Trump's immigration policies helped him win but now threaten to backfire

As she was sleeping in the early hours of October 9, aged care worker Margarida Celestino missed an important call from her father.

Nguinamau Celestino, an engineer originally from Angola, was trying to reach her from inside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility.

His family, who had been working through an asylum application for almost a decade, realised he had been locked up when they checked his phone's location later that morning.

"There's no reason why he should be there," Ms Celestino said.

"He has a clean record, he has all his paperwork, and [my parents] have followed all the steps that is required to make the asylum [claim]."

Mr Celestino had a permit to work in America while he waited for his claim to be processed, his daughter said. He had a job installing heating and plumbing systems in Maine.

Despite that, ICE calls Mr Celestino an "illegal alien". It says he should have returned to Angola in 2018.

Its agents detained him at a Maine airport as he prepared to visit his teenage son in Washington DC, where he attends a school for deaf students.

The Celestino family's story is a familiar one in America: asylum seekers are frequently detained despite holding permits allowing them to work in the US, where many have built new lives.

In a statement, ICE acknowledged the Trump administration viewed their rights differently to the previous administration of Joe Biden and the courts. 

Mr Celestino's airport arrest represented a reversal of "the horrendous Biden-era policy that allowed aliens in our country illegally to jet around our country", it said.

"This administration is working diligently to ensure that aliens in our country illegally can no longer fly unless it is out of our country to self-deport, despite left-wing judges determined to exempt illegal aliens from abiding by our nation's laws."

Rhetoric vs reality

Thousands of similar stories have been playing out under the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, which was a vote winner in the 2024 presidential election but is proving more divisive in the lead-up to next week's critical midterms.

Many polls show most Americans think it has gone too far. A Fox News poll this month showed 56 per cent of respondents disapproved of Mr Trump's handling of immigration.

"An issue that was a completely winning electoral issue for the Trump administration and the Republicans when President Trump came back to the White House has suddenly become a liability," said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute at New York University.

In past years, and particularly under Mr Biden, ICE targeted serious criminals.

Mr Trump was elected promising mass deportations and a crackdown on unauthorised immigrants, but said criminals would remain the focus.

His officials insist that is still the case. 

"We go after the worst of the worst every single day," Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin told a recent news conference.

But advocates and analysts say the rhetoric does not square with the reality.

"The principal difference between Trump two and even Trump one compared to all other administrations is that it is not targeted," Mr Chishti said. "Everyone is a priority."

In Maine, for example, most people arrested by ICE this year had no criminal convictions or pending charges, according to records obtained by university researchers and analysed by local media.

"We have found that the vast majority of the folks that are being subjected to enforcement are people who are undergoing the immigration process," Ruben Torres from the Maine Immigrants' Rights Coalition said.

Violence overshadows wins

Pollsters say Mr Trump's approval ratings on immigration really started to dive at the start of the year, after two activists were killed by agents in separate shootings in Minnesota.

Agents have killed nine people and injured 13 others in at least 30 shootings since Mr Trump's re-election, according to a CBS News count.

Viral videos of violent arrests have also fed into public anger over ICE tactics.

It has overshadowed the Trump administration's successes on the US-Mexico border, where unauthorised border crossings have been significantly reduced since Mr Biden was in office.

Quinnipac Polling analyst Tim Malloy said border control had been "an upside for the Trump administration", but Mr Trump had suffered in the polls because many Americans believed the crackdown was carried out with "brutality and callousness".

"Then you throw in Minnesota and LA and any number of different stories a week — people getting shot on the street or the wrong person being deported. It just piled up," he said.

"And it piled up as Trump was losing ground in a lot of other areas: on foreign policy, on the economy and the war."

The Latino vote

Some Republican candidates in areas with large Latino populations have been critical of the crackdown, conscious of the sensitivities for their constituencies on top of the broader public backlash.

"Mr President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far," Florida congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar said in a TV ad.

"The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today."

Latino voters make up the largest ethnic minority in the US and polling data shows a relatively large proportion are swing voters.

But political strategist Mike Madrid, an expert on Latino voting trends, does not expect immigration issues to significantly shift the so-called Latino vote.

"It's nowhere near the top issue," he said.

"It's overwhelmingly about affordability, cost of living, inflationary pressures and economic anxiety.

"You'll find a lot of times these [immigration issues] are bigger motivators for white folks than they are for Latino folks."

Protests and pushback

Indeed, in Maine, one of America's whitest states, days of protests in January led to the state's Republican senator successfully pushing ICE to dial back an enforcement surge.

More protests broke out after an agent fatally shot Colombian man Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, 25, during a traffic stop in July.

But activists who monitor the state's ICE headquarters say they still see multiple people taken in each day.

"These are loving members of our community who go to our churches, who spend time with their neighbours and their friends," activist Alessandra, who asked her surname not be published, told the ABC outside the facility.

"They're not criminals. They're not violent."

The best available data suggests almost half of those detained in Maine this year have been released.

Ms Celestino said she was confident her father would be too, because it had become so common for people in her community to be temporarily detained.

"Family friends, friends' parents, a lot of people that are back now in the community," she said.

"I know so many people that are not violent, that don't have anything in their records, and they've gotten taken."

With Phoebe Hosier and Emilie Gramenz in Washington DC