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With Donald Trump in line to be the next president of the United States, immigrant communities across Nevada and the nation are bracing for his promise to carry out the “largest deportation in the history of our country,” removing millions of immigrants in mass roundups and raids. Among the most immediate effects of such a move would be to tear Nevada families apart, experts predict.

Former President Donald Trump’s resounding victory appears buoyed by a key constituency – Latino voters – whose economic concerns may have outweighed his harsh rhetoric surrounding immigration.

As every four years, Democrats and Republicans have remembered the Hispanic vote this fall. It is surprising how two realities coexist in this electorate: on the one hand, it is a voting pool in which both parties can fish and with the potential to determine the outcome of the election.

The Las Vegas Valley’s affordability and housing crisis is taking center stage this presidential election, a 51�ԹϺ��� political scientist, said.

There are 600 of them, in a room covered in posters celebrating their union’s victories. The Culinary Union casino workers are preparing to go door-to-door for Kamala Harris. The Strip, Nevada’s economic heartland, with its Eiffel Tower, pyramid, Venetian palace, water jets and slot machines that spin night and day, is less than ten minutes away. Another galaxy.

The Rev. Arturo Laguna leads a largely immigrant church of about 100 followers in Phoenix. His job as a pastor, he says, gets complicated come election season. Laguna’s church, Casa de Adoracion, is in Arizona — one of seven closely-watched swing states that could possibly decide the next president. It is also a microcosm of the larger Latino evangelical Christian community in the U.S.

The Democrats' not-so-secret weapon in Nevada is an army of service workers from the Culinary Workers Union who have been helping deliver the party victories for several elections.

The economic impact of American Latinos increased by over 60% from 2010 to 2022, according to a report from UCLA released last week. The yearly United States Latino GDP study found that, independent from the rest of America’s gross domestic product, U.S. Latino GDP would be the fifth-largest economy in the world — ahead of India and the United Kingdom, among others.