MIAMI — Lifelong friends unfriend them on Facebook. Siblings and parents refuse to talk politics. Their kids are home from college stoked about the socialist Bernie Sanders.

Sure, their candidate may love them and be three weeks away from becoming the GOP presidential nominee. But it still isn’t easy being a Latino for Donald Trump.


From the get-go, with his big campaign announcement splash about Mexican immigrants being rapists and criminals, to his more recent broadside against a federal judge of Mexican heritage, the billionaire Republican’s incendiary rhetoric has made life more than a little complicated for many of his supporters who carry ties to places like Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico and across Latin America.

But they insist that his business acumen will turn around the economy and that his unsparing views on illegal immigration will prevent people from jumping ahead of them in line for jobs or social services. Some are Cuban-American conservatives who think he’ll be a tougher defender of the nation’s freedoms than Hillary Clinton.

And many refuse to be silenced. They’re carrying posters and wearing T-shirts proclaiming their ethnic backgrounds at his raucous rallies; calling in to talk radio programs demanding a wall be built on the U.S.-Mexico border; making videos that Trump, through Facebook and Twitter mentions, has helped notch millions of views; wearing his campaign gear while waving the Stars and Stripes on highway overpasses; and, on a recent weeknight, showing up by the dozens at a trendy restaurant here in South Florida for what was billed as a “coming out” party hosted by the local volunteer group Latinas for Trump.

No protesters were in sight, but some of the people mingling at the bar still insisted on some ground rules for their protection.

“I don’t want to put my face out to the public showing that I am for Trump,” Rachel Larrea, a 44-year-old real estate agent from Coral Gables, told POLITICO a few moments after she refused another reporter’s request to record a video interview about why, as a lifelong Democrat, she was now ready to pull the lever for a Republican named Trump.

“For safety reasons,” she explained. “There’s a lot of crazy people out there these days.”

Trump on the campaign stump is billing himself as “No. 1 with Hispanics.” But to succeed in November he’s probably going to need to win a larger share of the Latino vote than his immediate past presidential campaign predecessors Mitt Romney and John McCain; both got creamed on this front by Barack Obama. The billionaire’s backers say it’s possible, and they maintain that the next iteration of the country’s “silent majority” voters will be the Latinos and Hispanics who aren’t quite ready to publicly declare their allegiance to Trump but still secretly plan to vote for him.

“It’s a grass-roots movement, and people haven’t even seen it yet,” said Gina Sosa, a 59-year-old retired business executive born in Cuba who is active in local Miami GOP politics. “Some will be horrified. Some will be delighted.”

Trump for now looks like he has nowhere to go but up with the country’s 27.3 million Latino eligible voters, nearly half of whom are millennials, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. While an online NBC News/Survey Monkey poll from earlier this month did show Trump with 32 percent of the Hispanic vote, which would put him 5 points ahead of Romney’s pace, most other recent surveys have Clinton holding quite comfortable leads: a Fox News Latino poll from mid-May put the Democrat up 39 points among Hispanics, and an online survey from FIU-Adsmovil released this week had Clinton ahead by 58 points. Trump’s unfavorable rating among Hispanics is at 87 percent in this week’s Washington Post/ABC News poll. Democrats see those numbers and dismiss even the faintest suggestion that Trump can have success with a demographic long considered essential to Clinton’s base coalition.

“To a large degree he’s waged a war on the Hispanic-American community,” said Lorella Praeli, Clinton’s director of Latino outreach. “You can’t show up at the eleventh hour and say ‘Latinos like me’ or ‘Hispanics love me’ and expect them to turn out and be for you.”

Carlos Gimenez, the Republican mayor of Miami-Dade County, said in an interview here that Trump’s comments questioning a federal judge’s impartiality because of his Mexican descent “may have been the final straw” with many Latino voters. While Trump can expect to perform well with longtime Republican loyalists from South Florida’s Cuban-American community, Gimenez warned that the younger generation of Cuban-Americans is poised to back Clinton because its members don’t carry the same personal grievances as their parents and grandparents have against Fidel Castro.

Latino supporters of Donald Trump gather at an event in Coral Gables, Florida.

“It’s not a homogeneous group,” said the 62-year-old Havana-born mayor, who has said he will not endorse a presidential candidate ahead of November.

The existence of the Latinos for Trump movement can’t be denied either. At Trump Tower in New York, the presumptive GOP nominee is building up his skeletal primary campaign staff. Last week, he announced the hiring of a deputy communications staffer who will work directly with Hispanic media. Trump aides in battleground states with large Latino populations are also starting to dissect the Republican National Committee’s rich database of personal information about America’s voters.

Online, Trump’s most fervent Latino supporters are finding viral success as they pump out a series of montage videos. And some of Trump’s volunteer Hispanic leaders around the country report being overwhelmed with a glut of media requests on his behalf. In Miami, the organizers of the Latinas for Trump effort say they’ve been getting calls from like-minded allies in Arizona, Wisconsin, Texas and Washington state who are requesting help translating pro-Trump literature into Spanish and for the bright red T-shirts declaring the name of their group, which they’ve been giving away at their two open functions.

