Amid deportations and Trump’s lagging popularity, one Koch-backed group has recruited Michigan Latinos to reach more than a hundred thousand voters for Mike Rogers.%2520(1).jpg)
One Saturday morning in late August, Ricardo Alfaro, an immigrant from El Salvador, approached a low-slung white house in Holland, Michigan. The place looked as if it had been the site of a party: a fire pit in the driveway still smelled of smoke, and cans of Modelo were strewn across the concrete. A resident named Veronica Cruz appeared at the door holding a baby and a stick of string cheese. Alfaro said that he was there to stump for Mike Rogers, a former Republican congressman now running for Senate in Michigan, against Abdul El-Sayed. “He’s focussed on the American Dream—I think that’s something that we share, as Latinos,” Alfaro told Cruz, in Spanish. As Alfaro gave his spiel about how Rogers would slash regulations, reduce government interference, and reform the American immigration system, Cruz studied a door hanger that he’d given her as the baby bit into the cheese stick. “So,” she said, “there’s more elections? This November?”
Alfaro, who’s twenty-seven and the youth director at an evangelical church, has decided to devote his time to turning Latinos into Republican voters. “Maybe you see things on the news, or on social media, but you’re not getting the facts or reliable information—that’s what we want to share with you,” he told Cruz. He introduced himself as a volunteer, but he is the Michigan strategic director for the Libre Initiative, a center-right group that’s affiliated with Charles Koch’s political-action committee Americans for Prosperity. In the past fifteen years, Libre has captured a significant share of the market for Latino voter-turnout operations on the right, with a presence in thirteen states, including all the electoral battlegrounds. Although Libre originated in Texas, a state with more than twelve million Latino residents, the organization chose not to funnel its money into the Senate contest there this fall. Daniel Garza, Libre’s founder and president, said that campaigning statewide for Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general and the Republican candidate for Senate, would have been too expensive, and that the group could have more of an effect on other races. But, “if Paxton loses by a point, two, three points, I won’t be sleeping at night for at least a year,” he told me.
Libre also inhabits a kind of bubble in the electoral ecosystem. It is one of the largest efforts on the right dedicated to motivating Latinos to vote for conservative and libertarian ideals, but its policy goals, such as enacting comprehensive immigration reform and reducing the size of the government, are at odds with President Donald Trump’s efforts to build and execute the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, in addition to other aspects of his agenda, such as his tariff program and the war with Iran. In Grand Rapids, Alfaro introduced me to Miguel Mota, a barbershop owner who voted for Trump but has grown frustrated with him over immigration policy—he’s heard that some of his own clients have been detained. Mota told me that he liked Rogers because he talked about his faith, but Trump was a different matter. “The Bible says, ‘From the abundance of your heart your mouth shall speak,’ ” he said of the President. “You just have to listen to him talk to see what he has inside.” (Rogers declined to be interviewed or clarify whether his position on immigration differed from the President’s.)
In the past, there was a natural place within the G.O.P. for Libre, which is “trying to carve out a more pro-immigrant—in addition, a more pro-Hispanic—wing of the Republicans,” Carlos Odio, a co-founder of Equis Research, which tracks Latino public sentiment, said. “There’s not a space for that now, right? There’s MAGA or bust.” Yet the Party stands to lose Latino voters who coalesced for Trump in 2024; his approval rating among Hispanic voters has fallen as low as twenty-six per cent, according to a recent Times survey. According to Equis, deportations are a significant reason for that drop—though Latinos aren’t particularly enthusiastic about Democrats, either. “Libre is filling a role that the Republican Party is either, one, too stupid to see they need that,” Michael Farage, the ethnic vice-chairman of the Michigan G.O.P., said. “Or, No. 2, they just don’t care. I’m confused, because sometimes you think people aren’t this stupid, but then when you talk to people, then you find out they are that stupid.” (Farage claims to be related to the British politician Nigel Farage; Nigel, through his office, said he had no evidence of their relation.)
Garza, whose parents came from Mexico to the U.S. as migrant farmworkers, told me he finds some of the deportations that the Administration has undertaken difficult to stomach—specifically those involving women and children, and people who have not committed any crimes. “That’s where the rubber hits the road,” he said over dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Grand Rapids. Garza occasionally attends White House events and has spoken to the President, though he has not brought up these concerns to him. “You don’t have all the time in the world to have an extended conversation with the President,” he said, adding that he has discussed the subject with members of the White House’s political staff. “And they see it. They know.” Trump’s firing of Kristi Noem, he added, seemed to be partly a recognition from the White House that the deportation program had gone too far. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)
Yet Garza isn’t regretful about helping elect Trump—he voted for him three times and says he’d do it again if he could. Libre helped promote the tax portions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which, among other things, allocated seventy-five billion dollars in funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and sixty-five billion dollars to Customs and Border Protection. On the whole, Garza believes that the MAGA movement has benefitted Latinos more than anything Kamala Harris could have offered, and says that he agrees with Republicans on “eighty to ninety per cent of issues,” including the deportation of immigrants who have committed crimes.
