Benny Melendez is a Trump voter who says he can no longer run his south Texas construction company like nothing is happening. Since Trump returned to the White House, he says immigration officers have detained workers at his job sites and while he drives company trucks, and since the beginning of 2025, more than 10 workers have been deported. For Melendez, the calculus flipped from politics to operations, and quickly: the fear, the disruption, and the practical reality of not being able to staff jobs pushed him to abandon support for Trump and Republicans and instead back Democrat James Talarico in this year’s U.S. Senate election.

Melendez is not alone in that story, and the new poll behind it is the kind of datapoint that makes campaigns blink. In a survey commissioned by the U.S. Hispanic Business Council and shared first with POLITICO, one in five Hispanic business owners in Texas say they’ve had an employee deported in the past year. Seven in ten also say their businesses have been impacted by Trump’s tariffs. Among respondents, Talarico holds a seven-point lead over Attorney General Ken Paxton, the GOP nominee, even though a plurality of the over 1,000 respondents self-identify as Republican. That mix matters because it suggests this is not a niche protest vote. It is showing up inside a community that has historically been politically meaningful for Republicans.

The survey was conducted from June 2 to 15 and included 1,012 Texas-based USHBC members, spanning owners in construction, food services, retail, manufacturing, and other industries. Respondents pointed to both the emotional and financial pressure created by the deportation push. Javier Palomarez, president and CEO of USHBC, framed the business impact bluntly: if a small business has around 10 people and even one is deported, it hits morale and fear levels in a way that can paralyze operations. That is a subtle but real leadership challenge for executives: even if you can keep the same contracts, you can still lose momentum when staffing gets unpredictable and the workplace feels unsafe.

Layer in the tariff angle and the picture gets harder to manage. Seventy percent reporting tariff impact implies that for many firms, the cost pressure is not just labor related. When costs rise and workforce stability drops at the same time, cash flow problems tend to follow, then project timelines stretch, then customers feel the delay. In that context, Palomarez’s point that this fear-based disruption is “debilitating” does not read like politics. It reads like risk management. You can see why one of the clearest concerns is not only whether deportations happen, but whether they keep happening unpredictably.

Politics, meanwhile, is catching up to the operator reality. The survey is described as the clearest sign yet of Paxton’s vulnerability among Texas’ Hispanic business community, against a backdrop of broader signs that Hispanic voters around the country are swinging hard against him, tied to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and a shaky economy. Earlier polling supports that the issue is alive on the ground. A New York Times/Siena poll released last month showed Paxton and Talarico tied overall, while Hispanic voters showed Talarico leading by 32 points. In 2024, Trump won Texas Latinos by 10 points. So the direction of travel is not incremental. It is a reversal from last cycle.

Paxton has stayed in a hardline lane on immigration. The source notes he has doubled down on his controversial Texas immigration law and has sued to stop publicly funded legal defense for undocumented immigrants. A Paxton spokesperson, Madison Cercy, said in a statement that Hispanic voters want “lower taxes, less regulation, affordable energy, and a strong economy,” arguing that Paxton has a “proven record” on those priorities while Talarico has opposed tax-cutting policies. Cercy’s statement also included claims about Talarico, saying he declared that “God is non-binary” and “six biological sexes,” and the spokesperson said once voters hear the “truth,” it will “kill Talacreepo’s campaign.” Talarico, for his part, offered a message directly aimed at small business and immigration policy: “We should be supporting Hispanic small businesses - not crushing them under the weight of high costs and failed immigration policies,” he said, and told Hispanic communities that if they feel “conned” or “let down by both political parties,” they have “a place in this campaign.”

Zoom in on south Texas and the operator-to-politics link gets sharper. The source explains that Trump’s 2024 victory in heavily Latino border communities leaned on concerns about former President Joe Biden’s border policy, with Trump winning 14 of 18 border counties, including Starr County, a 90-percent Latino county that Clinton won with 79 percent in 2016 and that had not gone for a Republican since the 1890s. Now many say the interior enforcement policy has gone too far for them. In the USHBC poll, 70 percent of respondents had a negative view of immigration raids on the workforce, and the impact on families and businesses risks “kneebuckling” Republicans in border districts.

There is also an execution story inside the reporting. Earlier this year, construction executives in south Texas sounded the alarm on immigration enforcement. The source says some trade association leaders met with officials in the White House and Congress to discuss concerns in February, after which enforcement at worksites “subsided for several months,” according to executives. But activity ticked up again last month. Melendez says officers are now rounding up workers at construction sites and pulling over vehicles carrying work equipment like ladders. The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the characterization of enforcement.

To executives who are used to measuring elections in polling error bars, the deeper second-order implication here is workforce risk. Mario Guerrero, who leads the South Texas Builders Association with over 160 members across south Texas, says he knows it sounds “racist” but that the operational experience is that if you are brown, “they’re gonna stop you.” Another construction company owner, granted anonymity, called the arrest of a Catholic nun on her way to Sunday Mass the “final nail in the coffin” for many Hispanics who had voted for Republicans. And the source lists other local media stories of the crackdown, including an undocumented man in Houston shot and killed by an ICE officer, a mariachi musician in San Antonio detained after playing at a birthday party, and the nun detained in McAllen.

Even Republican voices are described as pushing back on the optics. GOP Rep. Monica de la Cruz wrote on Facebook that enforcement should target violent criminals and that “A Catholic nun on her way to church is not a threat to our community.” Meanwhile, Guerrero challenges the premise that deportations create jobs by pointing to the practical limits of labor substitution. His argument is operational, not ideological: when people say hire American citizens for foundation or concrete work, he says, “tell me what f-ing United States citizen is gonna want to go and pour concrete at 103 degrees down here in the valley.” Palomarez echoes the business reality, calling the “taking American jobs” notion “bullshit” and adding that south Texas GOP districts are paying because projects cannot get done without employees.

For decision-makers, the strategic stakes are simple: elections are being influenced by the credibility gap between what policymakers say the enforcement will do and what operators experience in staffing, morale, and costs. If one in five Hispanic business owners report deported employees in the past year, and if seven in ten report tariff impacts, you have a dual operating drag that can reshape not only votes but contract delivery, customer satisfaction, and local economic stability. That is why the Talarico over Paxton seven-point lead is not just a campaign scoreboard. It is a signal that business communities may increasingly treat immigration enforcement and trade policy as direct line items on their balance sheets.