A robocall said Maria Elvira Salazar ‘voted for everything Trump wanted’ on immigration. Is it true?
PolitiFact ·
In Florida, a robocall is targeting Republican U.S. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar for supporting President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda.
“Salazar voted for everything Trump wanted,” said the audio in the call paid for by super PAC Battleground Alliance . “Eighty-three billion dollars for ICE, for 10,000 new agents, for new detention camps, to arrest grandmothers and children and people just trying to work. She toured Alligator Alcatraz and called the cages clean. She voted against making ICE agents take off their masks and wear body cameras.”
Salazar is running against Democrat Eliott Rodriguez for Florida’s 27th congressional district, which includes parts of Miami.
The robocall is largely accurate on Salazar’s immigration record, but it omits context about her stance on immigration agents wearing body cameras.
Here’s a rundown of the claims, fact-checked.
The call gets the numbers right.
Salazar voted for H.R. 1 , the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law in July 2025. It gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement around $75 billion, including $45 billion for immigration detention centers and nearly $30 billion to hire new agents. The Homeland Security Department said ICE would use the funds to hire 10,000 new agents and increase its detention capacity.
In June, Salazar also voted for the Secure America Act , which gave ICE an extra $38.5 billion.
Battleground Alliance told PolitiFact that it reached $83 billion by adding the $45 billion allotted for detention centers in the One Big Beautiful Act and the $38.5 billion for ICE in the Secure America Act.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has said anyone illegally in the country is subject to deportation. News outlets have reported on ICE arresting older adults , children and people at work .
After Salazar toured the former Alligator Alcatraz detention center in South Florida in July 2025, she told CBS News : “It’s a jail, people are in a cage, I sat on the beds, they are clean, they are soft… It was clean and it was very well presented. I’m talking to you about the areas that I visited.”
In that interview, Salazar said that the facility met the highest standards for federal detention centers of that kind.
Battleground Alliance also pointed PolitiFact to Salazar’s comment in another interview with Fox & Friends in which she said that the “cages were clean.”
In July 2025, of the roughly 750 people detained at Alligator Alcatraz, more than 250 had no criminal convictions or pending charges in the U.S., a Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times investigation found.
In September, a South Florida woman, whose father was detained in Alligator Alcatraz, confronted Salazar at a public event over her support for the facility. This happened after a Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General report found that the facility didn’t meet standards related to environmental health and safety, medical care, food service and personal hygiene. It also noted that some detainees were held in small metal enclosures.
Salazar told NBC 6 in September that the woman had previously declined help for her father’s case and that the confrontation was a “coordinated political effort with a clear agenda.”
This is missing context.
Salazar hasn’t explicitly voted against bills banning ICE agents from wearing masks or requiring that they use body cameras. She also voted to allocate money for those cameras.
Salazar voted against a motion from Democrats to recommit a bill, which in part wanted to require ICE agents to wear body cameras, remove their masks, show a badge and have a judicial warrant when arresting an immigrant. In April, Salazar voted for the final iteration of a bill that became law — it granted $20 million for body cameras, but didn’t ban masks.
PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.