From dignity to a heavy hand: Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar’s shifting views on immigration

At the Republican convention in Milwaukee a few weeks ago, a verbal slip went unnoticed during a panel on the importance of the Latino vote in the United States with two House representatives, Monica de la Cruz, from Texas, and Maria Elvira Salazar, from Florida’s 27th district, south of Miami. It was a routine campaign chat. But in the middle of the nearly 40-minute conversation, when the topic of migration was being discussed, Salazar said forcefully: “Those who just came in and belong to El Tren de Aragua, we should kill them.” Then she caught herself and added: “We should pull them by the hair and kick them out.” The quick self-correction left the incident as little more than an anecdote, but those few seconds of the conversation reflect the constant changes in immigration rhetoric that the congresswoman must make in order, on the one hand, to be in line with the party’s most aggressive stance —directly and openly dictated by former president and Republican candidate Donald Trump— and, on the other, to demonstrate a little more moderation in appealing to her voters, who are mostly Latinos and migrants.

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