Politically Unstable: What everyone got wrong about Latinos and immigration

Video

Monday, September 29, 2025

OPINION:

What did President Trump know about the will of the American people on illegal immigration that both parties and most politicians simply missed?

Washington Times Commentary Editor Kelly Sadler is joined by Chris Salcedo, author of “The Rise of the Liberty-Loving Latino: A New American Revolution” — coming out in December — and host of “The Chris Salcedo Show,” airing daily on Newsmax.

[SADLER] What prompted you to write this book?

[SALCEDO] It’s really a combination of things. My show has been working for over a decade now, trying to introduce the country to this idea that things were changing at a really fundamental level in the Latino community. And with the election of President Trump, we finally saw that build accomplished. So I said, “Well, I’ve got to put this down on paper.” We decided to cram 10 years of the radio show, which, yes, we have a radio show, got a podcast, got the television show… Cram that all into a book that can be digestible about the greatest political revolution to hit the United States since the formation of the Republican Party. And then how are we going to do that? Well, we decided to use the interview I had with President Trump just before the election as the launching point, as the orbit, if you will, to introduce all these concepts we’ve been talking about for a long time.

[SADLER] What’s interesting to me is, back in the day, I think it was after Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama, there was an autopsy done by the RNC in terms of how to expand our voter base. How do we beat Democrats moving forward? Who do we need to have outreach toward? And Hispanics were the number one target. And then in 2016, you have Donald Trump enter the picture. Donald Trump takes that escalator down at Trump Tower, and he says that we are going to put an end to illegal immigration. We are going to build a border wall. We are going to make our nation safe and secure. We are going to be a country of law and order. And there’s a lot of bad people entering our country illegally. They’re not sending us the best and the brightest.

And at that time, he was lambasted by the mainstream media, by the Republican Party itself, many within the Republican Party, saying this is not the message for Latinos. This is the exact opposite of what our autopsy said was true to attract this voting base. So what about Donald Trump’s message resonated within the Latino community? Why was conventional wisdom at that time proven wrong?

[SALCEDO] Because it wasn’t conventional wisdom. It wasn’t even wisdom. It wasn’t wise. Look, Kelly, I’m going to say something that, it might come off as controversial, but the Republican and Democrat Party have colluded together for the better part of the last half century, maybe a little longer, against the majority, the will of the majority of the American people on illegal immigration.

Think about this. The last four years, we saw unprecedented illegal immigration into this country. The Republican Party talked a lot about it, right? Not one policy was passed or insisted upon by the Republican Party to stop one illegal alien from coming into this country, not one under Joe Biden. This has been the case for many, many, many moons. What the left-wing press was sold a bill of goods by both sides, the Republicans and the Democrats saying, “You know what? If you oppose illegal immigration, you’re really opposing Latinos, you’re really opposing Hispanics.” And Hispanics said, “Wait a minute, come again?” You seem to think that we in the Latino community support illegal immigration. We support breaking into the United States of America. This is why so many of our progenitors, the first generation Latinos, came here, a lot of them legally, some of them illegally, but it’s why they came here for the stability of the rule of law. We know where all of this goes, where the lawlessness goes.

So what Donald Trump knew and understood, because he actually talked to those in the so-called minority communities, he knew that just because you’re a Latino doesn’t mean you support lawlessness. Now, if you’re a Democrat, you do. If you’re a complicit Republican, you do. Right? You support illegal immigration. But if you’re a Latino, you don’t necessarily support illegal immigration. He knew it. And plus, let’s give credit where credit is due. Joe Biden, or the third term of Barack Obama, laid to waste whole communities inside of areas of Texas that were just inundated with narco-terrorists and massive waves of humanity with their open borders and their illegal immigration policies. And the Democrats didn’t care. And by extension, the Republicans did nothing to stop them. So the Republicans are seen as not caring.

The only one who cared to save those Latino communities was President Trump. If you see the map, Kelly, it’s flipped almost all red along that border. No thanks to the mainstream Republican Party. All thanks to the America First Coalition and President Trump.