A longtime Republican who enthusiastically voted to put Donald Trump back in the White House is now having serious regrets after Trump’s immigration crackdown landed directly on his doorstep.
John Gannon, a 75-year-old Texas businessman, says he wouldn’t vote for Trump again after immigration agents arrested his fiancée, Yasmin Suarez Reyes, as the couple prepared to board a flight.
“I voted for Trump,” Gannon told CBS News. “I wouldn’t do that again, not after this fiasco.”
And he had a blunt message for the president he once supported.
“What are you doing?” Gannon said he would tell Trump. “Go after the criminals. We’re all for that. But leave the moms and pops and the kids alone. Man, he’s destroying families.”
Gannon and Suarez Reyes, 45, had been planning to get married.
Those plans are now on hold.
Suarez Reyes, a Venezuelan-born Spanish citizen, was arrested July 24 at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston as the couple headed to Las Vegas for a furniture industry convention.
Gannon said they had already passed through airport security when eight plainclothes ICE agents suddenly surrounded his fiancée.
“Eight officers, ICE agents, swarmed Yasmin and detained her,” Gannon recalled. He said agents didn’t initially explain what was happening before taking her away in a vehicle.
Gannon said he was left standing there in “total disbelief.”
But Suarez Reyes wasn’t accused of committing a violent crime.
According to her immigration attorney, Anne Kennedy, she has no criminal record, entered the United States legally and has an asylum application pending with the federal government.
Her immigration status, however, is complicated.
Government records reviewed by CBS News show Suarez Reyes entered the United States in October 2023 through the Visa Waiver Program using her Spanish citizenship. The program generally allows eligible travelers to remain in the country for up to 90 days.
Before that period expired, Suarez Reyes applied for asylum.
Her case still hasn’t been decided. But ICE maintains that her authorization to remain in the United States expired despite the pending asylum application, making her subject to removal proceedings.
Kennedy said Suarez Reyes had nevertheless received authorization to work and obtained a driver’s license while waiting for her immigration case to make its way through the system.
She and Gannon were also preparing to marry, after which Suarez Reyes could potentially have sought permanent residency through their marriage.
Instead, she’s sitting in detention.
Suarez Reyes has been held at an immigration processing facility in Conroe, Texas, since her arrest, according to ICE’s detainee tracking system.
“For almost two weeks now, she has been in a physical jail cell, when she has done nothing more than follow the laws of the United States and do what our immigration laws allow her to do,” Kennedy told CBS News.
Her arrest comes as the Trump administration ramps up immigration enforcement at airports around the country.
According to The New York Times, ICE has expanded an information-sharing arrangement with the Transportation Security Administration that makes it easier for immigration authorities to identify travelers whose legal authorization to remain in the country has expired.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson defended the crackdown, saying the administration intends to prevent people unlawfully present in the country from boarding flights unless they’re leaving the United States.
For Gannon, however, the administration’s hard-line immigration policy looks very different now that the person being taken away is the woman he loves.
He says he still supports deporting criminals.
What he didn’t expect was seeing his own fiancée swept up in Trump’s immigration dragnet.
Now, the Trump voter who helped put the president back in office is watching his wedding plans unravel while his fiancée sits in detention, and says he wishes he could take his vote back.
Watch the report below via CBS News:
