Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. Story after story on social media and in the news has been about people who have come to regret their votes for Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Now we’re hearing from the people who really got Trump elected: Those who knew they could be negatively affected, but took the chance anyway.

A CNN report took the stories of two different Latino voters in the 2024 election, one here legally and one illegally. And surprisingly, the one here legally is feeling more fear than the undocumented worker.

The kicker is, they voted differently. The one here with a green card after 33 years of being here voted for Harris — and so did his whole family. He was not ready to mess with his future, and although Harris also promised to get tougher on immigration, she never threatened DACA or promised mass deportation like Donald Trump did.

The man who voted for Trump, an undocumented mechanic in Houston, has been here 25 years. Gelacio Velazquez came here from Mexico and says he voted for Trump “for the economy.”

Everything feels upside-down and backwards now.

Velazquez was taken in by Trump’s rhetoric about the immigrants that he intends to deport. He has talked about some 11 million immigrants who will be looked at, who he categorized uniformly as all being criminals.

When CNN’s Rosa Flores asked Velazquez about mass deportation, he rebuked the idea. “It’s not human,” he said. But he added in broken English that if he is deported himself, “I respect the decision. I leave the country.”

Here’s where it gets very sad: Velazquez has two children, ages 9 and 5. They are both citizens who were born here. They know nothing of Mexico. It’s likely that there is Spanish spoken in the home, since Gelacio clearly speaks only the bare minimum of English. But simply speaking the native language would not be nearly enough to acclimate his two young children to living in Mexico if they are deported.

Depending on where Velazquez lives, things are very different in Mexico than the United States — enough for children that old to notice and be affected by. When I visited the Yucatan Peninsula in 2022, traveling from Cancún to Tulum, there were military police in the middle of the highways. None of the grocery stores looked even similar.

Nothing but the most tourist-y places that I saw — which Sr. Velazquez certainly won’t be taking his children to — would feel anything but entirely foreign to children who grew up in America.

But the likelihood they’ll end up there is double: Not only has Trump made clear that he intends to deport all criminals, including those whose only crime was entering the country illegally, but he even has in the works a program to strip citizens of their legal status through “denaturalization.” And Velazquez says if he’s deported, he’ll take his family with him and never return.

Velazquez’s children — US citizens under the 14th Amendment — would be foreigners in a foreign land.

Watch the video here: