AIKEN, S.C. – Karina Trueva was standing with about 10 other Mexican immigrants outside the St. Mary Help of Christians Church a couple of Saturdays ago. They’d just left a baptism conducted in Spanish.

Trueva was asked what she thought about comments by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump about deporting immigrants who are in the country illegally.

In a part of the country where the Hispanic and Latino population has seen some of its fastest growth, Trueva related the question to the others in Spanish.

A few of them said, “No, Trump,” before Trueva added, “No one here likes Trump.”

As the New York businessman widened his lead in the presidential race during this week’s Super Tuesday primaries, concern has spread within the GOP that the tone of Trump’s rhetoric is hurting the party’s ability to attract Hispanic voters.

In the navel-gazing that followed Democratic President Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012, the Republican National Committee acknowledged that it needed to court the country’s growing Hispanic population in order to survive.

The party’s assessment, the Growth and Opportunity Project, noted the portion of Hispanic voters grew from 7 percent of the electorate in 2000 to 10 percent just two years later.

It noted the Pew Hispanic Center’s prediction that the country’s Hispanic population will reach 29 percent by 2050, when whites will represent 47 percent.

“It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies,” the GOP report said.

But rather than making gains, this year’s campaign is driving Hispanic voters away from the party, according to national polls and interviews in South Carolina and Georgia.

Other voters interviewed in the South illustrate the GOP’s conundrum, however: Trump speaks for many Republicans when he calls for tougher immigration policies – no matter the impact of his rhetoric on the party’s long-term health.

In Aiken County, the Hispanic and Latino population doubled from 2000 to 2010, and they now represent more than 5 percent of the county’s residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Throughout the Southeast, the Hispanic and Latino population grew by more than 70 percent during the decade.

Trueva called Trump’s comments racist. If the United States wants to deport those who’ve entered the country illegally, she said, it should focus only on those who’ve broken laws while here.

Polls show Hispanics share that or similar views about Trump – and, more broadly, the Republican Party.

A poll last August by NBC News, the Wall Street Journal and Telemundo found only 13 percent of Hispanics view Trump favorably. More than two-thirds said he is hurting the GOP’s image.

A November poll by ImpreMedia and Latino Decisions, which specializes in polling Hispanics, found a similar portion, 68 percent, have a “very unfavorable” view of the party because of Trump’s comments.

Tellingly, a CNN survey found that so few Hispanics voted in Tuesday’s Republican primaries, pollsters considered their role to be statistically insignificant.

Pierluigi Mancini, CEO of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services in the Atlanta suburb of Norcross, Ga., said immigrants there are “petrified” by Trump’s comments. Gwinnett County, where the center is based, has seen a similar growth in Hispanic population as Aiken County. There Hispanics and Latinos represent 1 in 5 residents.

Mancini’s organization offiers Spanish-language health and psychiatric services, and many of its clients are in families that include documented and undocumented members, he said.

“There’s a high level of fear about people being arrested or detained,” he said.

Lucy St. Philip, a psychiatric clinician at the center, said children whose parents have been detained or deported show signs of post-traumatic stress.

“They see a cop, and they start screaming and crying that they’re going to be taken away,” said St. Philip, a Mexican immigrant who gained U.S. citizenship through marriage.

As the immigration debate unfolds, communities like Aiken County and Gwinnett County have struggled with changing demographics.

Near the Norcross clinic, where many billboards are in Spanish, St. Philiip recalled going to a restaurant and speaking Spanish with her companion. They stood while the hostess seated others who arrived after them.

Eventually they left, and a few years later, St. Philip is still angry. But she also noted that at the Panera restaurant next door, they were welcomed by a white manager who spoke to them in Spanish.

In downtown Aiken, where no signs in Spanish were apparent, Juan Rodriguez, an applied sciences student at Aiken Technical College, said he sometimes hears anti-Hispanic talk at the gym.

Mostly, he said, “We’re tolerated.”

Republican leaders hoped for a better reception.

In contrast to the tone of the presidential race, Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the Republican majority whip, emphasized reaching out to Hispanic voters during his 2014 re-election campaign. Showing “respect” for their culture, he bought ads on Spanish-language stations and distributed campaign materials in Spanish, said Brendan Steinhauser, who managed the campaign and previously organized the Tea Party’s 2009 Taxpayer March on Washington.

Hispanics and Latinos are nearly 40 percent of Texas’ population.

Though Cornyn declined comment, Steinhauser in an interview said he’s worried that Trump, as Republican nominee, would do even worse than Mitt Romney’s 27 percent support among Hispanic voters in his failed campaign for president in 2012. Trump could also be a drag on Republicans in competitive races, such as Pennsylvania Sen. Patrick Toomey’s reelection bid, he said.

In October, about two-dozen Hispanic leaders warned Republicans that their constituents would not support Trump, and the party will lose the election if he’s the nominee, according to The Hill newspaper.

But, at mostly-white Trump campaign rallies, crowds numbering in the thousands have erupted at his promise to seal the border with Mexico: “We will build the wall.”

At campaign rallies for various candidates before the Georgia and South Carolina primaries, Republican voters said they have nothing against Hispanics, or immigration, as long as it’s legal.

In Aiken, Sharon Nicodemus said most Latinos she encounters want to work. She’s not sure how a wall would be built, and she’s troubled by the idea of splitting families through deportation.

Yet, she said, the nation needs laws, and immigrants who are undocumented have broken them.

Steinhauser noted the prevalence of that sentiment. He cited a Texas Tribune poll last November that found 55 percent of Texans, Democrats and Republicans, favor immediately deporting undocumented immigrants.

He said Republican positions on issues such as school choice and health care are attractive to Hispanics. Cornyn emphasized those issues in his reelection bid, in which he out-polled Democrat David Alameel among Hispanics, 48 percent to 47 percent.

Instead of moderating Trump’s rhetoric, other Republicans seem to be taking a harder line on immigration because of him, said Jerry Gonzalez, executive director of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials.

He noted Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s attacks on Florida Sen. Marco Rubio during the campaign over Rubio’s support of a 2013 plan that would have given undocumented immigrants a shot at becoming U.S. citizens.

On Tuesday, Gonzalez sent out a press release blasting a trio of bills in the Georgia Statehouse to create a ballot initiative making English the state’s official language; adding driver’s license requirements for young immigrants; and requiring members of state policy-making bodies to be U.S. citizens.

He said the measures are part of a “Trump-like, anti-immigrant agenda.”

Kery Murakami is the Washington, D.C. reporter for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach him at kmurakami@cnhi.com