WASHINGTON – Amid the chaos and confusion of Capitol Hill this week, one prevailing trend emerged: Republican leaders are embracing the party’s hard-line position on illegal immigration.

While the battle over spending continues, GOP lawmakers have chosen to align with the conservative posture that took root in the party with President Donald Trump, a development that caused consternation among some Republican dissenters.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and other GOP lawmakers repeatedly cast the spending fight as Democrats displaying more loyalty to undocumented immigrants than Americans, a wager that the nativist leanings that propelled Trump to power will energize their base in this year’s elections.

“What has been shoehorned into this discussion is an insistence that we deal with an illegal immigration issue,” McConnell said Friday.

That strategy marked the latest chapter in a decades-long realignment for a party that championed outreach to the fast-growing Latino population as recently as during the George W. Bush administration. Those overtures vanished in the politics of 2016 as Trump steamrolled former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who espoused a more welcoming approach to immigrants.

Some Republicans worried, as they did even before Trump’s rise, that this will harm the party in the long term as the country becomes more ethnically diverse. In the short term, it has complicated bipartisan spending talks and revived GOP tensions.

“That’s a frustration,” Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said in an interview Friday. Flake, a centrist, was lamenting that the Senate has yet to vote on a deal to protect immigrants brought into the country illegally as children, despite a promise from McConnell to do so.

McConnell has delivered red meat for the conservative base. He slammed Democrats for withholding support for a monthlong government spending bill because talks had yet to produce a deal to protect those immigrants, known as “dreamers.”

McConnell repeated the term “illegal immigration” several times in his floor remarks Friday — punctuating the words for emphasis. The term is considered disparaging by activists. When McConnell said “illegal immigration” Thursday night, Flake, seated behind him, visibly grimaced.

McConnell also has used the term “chain migration” to refer to the practice of U.S. citizens sponsoring extended family for green cards. Many Democrats consider it a derogatory term to describe legal, family-based immigration.

In a tweet Friday, Trump used similar words, saying Democrats “want illegal immigration and weak borders.”

The failure so far to produce an immigration deal was the main driver of the Democratic resistance to passing another short-term spending bill. Democrats and Republicans have struggled to come up with a framework to protect dreamers in exchange for beefing up border security.

One reason those efforts have sputtered, some Republicans say, is the powerful influence of hard-right immigration activists on the president. For example, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who worked with Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., to broker a compromise, has grown frustrated with Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., a more hawkish figure who has Trump’s ear.

Rep. Luis Gutiérrez, D-Ill., a longtime champion of comprehensive immigration changes, said when it comes to Republicans: “Immigration is the glue that keeps them together. And you’re going to need a powerful weapon to break that.”

In McConnell’s orbit, there is a sense that much of the Senate Republican Conference is closer to Cotton and Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., on immigration than to Graham.

Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that advocates reduced immigration, said that McConnell “has definitely become more hawkish on immigration. And I don’t think that’s necessarily an evolution in his own perspective as much as it is a change in the party.”

The way that the Republican Party has addressed immigration has shifted. George W. Bush was a champion of immigration reform who carried 44 percent of the Latino vote in 2004. In 2012, Republican nominee Mitt Romney shifted from a stance as a pro-immigration governor of Massachusetts to promoting “self-deportation” to reduce the number of illegal immigrants. He suffered with Latino voters at the ballot box, winning just 27 percent.

And then came Trump in 2016, who opened his campaign by accusing Mexican immigrants of being “rapists” and campaigned on the promise of building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump performed about the same as Romney did among Latinos.

But demographic trends could be trouble for the GOP if they alienate Latino voters.

“Any party that hopes to do well in elections in the 21st century is going to have to do better among people who are demographically different from the current Republican base,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster.