Florida Rep. María Elvira Salazar just looked into a camera, approved the message, and told President Donald Trump his immigration enforcement has “gone too far.”
The South Florida Republican released a campaign ad Thursday, lecturing the president, who just delivered the secure border and record ICE arrests, her party spent years promising.
In the spot, Salazar claimed that in July “50 percent of the 50,000 people that were detained had no criminal record,” warned that “the same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today,” and then sold the same old product she has been pitching for years: keep illegal aliens here and give them “a dignified life in this promised land.”
WATCH:
The “No Criminal Record” Line Is a Media Favorite — and a Shell Game
Salazar’s ad leans on July ICE numbers that left-wing outlets have been blasting for weeks. Associated Press, using ICE figures compiled by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA, reported 49,571 arrests in July, the highest monthly total of Trump’s 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 separately reported that July was the first month of the second Trump term in which people held only on civil immigration violations made up more than half of ICE arrests.
What those headlines leave out is the part the Department of Homeland Security keeps repeating.
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 don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”
DHS and the White House have also noted that media “non-criminal” counts ignore foreign convictions, INTERPOL notices, gang membership, and human-rights abusers who never built a U.S. rap sheet.
Illegal presence itself is the violation ICE is paid to enforce. Folding that population into a sob story about “people with no criminal record” is how amnesty advocates turn a law-enforcement success into a moral panic.
The Gateway Pundit has been on this file since Salazar first rolled out her bipartisan “Dignity Act” / DIGNIDAD Act with Democrat Rep. Veronica Escobar.
In July 2025, TGP’s 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, TGP’s Cullen Linebarger caught her saying the quiet part out loud 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 a section of Salazar’s amnesty vehicle would let illegal aliens deported under President Trump since January 2017 flood back into the United States, and listed the House Republicans who signed on.
Now she is taking the same argument straight at the president on camera.
Salazar represents Florida’s 27th District. Trump carried it. She is now running an ad that tells 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.
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