Steve Cortes, founder of the League of American Workers and senior advisor to Catholic Vote, said the Republican Party has undergone a historic transformation into the party of workers driven by a surging Hispanic coalition, and warned that holding that coalition together demands delivering on economic promises, securing the border, and confronting China’s predatory trade practices.
“They’re here to stay if we deliver,” Cortes said on the Restoration Spotlight Podcast by Restoration News. “If the Republican party, if the America First movement, if patriotic populism as a philosophy delivers the results that these people are looking for. But they don’t display some sort of lasting loyalty to the Republican brand.”
Cortes said the transformation of Starr County, Texas, the most Hispanic county in America, perfectly illustrates the historic scale of the Latino shift toward Trump.
“In 2016, Hillary Clinton walloped Donald Trump in Star County, won by 60 points,” he said. “Come 2020, Joe Biden still wins the county, but it’s plus 16. Trump’s going to win this place in 2024, and he did. He did by double digits.”
Trump won 48 percent of Latino voters in 2024, his best performance among Hispanics of any Republican presidential candidate in modern times, after losing the group by 25 points to Joe Biden in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center.
Cortes said the key to reaching Hispanic voters is simple and has been overlooked by Republican strategists for decades.
“The same things that work with a working-class white voter in Michigan are the same things that are going to work with a bad ombre in Arizona,” he said. “Thankfully, we have become the party of workers. The GOP has been transformed.”
Cortes said polling shows Hispanic support for mass deportations is far stronger than most media coverage suggests.
“The overall population in the latest national polling I’ve done is at 62% in favor of mass deportations,” he said. “Among Hispanics, still getting well above 50%, still getting a strong majority, and in some cases even a super majority of Hispanics who support mass deportation.”
Cortes said the ruling class tolerated mass illegal immigration for decades because they personally benefited from cheap labor while working-class Americans paid the price.
“If these illegal aliens were coming across the border and they were, say, journalists, lawyers, bankers, that border would have been hermetically sealed in a nanosecond,” he said. “Because they were taking jobs away from working-class masses and depressing their wages, the decision makers of America didn’t care.”
China’s predatory trade practices eliminated 3.7 million American jobs between 2001 and 2018, with nearly three-quarters of those losses concentrated in manufacturing, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Cortes said the FBI’s targeting of traditional Catholics under Biden was not a localized mistake but a deliberate nationwide policy.
“This was an FBI memo that went out to thousands of FBI employees,” he said. “This was not just Richmond; it wasn’t one office, it wasn’t a few rogue players. This was an FBI-wide policy.”
The Biden-era FBI anti-Catholic Richmond memo was distributed to more than 1,000 FBI employees nationwide, and anti-Catholic terminology was found in at least 13 additional FBI documents and five attachments, according to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley.
Cortes said tariffs are not only economically justified but are an essential tool for punishing China’s decades of predatory trade practices against American workers.
“The Chinese Communist Party, with the full cooperation and complicity of the ruling class of America, has been abusing American workers for decades through predatory trade practices,” he said. “Tariffs are not a dirty word. Protectionism is not a dirty word.”
Cortes, known as the voice of the deplorables, is the founder of the League of American Workers and a senior advisor to Catholic Vote, who served as spokesman and senior advisor for Hispanic outreach on both the Trump 2016 and 2020 campaigns. A Georgetown graduate and former on-air broadcaster for Fox News and CNN, he is a leading voice for patriotic populism and America First economics.
Restoration News is an investigative outlet affiliated with Restoration of America, covering cultural issues, political funding, and border policy for conservative readers, with an emphasis on stories it says receive limited mainstream media coverage.
