How Trump's immigration crackdown sparked a backlash that could boomerang in the midterms

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — When Donald Trump was running for president two years ago, Americans’ television screens were filled with images of migrant chaos. There were tent camps on both sides of the border, caravans of people trudging through Central America and concerns about newcomers overwhelming social services.

That turmoil faded as President Joe Biden tightened immigration enforcement after Trump clamped down even more. Now any chaos is on American streets, where violent and even deadly clashes have defined a deportation campaign that's designed to fulfill hardliners' goals of uprooting anyone in the country illegally.

The shift helps explain why Trump's effort to fulfill his promises has turned into a backlash, undermining one of the core issues that fueled his return to the White House. While Trump maintains some support for his handling of the border, polling shows voters disapprove of his approach to immigration, a striking turnaround that could undermine Republican attempts to maintain control of Congress in the midterms.

“The American people supported strong border security,” said Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat who has become a prominent critic of the administration’s policies. “What they got instead was shredding the Constitution, mass deportations and killing American citizens on the streets of Minneapolis.”

Trump's allies say the president is the victim of his own success.

“The disaster at the border and the impunity of people just walking over and being released into the country was hard to ignore,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Trump dramatically reduced illegal border crossings, Krikorian said, “and that’s often politically bad."

Krikorian praised Trump for adopting low profile but highly effective sweeps that have achieved month after month of record arrests. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested almost 51,000 immigrants in the country illegally in August, according to the Department of Homeland Security, up from 49,000 in July and 43,000 in June. An estimated 660,000 people have been deported in the past fiscal year, according to the Migration Policy Institute, short of the administration’s goal of 1 million annually.

Biden's immigration policies remain a regular target for Republicans this year. Trump said at a recent Florida rally that Democrats let migrants “pour across our borders from all over the world.”

“If they win in the midterms, they'll do it again,” he warned.

In 2024, Trump warned repeatedly of an immigrant “invasion.” “They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” he said of people crossing the border illegally. He insisted, falsely, that immigrants were behind spikes in crime and eating household pets.

Even as Trump drew criticism for his rhetoric, his focus on the issue resonated with voters who had seen illegal immigration soar during the Biden administration, with border arrests from Mexico reaching a record 250,000 in December 2023.

Trump's victory seemed poised to reshape immigration politics. Forty-six Democrats in the House and a dozen in the Senate joined Republicans in voting for the Laken Riley Act, a bill named after a Georgia student killed by a man in the country illegally. The law requires detention without bond for noncitizens accused of murder and other violent crimes.

After Trump took office, he cranked deportations into higher gear. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident, was one of the people caught up in that net. Despite a court order forbidding it, the administration sent him to his native El Salvador, where he was confined to that country's notorious central prison that was also used to house other Trump deportees.

The U.S. Supreme Court directed the administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia's return, and Van Hollen flew to El Salvador to meet with him. Some Democrats questioned the wisdom of confronting Trump on an issue where the president was so popular, the senator recalled. Now his party is more emboldened on the issue.

“We’ve gone from some of that sniping on the sidelines to a clear vote among Democrats to defund ICE,” Van Hollen said.

The early face of the Trump crackdown was top Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, who swaggered through raids in tactical gear and deployed forces to Los Angeles and Chicago, where he led a helicopter raid on an apartment building.

But Minneapolis was the turning point. More than 2,000 federal officers were sent to the city, and scenes of masked agents spilling from convoys of unmarked vehicles became commonplace. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets.

Two U.S. citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both 37 — were killed during confrontations with agents. In the weeks that followed, the White House pushed aside Bovino and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

Michael Pretti, Alex's father, said this week that the family is still troubled by the bystander videos of the shooting. He had a holstered gun that he was legally allowed to carry, and none of the footage shows him brandishing the weapon or attacking federal agents in the moments before he was killed.