At the same time, Garza hasn’t seen the G.O.P. invest enough money to build on Trump’s gains with Latinos in 2024. Republicans started “taking things for granted, like they just happen automatically,” he said. “This isn’t accidental, man.”
In his study at home in Mission, Texas, Garza keeps a collection of leather-bound volumes—the Iliad, the Odyssey, an assortment of Shakespeare plays, books on the fall of the Roman Empire. An illustrated version of “Don Quixote” sits open on a stand. At Libre’s office in Grand Rapids one Thursday in August, Garza, who wears thick-rimmed glasses and slicks back his hair, stood in front of some sixteen volunteers wearing yellow shirts and quoted Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary: “Tierra y libertad,” or “Land and liberty.” They were the same principles, he said, that the U.S. Constitution reflected. “We can’t stay quiet while other Latinos are pushing the idea that we need more government, that we should be more dependent on the state, that our money should be centralized, and that more power should be in the hands of politicians,” he said in Spanish. “Ya basta.” Sitting at round tables, the volunteers, many of them immigrants, opened an app on their phones that gave them a call list and a script. “I wanted to know if you knew Mike Rogers?” one woman said into her phone. “Your call has ended,” the program replied.
Many of the volunteers I met had arrived in the United States within the past ten years. The atmosphere in the office felt similar to that of a Bible-study group: there were trays of chicken nuggets, mac and cheese, and salad near the entrance, and the organization had bought a birthday cake for one of the volunteers, who said that she wanted to spend the day with Libre, “en familia.” Some people had met Alfaro through his church; others discovered the organization through its nonprofit arm, which has provided community services in places with growing immigrant populations—English lessons, driver’s-education courses, and classes for the U.S. citizenship exam, among others. The group declined to share its operating budget—Americans for Prosperity, one of its backers, has raised about ninety million dollars this year—though Garza clarified that Libre doesn’t receive funds from the Trump family. In some ways, he said, the fact that Koch had been such a prominent and visible donor had shielded the identities of the others.
Garza was born in California, while his parents were working the grape season there. He grew up in Washington and travelled often due to his parents’ itinerant work; by the time he was seventeen, he’d missed so much school that he dropped out and joined his father in the fields, where he saw incidents of Americans taking advantage of the workers. But he also grew skeptical of the labor-rights movement led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. Its members could be inflexible and doctrinaire, he thought; at one point, his parents stopped associating with them because the activists decided to march under the banner of the Virgen de Guadalupe, and they were evangelicals. He later became a police officer, a city councilman in Toppenish, Washington, and a public liaison officer in the George W. Bush White House.
After Garza started Libre, in 2011, as a partner of the Americans for Prosperity network, the backlash from Latinos on the left was swift. By 2015, as Trump launched his Presidential run, Huerta was telling Univision: “They are against the Latino community.” That same year, Hillary Clinton’s campaign officials acknowledged that they needed to figure out a way to match the group’s organizing. “The reality is that Libre is VERY good,” Clinton’s national political director wrote in an e-mail to leadership. “They have finally figured out the FOX approach to Latinos.” Albert Morales, a former Hispanic-engagement director for the Democratic National Committee, and a friend of Garza’s, remembers, after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, seeing images of Libre volunteers greeting victims at Florida airports with merchandise. Meanwhile, he said, Democrats in Florida, such as Senator Bill Nelson, who was running for reëlection, had done little outreach to Latinos. “I remember the campaign manager telling me, ‘You’re the one who requested this call.’ And I knew then, this one’s gone,” Morales said. (Nelson’s former campaign manager called this claim “inaccurate and laughable.”)
Garza told me that other Latinos often accuse him of catering to white people to earn their praise, but this doesn’t bother him. Even when Huerta came out against him, he said he was neither surprised nor dismayed. “It’s not like I’m fighting for white people,” he told me. “I’m fighting for my own people—and sometimes white people get it right, goddamit!” But he bristles at the suggestion that he uses Latinos to advance Republican causes. That was the impression that Eric Kas, a voter in Grand Rapids, got when Garza and a few Libre canvassers knocked at his door. Kas had questions for the group, such as whether Garza was paying people to canvass, whether Libre was a Republican group, and what the “Hispanic connection” to Mike Rogers could possibly be.
Also: “Do you accept money from super PACs?” Kas asked.
“So,” Garza said, “we are a PAC.”
Kas chuckled; the two had a spirited debate over the influence of money in politics before parting ways. But, after Kas looked into the group and saw that it was linked to the Koch family, he told me his first impression was reinforced. “It just made sense that this was why a group of Latinos may want to walk through our neighborhood to share information by Mike Rogers,” he said. When I relayed Kas’s comments to Garza, he found them insulting. “We’re not the property of the left,” he said.
