Meanwhile, lots of Hispanics support Donald Trump. Frankly, Democrat Party support is likely exclusively concentrated among Latinos looking for a massive illegal alien amnesty program. No wonder some of them have announced they're fighting a "civil war" in this election.
At LAT, "Inside Trump Nation: How Donald Trump scored a win in Texas border country":
How Trump won Latino votes near the Texas border https://t.co/cJYJgsDood pic.twitter.com/WsBnVQ2d2g
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) May 1, 2016
Patti Magnon grew up on the other side of the Rio Grande — in the adjacent Mexican city known as Nuevo Laredo.Keep reading.
But the border here has never been a barrier, and Magnon, who has lived on the U.S. side now for years, feels at home in both. “Proud to be an American & a Catholic!” proclaims her bio on Twitter. “Love my Mexican heritage! An immigrant is not the same as an illegal immigrant.”
These days, Magnon sometimes feels she has more in common with Americans elsewhere across the country than with Latino families here in Texas, and that started when she told people she was voting for Donald Trump.
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“They bash you,” said Gina Gil, who’s also joined a small but enthusiastic group of people here on the border who like what Trump has to say — especially about immigration, a subject that, here on the banks of the Rio Grande, they feel they know as much about as anybody.
“I find it insulting when people say people who follow Trump are uneducated, unintelligent,” said Magnon.
“Te aventaste!” Gil exclaimed. “You hit it.”
Across the country, only a small minority of Latinos have backed Trump, and even here in Texas, a plurality of Latino Republicans voted for home-grown U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who won the March 1 primary with 44% of the overall vote to Trump’s 27%. Now as ever, most Latinos vote Democratic, and in Texas, where Latinos make up more than a quarter of the electorate, up to 71% of them backed Hillary Clinton, according to exit polls.
It was here on the border that Trump scored his biggest Texas victories, capturing Laredo’s Webb County, which is 95.3% Latino, and Zapata County next door (94%), as well as Terrell County (49 17.4% Latino Hispanic) and Hudspeth County (78%), which are farther west.
“It’s the hardworking people,” said Miriam Cepeda, 24, a history major at the nearby University of Texas-Pan American who is leading Trump’s campaign in the Rio Grande Valley east of Laredo. What she hears, she says, is a lot of resentment aimed at undocumented immigrants who receive government services. “Those that pay the taxes and do what they’re supposed to say, ‘Why do I have to pay?’”
Magnon and Gill voted for Trump in the Texas primary, plan to vote for him in the general election, and are waging their own kind of ad hoc citizens’ campaign, praising him on radio shows and online, recruiting friends and family.
The two women met last summer when Trump came here, to the Southwest border’s third-most populous city, behind El Paso and San Diego.
Magnon drove her 7-year-old daughter, Allie, to the small local airport to see the real estate magnate. They were greeted in this majority Democratic, heavily Mexican American town by a crowd of opponents chanting into megaphones: “Dump Trump!”
Both Magnon, 44, and Gil, 49, are former Democrats — working mothers with community college educations who say they’re alarmed about welfare fraud, illegal immigration and the rising costs of healthcare. Magnon almost lost her health insurance when Obamacare took effect. Gil seethed at paying an $800 penalty under the new federal healthcare law, but insurance would have cost even more.
Trump promised to run the country like a business and repeal Obamacare. They didn’t think he was racist when he promised to build a bigger border wall to keep out Mexican “rapists.” They thought he was right — and were delighted to find that others around town agreed with them.
“I was surprised other people in Laredo think like I do,” Magnon said...
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