President Biden and other Dem candidates face a “rude awakening” on Election Day from a massive wave of Hispanics set to vote Republican — because of lax US border policies, a top New York Latino said Sunday.
Biden’s disastrous immigration stance has caused an unrelenting surge of migrants to flood New York City and other urban areas across the country, leading more and more Hispanic voters who typically lean Democratic to defect from the party and instead back Donald Trump, said the Rev. Ruben Diaz Sr., a former Bronx councilman and state senator and current Trump surrogate.
Hispanics, as with other voters, object to people coming over the border “without papers” and diverting resources from citizens, said Diaz, a native of Puerto Rico, on 770 WABC’s “The Cats Roundtable.”
“Some of them are committing crimes,” he said of the migrants.
“This is going to be a rude awakening for the Democratic Party,” Diaz predicted.
“That is the worst thing that the Democratic Party and President Biden [have] done,” he said of the border crisis. “Maybe they thought that by opening the border, we, the Hispanic community, would be happy. But it has been the Achilles heel [for] them because now even the immigrants that are here are against them.
“Hispanics no longer support the Democratic Party as strong[ly] as they used to,” Diaz claimed.
A New York Times-Siena College national poll released last week backs Diaz’s assertion, with former President Trump leading Biden among Hispanic registered voters by 9 percentage points (50%-41%).
Even the gap between Hispanic likely voters has narrowed, with 47% for Biden and 46% for Trump as the pair race for the White House.
By comparison, Biden won nearly 60 percent of the Hispanic vote when the candidates ran against each other in 2020.
Diaz, president of the 150-member Bronx-based Hispanic Clergy Association, is a pentecostal minister and conservative Democrat who often backs Republicans.
He is despised by many in his party for fighting against gay marriage and opposing abortion.
But he argues that the Democratic Party has shifted too far to the left on immigration and crime.
“We have 150 Hispanic ministers. They all have congregations with people. … Some people try to talk for us, people who don’t know the community … how we feel,” Diaz, 81, told host John Catsimatidis. “But I know the community. I know what I’m talking about. I know how my Hispanic community feels. We are angry.”
Diaz endorsed Trumpat a Bronx rally in Crotona Park in May.
