MIAMI — Miami Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar chastised President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda and warned him against listening to his advisers in a new campaign ad released Thursday — just seven weeks before she’s up for re-election for a congressional seat that Democrats are hoping to flip this year.

“Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Salazar says in the ad, which was filmed in D.C. “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”

Her ad shows a statistic attributed to ICE data stating that 50% of ICE detainees “had no criminal convictions or pending charges,” directly challenging a message the Trump administration has repeated for months about targeting the “worst of the worst.”

The ad is running in a district where Latino voters swung to the right to vote for Trump in 2024, helping him flip Miami-Dade County red for the first time since the 1980s. Trump won 57% of voters in the newly redrawn 27th District, according to precinct-level analysis by Dave’s Redistricting, which also put the district’s population at 74% Hispanic.

South Florida Republicans staunchly supported Trump in the 2024 elections. But under his second term, Salazar and the Republican delegation from Miami have been balancing how to address the needs of constituents targeted by Trump immigration policies with their support for the president.

In the ad, Salazar did not specify where she believes Trump has gone too far on immigration. She has previously voted for Haitians to keep their deportation protections under TPS and criticized a Supreme Court decision that left over 600,000 Venezuelans without them in May 2025.

But she issues a warning to Trump about the people around him: “Be careful what your advisors are telling you about immigration policy,” she said. The White House did not respond to a request for comment on her criticism of the president or his team.

Trump has repeatedly endorsed her re-election campaign, including as recently as last month on his social media platform Truth Social, saying she’s doing a “truly fantastic job.”

Her Democratic opponent in the congressional race, former CBS Miami news anchor Elliot Rodriguez dismissed her new ad as political opportunism.

“The same Maria Elvira Salazar who desperately sought Trump’s endorsement and then voted to give billions of dollars to ICE to terrorize immigrants, the same Salazar who praised Alligator Alcatraz now wants to cry alligator tears to her boss because his immigration policy is political poison in her reelection campaign,” Rodriguez said in a written statement.

According to Google’s Ad Transparency platform, the digital version of her new ad is targeting residents across Florida’s 27th district — except for eight excluded zip codes, largely along the coast and in neighborhoods that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. Her campaign did not respond to questions about the intended audience of her new ad.

Since entering Congress, Salazar has pushed for bipartisan immigration reform known as the Dignity Act. But there has been little appetite for the measure from hardline Republicans, who have accused her of advocating for amnesty for immigrants.

She closes her new ad by directly addressing that criticism — and asking Trump to pursue her immigration ideas: “I’m not talking about giving them amnesty, I’m talking about giving them a dignified life in this promised land and only you can do that.”

—Miami Herald staff reporter Shirsho Dasgupta contributed to this report.

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