Tuesday night’s explosive rout of the Republican party was supercharged by the fury of Hispanic Americans who turned out in record numbers in key battlegrounds to protest the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant assault on their communities.

“Trump went against us,” said Benny Melendez from Weslaco, Texas. “He made us the target of ICE operations, so we decided to punish him by voting against his party. That’s what happened.”

Melendez, the owner of a small housebuilding company in south Texas, voted for Donald Trump in the presidential election two years ago, attracted by his promise to secure the Mexican border and improve the economy. But on Tuesday, he cast his vote for the Democrats in a display of pure anger.

Two of his cousins and up to 15 of his building workers have been picked up and deported to Mexico by ICE. When Melendez voted for Trump in 2024 he expected the immigration raids would focus on those with criminal records, he said, not his relatives and employees.

“They’re taking our neighbors. They’re taking our friends. They’re they’re taking our workers, and they’re taking our family members. This is an attack against our community.”

Melendez’s rage, replicated in the millions across Texas, Florida and other critical swing states, itself tells a story. It speaks to how Trump first wooed, and then alienated, the backing of many Latino voters, effectively shooting himself in the foot.

In the closing days of the 2024 presidential race, Trump made a special pitch to Hispanic voters. “I love Hispanics,” he told them, “and Hispanics love Trump.”

To some extent, that audacious appeal worked: in 2024 Trump garnered 48% of the Latino vote, according to Pew Research, 12 points up from four years previously.

But on Tuesday night, Latino voters delivered Trump a resounding message of a very different sort. In a dizzying switch in affiliation, Hispanic American support for Republicans plummeted from the almost half who backed Trump just two years ago to 30% today.

According to the New York Times analysis of voter trends, election night marked a 28 point shift from 2024 in Latino allegiance toward Democrats nationwide. The dramatic turn was more notable than any other demographic voting group, with the next largest shift of 17% coming from Asian Americans.

The shift helped propel Democratic wins in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as governor’s seats in states like Texas, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

If Trump and the Republican party had assumed they had forged a new alignment with Hispanic voters, they must now think again. Any such alliance was abruptly and spectacularly uncoupled on Tuesday.

“People have called us the sleeping giant for a long time, and now we’re really the swinging giant,” said Stephanie Valencia, co-founder of the Latino polling experts, Equis Research.

“The vociferous message that voters sent last night was an F-U to Trump and Republicans and their misplaced priorities and broken promises.”

It was a night of stunning surprises, and of firsts. Texas, the state with the second largest Hispanic populace after California, elected its first Latino governor, Democrat Gina Hinojosa, a native of the Rio Grande Valley whose mother is an immigrant from Mexico, in an astounding rebuke to decades of largely white Republican rule.

Democrat Xavier Becerra, the son of immigrants from Mexico, will become the first elected Latino governor in California, the world’s fourth largest economy.

Here too the same voters’ fury was powerfully vented. “We’ve known better than anybody what these last two years have been like,” California senator Alex Padilla, the son of Mexican immigrants, told the crowd at Becerra’s closing campaign stop at the Palladium in Los Angeles on Sunday. “We have endured relentless attacks on our communities by Donald Trump and his rogue ICE agents.”

Angelica Salas, an immigration activist who leads the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, called Becerra “familia”.

“Xavier Becerra dreams the way we dream,” she said.

In key battleground states, Latino voters flexed their electoral muscle in this midterm cycle to a degree arguably never seen before. Texas took the prize for the seismic jolt that shot across the state.

In Hispanic-dominated south Texas where Trump made some of his greatest gains two years ago, Democrats won all four congressional districts along the border with Mexico. That included the three districts that Republicans had gerrymandered in an attempt to bolster their control of the US House – a move that backfired.

Two of those districts were held by their Democratic incumbents, Henry Cuellar in Texas 28 and Vicente Gonzalez in Texas 34. The third gerrymandered district, 81% Hispanic Texas 15, was flipped by the Democratic candidate, the Tejano music star Bobby Pulido.

Pulido always looked to be doing well against the Republican incumbent, Monica De La Cruz, even though Trump had prevailed here in 2024. In the end, Pulido’s victory was overwhelming, by an astonishing 24 percentage points with 95% of the ballots counted.

“Not bad for a quinceañera singer,” Pulido said at his victory event.

Pulido’s campaign manager Abel Prado told the Guardian that the outstanding result was in part a reflection of Trump’s mass deportation drive that has seen thousands of undocumented Hispanic people detained and deported by ICE in Texas. “When you implement policies with such cruelty and malice, then this is what you get,” Prado said.

Among the 48,000 individuals that the Pulido campaign assembled in its voter database, almost 40% they found were members of mixed-status families. “These are people whose parents couldn’t vote, but they could, and so when my dad got deported, or my mom got deported, that became a crystallizing moment.”

Prado said that many people in the district who had voted for Trump in 2024 “came to their senses and realized the consequences of their previous vote. Tuesday night was a correction to what happens when one party is allowed to run rampant and do whatever they want without fear of consequences.”

The 30 million registered Latino voters are as diverse politically, culturally and economically as any other group. Talk of a Latino monolith has for years led analysts to reach simplistic and inaccurate conclusions about their voting patterns.

Yet Tuesday’s results showed a surprisingly similar rejection of Trump’s policies across very different Hispanic communities. In Florida, Latino voters swung powerfully toward Democratic candidates in the Cuban and Venezuelan communities of Miami-Dade, and equally in the heavily Puerto Rican areas around Orlando.

In Miami-Dade, which Trump won by a whopping 15 points in 2024, the Republican incumbent Maria Elvira Salazar was fighting a neck-and-neck battle with her fellow Cuban American newscaster, the Democratic candidate Eliott Rodriguez.

That the race was so tight amounted to the realisation of Salazar’s worst fears. In September she was blasted over news headlines when she warned Trump in a campaign advert that his mass deportation of Hispanic immigrants had “gone too far” and that the very people who had put him back in the White House now “feel betrayed”.

Trump’s response was indicative. He accused Salazar of backstabbing him, claiming that his “Latino support hasn’t wavered.” The voters disagreed.

Tuesday’s results will reverberate for some time. Democratic leaders, as they prepare to take control of Congress and begin the search for a presidential nominee, should be mindful that Hispanic voters are hungry for policies that reflect their needs, Valencia said.

“This was a cry for help from voters to focus on the right things: the economy and inflation, immigration, and wars abroad. Democrats are entering a probationary period with voters, they should not make the mistake of thinking that this swing is permanent.”

The election has also ushered in a new generation of young, ambitious Hispanic politicians and organizers determined to be heard. Pulido’s entire campaign staff was aged under 25.

“These are people who have never had a seat at the table who can now become a new voice in how we do things,” Prado said. “We absolutely rejected anybody parachuting into the district, out-of-towners telling us how to do things.”

He added: “If there’s a gringo operative out there trying to take credit for what happened to the Latino vote in Texas on Tuesday night, please shut the fuck up.”