Latino Democrats have long complained that campaigns and political-action committees wait until just a few weeks before the election to begin persuading and turning out the community. Morales, the former D.N.C. official, told me that Libre has been successful, in part, because Garza knows how to persuade donors to provide a steady stream of funding year after year, regardless of whether there are elections happening. Tim Marroquin, the only Latino member of Holland’s city council, said he worried that Libre had resources that El-Sayed’s campaign would not be able to match: in August, he showed me a WhatsApp group called “Latinos for Abdul” that had eleven members and a scant few messages. (The group, now housed on Slack, has grown to a hundred and fourteen members.)
In an interview in August, El-Sayed said that he was formalizing his campaign’s outreach to Latinos; since then, he has hired a Latino-outreach director. “Our party has talked about being a big tent, but we organize people by putting them on the outside of the tent, and then we go and pander to them on particular issues, rather than bringing them to the center tentpole around what it looks like to afford their life,” he said. El-Sayed has campaigned on abolishing ICE, but Marroquin, who hosted a meet and greet for him, said that he would do well to focus on cost-of-living issues. “Those are everyday issues,” Marroquin said. “They transcend all identities.”
Somos Votantes, an advocacy organization with a nonprofit arm, is attempting to adapt the Libre playbook for the left. (The PAC is supported by the Soros family.) Melissa Morales, the organization’s founder and president, told me over coffee in Washington, D.C., that Republicans have been smart in “recognizing that people aren’t interested in an ideological victory; they’re interested in a system that works, or a system that’s meeting their needs in the immediate.” A former union organizer, Morales recently announced that Somos is investing three million dollars into campaigning efforts in Michigan. The nonprofit arm recently announced a program through which Michigan residents could apply for up to a thousand dollars to pay their utility bills, partly inspired by the stimulus checks that Trump issued during the COVID-19 lockdown. Morales recalled that, after her father cashed his check, he told her that it was the most money he’d ever held in his hands.
In August, at a Somos Votantes event at a Latino community center in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the group announced its utility-bill initiative and gave out free backpacks, food, and haircuts for back-to-school season. Cynthia Portillo, a single mother of six, told me that she sat out the 2024 election because she saw an ad stating that Harris wanted to allow trans children to use the bathroom of their choice. Portillo said that she didn’t know much about the upcoming Senate race, and wished that the event could offer more information about it (because the event was under Somos’s nonprofit banner, campaign materials were not allowed). But she did plan to fill out an application for the check.
On September 15th, Libre threw a quinceañera for itself at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, in downtown D.C. About three hundred people were there to fête the Latino conservative movement, including Alfaro and Coen from Michigan, but there was an edge of precarity in the room. Two members of Congress whom Libre had helped elect were honored at the party—Juan Ciscomani, of Arizona, and Monica De La Cruz, of Texas, both of whom face challenging races this fall. At her table, De La Cruz swiped away tears from her eyes when Garza acknowledged her. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy sat at a table near the front, as his wife, the Fox News personality Rachel Campos-Duffy, m.c.’d. At the end, Charles Koch appeared on screens at either side of the stage to congratulate Garza, before he was presented with a legacy award. Libre was the “Paul Revere of the conservative movement,” Campos-Duffy said. “We at Libre have been saying, ‘The Commies are coming! The Commies are coming!’ ” she said.
Calling Democrats Communists isn’t new, but it seems to be a safer bet for a Republican in 2026 than breaking with the President over immigration. (After a Latina Republican incumbent in Miami cut an ad saying that Trump’s policies had gone too far, the President amplified criticisms of her on social media.) In Michigan, Garza said he wouldn’t recommend that Rogers distance himself from Trump to win over Latinos. “Maybe he will show an attraction to Latino voters, but you’re going to lose so much more in the white base that it’s going to offset whatever you gain,” he said. “He would lose in the end.”
Garza believes that Libre still has room to influence the G.O.P., and says that his group has prevailed on certain policy debates over school choice, lowering taxes, driving up energy production, and expanding telehealth access for Latinos in rural areas. But “ultimately, they chose Donald Trump, not Daniel Garza, to run the country,” he said. “And so Donald Trump gets to decide what the policies are at the end of the day.”
Albert Morales said that if Democrats win the midterms, Trump will become a lame duck—which could give Libre an opening to influence the 2028 primary. “I can see a world where they come out early in support of Rubio for the nomination—and just think of the machine they have in place for him when that primary begins,” he said. “The lights are still going to be on at Libre on November 4th, whereas some of our organizations, who are running ads right now and have field campaigns going—they’re going to shut down,” Morales added. “It’s just the way we operate.” ◆
