Semilocal and electroweak strings are well known to be unstable against unwinding by the condensation of the second Higgs component in their cores. A large class of current models of dark matter contains dark scalar fields coupled to the Higgs sector of the Standard Model (Higgs portal) and/or dark U(1) gauge fields. It is shown that Higgs-portal-type couplings and a gauge kinetic mixing term of the dark U(1) gauge field have a significant stabilizing effect on semilocal strings in the “visible” sector.