SAN DIEGO — Democrats take Latino voters for granted. But Republicans must take us for fools.

Burned by both parties, U.S. Latinos are political nomads who don't feel like we can let our guard down in our own country. In this land of the free, we're in a kind of psychological prison.

Oh, one more thing: We're really pissed off.

If you thought that President Donald Trump could hold on to his record-high support from Latino voters — while his administration is rounding up hundreds of thousands of Latinos, including U.S. citizens, because they have brown skin — I've got a big, beautiful border wall to sell you.

CNN's chief data analyst Harry Enten isn't buying it. He has the numbers to prove that Trump is now persona non grata with most Latinos. This week, Enten shared polls showing that Trump — who just one year ago got as much as 48% of the Latino vote against his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris — is now dramatically underwater with that group.

According to a CBS News/YouGov poll, Trump's overall approval rating with Latinos is -34%. When it comes to his handling of immigration, his approval rating sinks to -38%.

Enten was stunned. Obviously, Latinos are furious at Trump over his heavy-handed crackdown on immigrants — and anyone else who fits the profile.

"In their mind, he is doing something absolutely wrong when it comes to immigration," Enten said.

The anti-Trump sentiment among Latinos trickled down to gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia. Both contests were won by Democrats, with strong Latino support.

Enten is half right about what caused the dropoff of Latino support for Trump. Immigration is part of it, for sure.

Indeed, given such aggressive immigration enforcement, it would have been quite the magic trick for Trump to stay in the good graces of Latinos. Intoxicated by cruelty, violence, and disrespect, thousands of power-hungry agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol have wiped their boots on the things that Latinos value. They arrest people in front of schools as parents pick up their kids, in courthouses where migrants try to get right with the law, and at job sites where workers do jobs Americans won't do. They snatch up dark-skinned people off the street and stake out Latino-owned businesses to arrest customers.

All this is happening without warrants, and as the body snatchers — who are often out of shape, or over the hill — hide their true identities behind masks to protect themselves from criminal penalties and civil consequences. They wear costume vests with generic markings that say things like "police" that look like they came from a surplus store.

It's no wonder the FBI recently sounded the alarm about unscrupulous individuals posing as ICE agents to prey on immigrants. By the way, if you're keeping score at home, we now have criminals posing as ICE agents even as ICE agents continue to pose as real law enforcement officers. There is a lot of posing.

Immigration officials are even detaining U.S. citizens who allegedly interfere with their "investigations." Interfere is a fancy word for recording immigration raids. Investigation is a self-aggrandizing term for asking someone: "Where were you born?"

It's a trick question. The millions of legal immigrants who "played by the rules" to get here and then became naturalized U.S. citizens were all born somewhere else.

The immigration officials are doing all this and more as they desperately attempt to meet their daily quota of 3,000 arrests.

Even with all the mayhem, they're nowhere close. According to the Department of Homeland Security, daily immigration arrests are hovering near 1,200.

So there's a strong case to be made that immigration alone cooked Trump's goose with Latino voters.

But there is more to it. There's also a soft economy, and Trump's failure to tame inflation. And there are the cultural issues, on which Trump spends too much time. And there is the recent government shutdown for which Trump and Republicans caught most of the blame, and the fact that many of the federal workers who didn't get paid for 43 days are Latino. And there is the racism that has been uncorked in America, where white people now say out loud what they have for years been thinking to themselves.

Finally, there's the fact that, while Harris — and before her, former President Joe Biden — had low appeal among Latinos, they're not in the picture anymore. Now Latinos can evaluate Trump on his own merits — or lack thereof.

Not as the lesser of two evils. Just evil.

To find out more about Ruben Navarrette and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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