“I think it haunts many Americans to see a U.S. citizen who was peaceful and in his community shot multiple times on the back, in the back, while on the ground,” he told reporters.

Arrests dropped after the killings, although they eventually returned to record numbers. But the politics became more complicated, and Republicans’ immigration message has fractured.

There are hardliners like U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who is vowing more deportations as she runs for governor. And there's Cuban-American Florida Rep. Maria-Elena Salazar, who criticized Trump’s migrant crackdown in a campaign advertisement filmed outside the White House.

Salazar has sponsored legislation that would allow immigrants who are in the country illegally to remain as long as they have otherwise followed the law. Among the sponsors is Republican Rep. Gabe Evans, the grandson of a Mexican immigrant, who is trying to distinguish himself from Trump while running in a Colorado swing district.

In New Hampshire, former Sen. John Sununu, running for an open Senate seat, has been critical of ICE tactics and the agency's use of masks to conceal agents' identities.

Republicans often try to connect immigration to voters' concerns about high prices. Ohio Sen. Jon Husted blasts Democratic opponent Sherrod Brown as someone who “voted to raise your taxes repeatedly and give those tax dollars to illegals.”

“Republicans are trying to turn voters against Democrats because of what Joe Biden did in failing to control the border effectively,” said Frank Sharry, a longtime immigrants' rights activist who consults with the centrist Democratic group Third Way. “So they’re trying to define Democrats as being for open borders and not serious about removing criminals.”

But that comes as many Democratic candidates are shifting away from Biden-era messaging about immigration.

In Texas, Senate candidate James Talarico calls himself a “border security Democrat” who wants to hire more Border Patrol officers and increase the use of surveillance technology.

Talarico criticizes many of Trump’s immigration policies as wasteful, but doesn’t hold back when it comes to criticizing the last Democratic president.

“Joe Biden and his administration failed us on our southern border,” he said in a July press conference in a Texas county on the Mexico border.

Even some of the most liberal Democratic candidates, like Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, are careful to note that they want strong borders.

“I don’t know of a candidate who’s in a swing race who’s saying anything other than ‘We’ve got to secure the border’ and ‘We’ve got to remove criminals,’” Sharry said.

Riccardi reported from Denver. Associated Press writer Aaron Kessler in Washington contributed to this report.

FILE - Greg Bovino, the chief patrol agent for the U.S. Border Patrol El Centro sector, center, walks with federal immigration agents near an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, Ill., Oct. 3, 2025. (AP Photo/Erin Hooley, File)

FILE - People visit a makeshift memorial for Alex Pretti, who was fatally shot by a U.S. Border Patrol officer over the weekend, Jan. 26, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Adam Gray, File)

FILE - Authorities with batons stand near a demonstration where a man was shot in his vehicle by an ICE officer, Sept. 20, 2026, in Austin, Texas. (AP Photo/Joel Angel Juarez, File)

FILE - Migrants congregate on the banks of the Rio Grande at the U.S. border with Mexico on Dec. 20, 2022, where members of the Texas National Guard cordoned off a gap in the U.S. border wall. (AP Photo/Morgan Lee, File)

URDA, Spain (AP) — Spain's second high-speed rail disaster this year, in which one train struck another from behind, killing 69 people, has raised fresh concerns about the safety of the country's rail network ahead of a national election.

Search teams with sniffer dogs continued to look for victims on Thursday morning, a day after the collision in central Spain. Cranes shifted the carriages as police and soldiers picked through the wreckage strewn down the gravel slope where at least three train carriages were tossed by the impact.

One more body was found overnight, taking the death toll to 69, according to the regional leader of Castilla La Mancha, Emiliano García-Page. He added that 50 people remained hospitalized.

“Yesterday we experienced a catastrophe that without a doubt has left all of Spain in shock,” García-Page said. “Besides bodies, there are body parts that need to be identified.”

