‘My parents were illegal migrants, but I’m voting for Trump’
Fri, October 25, 2024 at 5:30 AM EDT
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Like millions of people living in the United States, Abigail Solorzano’s parents came to the country illegally.
Crossing the southern border after a long journey from Nicaragua more than three decades ago, they surrendered to the authorities, claimed asylum and raised their daughter in their new home in the Miami suburbs.
Now, Abigail is one of a growing number of Latinos who think people like her parents should be turned away.
“You don’t know their background,” she says, of the millions of illegal migrants who have arrived in the US under the Biden administration. “We don’t know what they’re doing. It’s scary.”
“My parents did come illegally. But they went through the process when they were here. They got caught, [and] they went through the proper steps to become legalised.”
The Telegraph met Abigail at the Alpha and Omega megachurch in Florida – a vast complex more similar to a concert venue than a traditional place of worship, where thousands of Latinos meet each Sunday. Like her, most of them are supporting Donald Trump.
Polls show that Kamala Harris will be lucky to win half of the Latino population at this election, a fall from the 66 per cent support Joe Biden picked up in 2020.
Trump has experienced an unprecedented surge among voters who were previously considered safely Blue. In Arizona and Nevada, two of the key battlegrounds, the rightward shift in Latino opinion could be enough to win him the White House.
Trump’s core message on illegal migration has had surprising resonance with voters whose families themselves crossed the southern border and made the US their home.
Alberto Delgado, the pastor at Alpha and Omega, arrived penniless from Cuba aged 15 and has since built a multi-million dollar Christian empire that broadcasts his sermons across Florida and South America each week.
During Trump’s 2016 campaign, he was appointed as an adviser to the president on Christian and Hispanic issues, and attended monthly summits at the White House during his first term. A portrait of the two men hangs in a corridor at the back of the church.
“The country cannot absorb this amount of people at once,” he says. “There are legal manners of arriving. And even though we, as Christians, must help those that are already here, something has to be done because of the high level of criminality.
“The gangs, the delinquency…where are we going to put all the people? That’s why we lean towards Trump.”
Mr Delgado is something of a Latino celebrity, reaching cult status among his hundreds of thousands of fans. He appears for our interview in a sharp grey suit and loafers, surrounded by a coterie of advisers and consultants.
“We’re in a time in this country that is really leaning to the Left, extremely,” he says. “As you lean to the Left, you go away from God’s heart more.”
Trump, he says, is a man of Christian values, and his multiple legal issues are nothing more than the condition of sinfulness that all humans share. Moreover, Trump is an ally to the Latino community.
For Abigail, whose own parents would have been turned away or deported under Trump’s border plan, there is no tension between her Nicaraguan heritage and her Republican instincts.
“The current government is offering them free incentives, just like that,” she says, recalling her parents’ struggle after arriving in the US.
“They had to work their butts off to get to where they are. [The Biden administration] is freely giving [migrants] things that hard-working Americans worked hard to be able to have. I don’t think people should be able to come in that way.”
Her friend Nazareth Lacayo, whose grandparents came to the US from South America in 1973, agrees.
“I’m going to vote for Donald Trump,” she says. “I believe in his values…and I think he is a very good representation of the Christian community.”
Trump’s 2016 campaign centred on illegal migration and his promise to build a wall on the southern border, to block the route of millions of economic migrants and asylum seekers looking for a better life in the US.
Since then, migration has become the second most important issue to voters, beaten only by the economy.
An overwhelming majority of voters say they trust Trump more on border security than Ms Harris, who was given partial responsibility for border issues by Mr Biden and has since been unable to shake off accusations she secretly hopes to run an open border and hand greater welfare benefits to migrants….
https://news.yahoo.com/news/parents-came-illegally-m-voting-093000644.html