Florida Rep. Mara Elvira Salazar has launched a new campaign ad aimed directly at President Donald Trump, accusing his administration of taking immigration enforcement too far even as federal agents finally begin to carry out the border security agenda Republicans have long promised voters.
According to The Gateway Pundit, the South Florida Republican released the spot, using it to lecture the president whose policies have delivered a secure border and record Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests. In the ad, Salazar claims that in July 50 percent of the 50,000 people that were detained had no criminal record, warns that the same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today, and then pivots to the same policy she has championed for years: allowing illegal aliens to remain in the United States and granting them a dignified life in this promised land.
Her central talking point that many ICE detainees supposedly have no criminal record mirrors a favorite narrative of corporate media and open-borders activists. Associated Press, citing ICE data compiled by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA, reported 49,571 arrests in July, the highest monthly total of Trumps second term, and said more than half of those arrested had no U.S. criminal conviction and no pending U.S. criminal charge.
Far-left CBS News likewise highlighted that July was the first month of the second Trump term in which individuals held solely on civil immigration violations comprised more than half of ICE arrests. What these headlines consistently omit is the basic legal reality that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been repeating for months.
A DHS spokesman told CBS: ICE enforces the law as written. What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is whether or not they are illegally in the U.S. full stop. The same statement added: Many of the individuals that are counted as non-criminals are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters and more; they just dont have a rap sheet in the U.S.
DHS and the White House have further emphasized that media tallies of non-criminal detainees ignore foreign convictions, INTERPOL notices, gang membership, and human-rights abusers who have simply never had the chance to build a U.S. criminal record. Illegal presence itself is the violation ICE is funded to enforce, and folding that population into an emotional narrative about people with no criminal record allows amnesty advocates to recast a law-enforcement success as a humanitarian crisis.
The Gateway Pundit has tracked Salazars record on this issue since she first unveiled her bipartisan Dignity Act / DIGNIDAD Act with Democrat Rep. Veronica Escobar. In July 2025, TGPs Jordan Conradson reported that Salazar introduced the bill as an earned opportunity for millions of illegal aliens to stay and work, while insisting, with a straight face, that work authorization and renewable legal status is not amnesty.
Days later, TGPs Cullen Linebarger documented Salazar stating the long-term objective on South Florida television: We give them dignity. At some point in the future, another legislator will write another law to give them a path to citizenship. In April 2026, TGP founder Jim Hoft reported that one section of Salazars proposal would allow illegal aliens deported under President Trump since January 2017 to flood back into the United States, and he listed the House Republicans who signed onto the measure.
Salazar is now taking that same amnesty-friendly argument straight at the president, on camera, in the middle of a renewed push to restore the rule of law at the border. She represents Floridas 27th District a district Trump carried yet she is airing an ad telling that same president his enforcement has gone too far and that his Hispanic coalition feels betrayed because ICE is arresting people who are in the country illegally.
For conservatives who fought for years to elect leaders willing to secure the border, Salazars message underscores a familiar problem inside the Republican Party: lawmakers who campaign as border hawks at home while advancing de facto amnesty in Washington. Her latest ad does not merely question tactics; it challenges the core principle that immigration laws should be enforced as written, raising the stakes for GOP voters who must now decide whether they stand with Trumps enforcement agenda or with a bipartisan establishment still intent on rewarding illegal entry with legal status and, eventually, citizenship.
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