Spain’s government declared three days of mourning starting Thursday. A minute of silence was held at various points at noon, including with lawmakers outside the Parliament and by rail workers and union leaders in Madrid's main train station.

The high-speed rail network has been considered one of Spain's crowning achievements. It is the world's second-largest, after China's. Until this year, it had not experienced a deadly crash since coming into service over three decades ago.

The reputation of the Spanish railways was already tarnished when in January 46 people died after one train jumped the track and slammed into the side of another going the opposite way in southern Spain.

Then, just nine months later, came the collision Wednesday morning that turned a sleepy stretch of rail lined by olive groves near the village of Urda into a scene of carnage.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez pledged an investigation and improvements to restore trust in a rail system that carried 45 million travelers last year, including millions of tourists.

“It is clear that we need to reinforce the safety of our train service to rebuild the trust in our high-speed rail,” Sánchez said Wednesday. “It is not acceptable for a country like Spain to endure two high-speed train accidents in the same year.”

Sánchez called the crash a “tragedy” when he visited the crash site a second time on Thursday, promising the victims and their families that the state would be with them.

Both deadly crashes this year took place on the same rail line between Madrid and Seville, the first of Spain's high-speed network that opened in 1992. Each collision involved a train operated by state-owned RENFE and another operated by privately owned IRYO. Spain liberalized its high-speed rail service in 2021, with the Italian IRYO starting service the following year.

Sánchez had hoped to leverage a wave of discontent over housing costs and high rents when he called for early elections on Nov. 29.

He now faces questions about the safety of the railways, along with criticism from right-wing parties of his liberal migration policies and accusations of corruption against his party and his wife, which both he and his wife deny.

Sánchez's main rival, conservative Popular Party leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo, demanded a full investigation of the crash.

Alejandro Quiroga, professor of political science at Madrid’s Complutense University, told The Associated Press that it is too early to tell if the crash will change the minds of many voters.

“This is not good news for the Socialist Party, but it may not hurt them very much because Spaniards generally don’t like it when politicians try to take advantage of tragedies,” Quiroga said. “That could be changing, but up until now it is not seen positively.”

Spain's Transport Minister Óscar Puente said Wednesday that the crash was caused by what he called the “inexplicable” order from a central command center for Spain’s trains after a security system had failed.

Puente said that at 8:30 a.m. the security system on a stretch of track stopped working due to a computer malfunction, causing all trains on that stretch to stop. At that point the IRYO train was stopped, with the RENFE train 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) behind.

But minutes later the central command told the RENFE train to start running again without any speed restrictions, and it ended up colliding with the stationary IRYO train at 8:53 a.m.

Spanish media on Thursday reproduced short audio clips of the controller ordering the train engineer to start moving.

Puente said that the train should never have been told to start moving again since a “stop signal” was still active on that line. And if it had, at least it should have been told to go at reduced speed.

Train workers held a strike on Thursday that had already been planned before the Urda crash to demand the government carry out safety improvements to the rail services that unions say were promised after the first deadly collision in January.

Union leaders questioned the minister putting all the blame on one controller and criticized the leaking of the control room’s conversations to the media.

“The focus should not be on if there was a human error, but rather what is wrong with the system, what situations must be improved so that if there is a human error we don’t find ourselves in this situation,” said Pepa Páez of the CCOO union.

A judge also declared the crash site an investigation zone.

Meanwhile, thousands of travelers were left searching for alternative transport with the high-speed line connecting Madrid and Seville shut down.

Wilson reported from Barcelona, Spain. Associated Press writer Teresa Medrano in Madrid contributed to this report.

Emergency services work at the scene of a collision between two trains in Urda, Spain, on Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

Emergency services work at the scene of a collision between two trains in Urda, Spain, on Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

Emergency services work at the scene of a collision between two trains in Urda, Spain, on Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

Cranes lift wrecked train carriages as rescuers search for victims following a collision between two trains in Urda, Spain, Thursday, Oct. 29, 2026. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)