Texan voters once believed Trump's 'lies' but they're now ready to vote Democrat

As he prepared to leave his home in Houston, Lorenzo Salgado Sr had just over an hour to live.

The construction worker started July 7 the same way he had for the last 30 years. He woke up, grabbed his lunch and a coffee and left the house before 6am to put in another hard day's work.

On the way, he was followed by unmarked vehicles. By 7am, he was fatally shot.

He's the second person to be killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Texas this year.

Salgado Sr was an undocumented Houston construction worker who had lived in the US for 30 years, his sons say being arrested by ICE was his biggest fear.

Instead they killed him.

CCTV shows an unmarked vehicle pursuing Lorenzo's van, but there is no footage of the actual shooting. The agent who shot him through the passenger side window was not wearing a body camera.

Authorities claimed that Lorenzo drove towards an ICE agent.

"That doesn't sound like our dad," Lorenzo Jr says.

"Our dad had a great respect for the law. 

"Had he known that these were officers, he would've stopped. He would've complied, but these officers failed to identify themselves."

Ronaldo Salgado thinks his dad thought he was being robbed.

"I imagine him being scared of someone trying to steal his van, his tools, that morning, and I am fairly confident that some of his last thoughts were about us, because he cared a lot about us.

"He cared a lot about his wife, our mum, and I know he worried about him leaving us alone."

Four months on Lorenzo Jr wants America's Latino population to do just one thing to remember his father: vote.

"Voting is voluntary, so at least in some of the lower income neighbourhoods that are accustomed to not being heard, they feel that their votes don't matter," he tells 7.30.

"I think voter turnout is going to make the difference."

At the 2024 US presidential election America's Latino community was split between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

But at the midterms polls suggest Latinos will heavily favour the Democratic Party, largely because of a backlash against widespread immigration arrests and the deaths of at least nine people by ICE operations since Donald Trump was elected to a second term in the White House.

Living in fear

The arrests and killings have up-ended America's Latino communities. 

In Texas alone, more than 100,000 people have been detained by ICE agents in the past two years. Many of those arrested have been deported.

In south Texas, the prospect of being targeted by ICE has left many in the Latino community frightened.

At the sprawling Mercadome Flea Market in Alamo, near the Mexico border, customers are staying away.

ICE has arrested people in the car park of the market, says Rosa Martinez, who sells shoes and clothing.

"It's very slow.The sales have gone down, I think maybe 70 per cent," Ms Martinez tells 7.30. 

"Nobody wants to deal with firearms and stuff like that. People get scared."

And nobody seems immune from immigration arrests — even Sister Letty Ugboaja, a nun from Nigeria who was arrested on her way to the Our Lady of Sorrows church in McAllen, Texas.

After a flurry of phone calls, Sister Letty was eventually released. Most of those detained are not so fortunate.

Parents have been arrested after dropping their children at school.

The church now asks parents to fill in a form allowing someone else to collect their children, just in case they are arrested after drop-off before eventually being deported.

"We don't call them illegal, we call them undocumented," says Father Jorge Gomez, the rector of the Basilica of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle.

"People have been here for 30 or 40 years and they were never in need of a document. Now they are.

"Mothers are afraid that the husband is not going to come back home after his job because there's a lot of raids, taking people, deporting people, mostly men, when they get out of work, a restaurant or a construction site or a store.

"We have a lot of mothers left behind with two or three kids that are in need, because the breadwinner has been deported or is in the process of being deported."

The evaporation of a workforce

As well as exacting a human toll, the arrests have had a significant impact on the construction industry in south Texas.

Local builder Mario Guerrero has lost much of his workforce. A construction project in Phar, Texas, is taking years longer than it should.

"We should have been done in year one because it doesn't take much to build these apartments," Mr Guerrero says.

"It's taking long to build because we don't have the proper labour force right now."

His skilled workforce, hired through sub-contractors, has evaporated.

He says ICE detains everyone on a job site, legal or not, and releases them only when they can prove they're in America legally.

Mr Guerrero voted for Trump two years ago — partly, because he vowed to stop the wave of refugees and migrants coming across the southern border but he says the wave of arrests will drive people to vote for the Democrats.

"Biden was a failure," Mr Guerrero says.

"He opened our borders. Nobody wanted that. Nobody wants open borders. So when Trump was like, 'we're gonna stop that. We're gonna close that. We're gonna send them all back.' Of course we want them to go back, but we never thought that he was gonna terrorise people that were here already working and, and providing a better living for their families."

'Make Quinceaneras great again'

Now the blue wave appears to be surging.

Three Texas Congressional districts may fall to the Democrats, including some that were gerrymandered to favour Republican candidates.

In the Fifteenth Congressional District, the party is pinning its hopes on a former teen idol, Tejano singer Bobby Pulido.

Early in the campaign, Pulido was mocked by his Republican rival as not worthy of being a congressman because he was merely "a quinceanera act". Quinceaneras are coming of age celebrations for 15-year-old girls.

Mr Pulido embraced the jibe and performs at quinceaneras most weekends as part of his campaign.

"That's when he said, "Well, let's make quinceaneras great again'," says Sandra Riviera, wearing a hat with the same slogan. 

Mr Pulido estimates he's since performed at 80 quinceaneras.

At a recent Saturday night rally in south Texas, he had a plea for his supporters.

"This election is so important for everybody to get out and vote," he tells them.

"Everybody comes up to me, 'Yeah, you got this in the bag'. No, we don't. We do not have this in the bag.

"If we don't show up and vote with an urgency that [is what] we really truly need to go out and do."

'Real change' putting an end to 'lies'

The rise of Mr Pulido and the south Texas Democrats is music to the ears of Julio Garcia, a committed Democratic supporter who has spent much of the past two years engaged in a peaceful, albeit noisy, protest against Mr Trump.

He rides high through local streets in his truck decorated with anti-Trump signs and has had an air-horn retrofitted to the vehicle so he can respond loudly whenever someone gives him a wave or a honk.

"There's a lot of Latinos who voted for Trump," Mr Garcia says.

"They believed his lies."

He says that is no longer the case, judging by how often he's sounding his horn as the election gets closer.

"They are frightened of ICE, because ICE has done such terrible things," he says.

"ICE has gone up … to people's homes and workplaces, and they've taken innocent people."

Father Gomez is careful not to criticise Mr Trump or his policies but he is unhappy with the way the laws are being enforced, which he says has been "inhuman".

"Some people are being killed when they're [immigration enforcement] just trying to go and get them. Some of them haven't been running." 

Back in Houston, the Salgado brothers regularly visit a roadside memorial for their father.

They've been buoyed by the public reaction: every day there are are more flowers or tributes to their dad, left at where he was shot and killed.

"I hope that we've done enough to encourage enough people to vote, at least here in our communities," says Ronaldo Salgado.

"And if our message spreads across the United States, to think of immigrants, to think of our dad, to think of everyone else's family members who've been killed by ICE, to think of them as they head to the polls … hopefully some real change can happen."

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