeting Black college students, with reports coming from schools like Clemson University, Ohio State, and the University of Alabama, among others. Students at historically Black colleges and universities, such as Fisk University, have also reported receiving the texts. Some of the texts have “A TRUMP SUPPORTER” as a signature. 

Many of the numbers seem to be tied to TextNow, a text messaging service that allows users to obtain untraceable, “burner” phone numbers, according to NBC News. TextNow said in a statement to the news network that it was aware of the racist campaign and was trying to prevent its service from being used to harass people.

“As soon as we became aware, our Trust & Safety team acted quickly, shutting down the accounts involved within the hour,” the statement read. “TextNow is proud to be an inclusive service offering free mobile text and data to millions of Americans. We do not tolerate or condone the use of our service to send harassing or spam messages and will work with the authorities to prevent these individuals from doing so in the future.” 

The Federal Communication Commission is also aware of the racist messages, and said in a statement that it “is looking into them alongside federal and state law enforcement.” Anyone who receives these messages can contact their local law enforcement office, or the FBI at 1-800-225-5324 or FBI.gov/tips.

Donald Trump’s team may already be having doubts about one of the most recent additions to its ranks: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Ahead of Trump’s victory in the presidential race Tuesday, Kennedy was already talking about his plans as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, including removing fluoride from the U.S. supply of drinking water. Trump has signaled that he would be open to the idea, even though experts say that fluoridation prevents people from getting life-threatening infections.

After Trump won, Kennedy did an ominous interview on MSNBC, where he was pressed about his personal skepticism about vaccines and how that might factor into his future role overseeing the Food and Drug Administration. Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick had previously claimed that Kennedy had plans to strip even long-standing vaccines from the market.

When backed into a corner, Kennedy claimed that he was “not going to take away anybody’s vaccines,” but, apparently, some in the Trump camp weren’t thrilled by the optics of the conversation.

“That is not what we want people focused on today,” a source close to Trump told CNN.

Inside Trump’s camp, it seems concerns reach much further than bad press. There have been discussions that Kennedy would not pass a background check to obtain security clearance for his Cabinet-level position.

“If you dump a bear in Central Park and think you’re above the law, you don’t want to have to go through that gauntlet of political correctness,” one former Trump official who’d been briefed on those discussions told CNN.

In August, it was revealed that Kennedy had found a baby bear carcass in upstate New York and then dumped the carcass in Central Park because he ran out of time to dispose of it before going to the airport and thought staging it was funny. Kennedy has also gotten into trouble for chain-sawing the head off a beached whale.