“I just hope they wear them publicly. That’s all I care about,” says Denise Galvez, the 41-year-old Cuban-American owner of a public relations firm in Miami who is leading the Latinas for Trump group. “I think people are embarrassed to wear them.”

Trump campaign staff say they’re giving the volunteer activists room to informally spread their message. That’s one of the reasons they gave to local GOP activists for skipping the most recent event. The volunteers also were told the Trump campaign staff in South Florida had their own general election strategy meeting convened in the wake of the firing last week of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

Ed MacDougall, chairman of the Trump campaign in Miami-Dade County and a former mayor of Cutler Bay, said in an interview that he keeps in daily touch with local Latino activists who are helping spread the Republican’s message. “We’re tickled to death that they like Donald Trump and they have put this together,” he said.

Trump’s lead strategist for Florida and the Southeastern battleground states of North Carolina and Virginia is in the midst of a “listening campaign” to connect with the Latino supporters and the different volunteer groups springing up in the region. Yet even with less than five months until Election Day, the campaign staffer, Karen Giorno, was nonetheless ready to make a bold prediction about how Trump would perform in Florida considering his Latino support in the Sunshine State, especially from female business owners. “I’m very confident that we have the votes to carry Florida,” Giorno said in an interview. “I think it’s going to be a blowout, to be honest with you.”

But there’s still plenty of work to do. Several of Trump’s Latino volunteers who have gone public with their support reported being overwhelmed by interview requests to appear on television and radio as surrogates. Jose Perez, an Atlanta-based data analytics expert and member of the volunteer group Trump Diversity Council, said he’s not sure the official campaign has dedicated enough resources to the Latino and Hispanic vote. He said he would use an upcoming July 1 strategy session with RNC officials in Washington to get the national party to explain its plans for how it would be microtargeting what are several very distinct segments of the different ethnic communities.

The Trump campaign is also missing out on some of the fundamentals for connecting with Latino voters. While Clinton’s website has an easy method for translating into Spanish, DonaldJTrump.com remains English only.

Trump’s Latino messaging is getting some help from some of his fans, including a group of about 200 fervent supporters from California to South Carolina who stay in touch via Twitter and have spent the past nine months making dozens of short videos about him. Their biggest hit: a 6-minute-plus montage about their support for Trump that the candidate himself posted to his Facebook page, helping it amass more than 1 million views.

“The values and contributions of America’s Latino community play a significant role in the history and future of our great country,” Trump said in the post, which included the #LatinosforTrump hashtag that the group frequently uses. “I am proud to have their growing support.”

Angelo Gomez, an 18-year-old Trump intern from the Las Vegas area, is the first speaker in the video that Trump promoted on his page. It’s not a very high-tech effort; he’s standing in front of an American flag pinned to a wall in a storage room at his house. To keep his iPhone camera steady, he propped it up against a case holding a Nike sneaker autographed by Michael Jordan.

A South Carolina man who would only give his first name and last initial, Mark F., has produced many of the group’s pro-Trump videos. In an email, he said he started making the films in September with some free software and only recently bought a new computer to help with the production. At first, he said he was just posting on Twitter the size of the crowds at Trump rallies. Many of those messages got a thousand or more retweets.

Now he’s pumping out short films compiled from footage sent in by his network on Twitter. Essentially, they’re just asked to speak into their camera about why they back Trump. “Many hits and misses,” he said of the films. “I am learning as I go.”

Several of the contributors to the Trump Latino volunteer video page said their short items helped give them an outlet to remain vocal in an election season in which nasty back-and-forth exchanges have become the norm. They say their pro-Trump talk can be a quick way to derail conversations with family and longtime friends.

“We’re shunned. We’re shushed. It’s gotten to the point where we just don’t use Facebook,” said Leticia Sullivan, a 42-year-old budget analyst who works for the city of San Diego and appears in several of the videos produced by Mark F. under her Twitter handle @luv4beagles.

“It’s kind of like being gay,” she said. “You’re closeted.”

Back in Miami, over cocktails and croquetas, many of the attendees to the Latinas for Trump event acknowledged they had only recently gotten on board the Trump train.

“Once Rubio was gone, I was going to support whoever got the nomination,” said Vivian Castro, a 64-year-old Realtor from Coral Gables and a lifelong Republican. “It could have been Ted Cruz. It could have been Kasich. It happens that it’s Trump, so I’m backing him.”

Many of the attendees expressed a strong level of frustration that their friends and family members had stopped talking politics with them since they declared their support for Trump. Liliane Agra, a 43-year-old building manager from Miami, showed off some screen shots of a Facebook exchange she had with a friend she had grown up with in New York who wrote her “good bye” after she’d posted that she was one of the billionaire’s voters.

“I really don’t believe that he’s a racist. I’m just tired of this s--- that everyone makes it into race,” she said.

What’s more challenging, Agra marveled, is coping with where her three children had fallen on the political spectrum as they returned home for the summer. “My kids are Bernie supporters,” she lamented. “And I put all those f------ through college.”