New survey finds rising pessimism among U.S. Hispanics
Nov 24, 2025, 3:30 PM | Updated: 4:18 pm
As the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term comes to a close, two new polls from the Pew Research Center find that Hispanic adults are increasingly unhappy with the way his administration is handling the economy and immigration, issues that were key for voters during last year’s election.
The surveys of more than 5,000 Hispanic adults in the U.S., conducted in October and September, found that a year after Trump eroded the Democrats’ traditional advantage with Latino voters, most Hispanic adults are feeling worse about their place in the country, and they’re more likely to be worried that they or someone close to them could be deported than they were earlier this year.
About two-thirds of Hispanic adults overall disapprove of the Trump administration’s approach to immigration, while 61% say his economic policies have made conditions worse.
Hispanic voters shifted toward Trump in the 2024 election, though a majority still backed Democrat Kamala Harris. According to AP VoteCast, 43% of Hispanic voters nationally supported Trump, up from 35% in the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
The vast majority of Hispanics who reported voting for Trump in 2024 — 81% — approve of the president’s job performance, although that’s declined from 93% at the start of his second term. Nearly all Hispanic Harris voters disapprove of Trump’s performance.
Pew’s findings echo an October survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which found that 25% of Hispanic adults have a “somewhat” or “very” favorable view of Trump, down from 44% in an AP-NORC poll conducted just before the Republican took office in January.
The shift in opinion underscores how worried and dissatisfied many Hispanic adults feel. Although many Hispanic voters were motivated by economic concerns in last year’s election, recent polls indicate that Hispanic adults continue to feel higher financial stress than Americans overall.
Hispanic voters made up 10% of the electorate in 2024, according to AP VoteCast, and the number of eligible Hispanic voters has been growing rapidly in recent decades.
About two-thirds of Hispanic adults say the situation for Hispanics in the U.S. is worse than it was a year ago. That’s higher than in 2019, during Trump’s first term, when 39% thought U.S. Hispanics’ situation had worsened over the past year.
Similarly, about 8 in 10 Hispanic adults say Trump’s policies harm more than help them. These views are more negative than in 2019, when about 7 in 10 said the first Trump administration’s policies were more harmful to Hispanics than helpful.
The Hispanics who are Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party overwhelmingly think U.S. Hispanics are worse off, as a group, than they were a year ago, but so do 43% of Hispanic Republicans and Republican-leaners.
Over the past few months, Hispanic communities have been a target of the president’s hard-line immigration tactics.
Today, 44% of Latinos adults are immigrants, numbering 21.1 million, according to a Pew analysis of U.S. Census Bureau estimates from the 2024 American Community Survey.
Amid the heightened enforcement, 52% of Hispanic adults say they worry “a lot” or “some” that they, a family member or a close friend could be deported. This is up from 42% in March.
The tough immigration environment has also affected the way some Hispanic adults live their everyday lives, with 19% saying they have recently changed their daily activities because they think they’ll be asked to prove their legal status, and 11% saying they carry documents proving their citizenship or immigration status more often than they normally would.
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The Pew Research Center survey of 8,046 U.S. adults, including 4,923 Hispanics, was conducted Oct. 6-16 using samples drawn from the probability-based American Trends Panel and SSRS Opinion Panel. A second survey of 3,445 U.S. adults, including 629 Hispanics, was conducted Sept. 22 to 28, 2025 using samples drawn from the probability-based American Trends Panel.
