What a liberal immigration enforcement policy might look like

ICE’s brutality is souring much of the electorate on the Trump administration. The Democrats look increasingly likely to win at least the House of Representatives in the midterms — so likely that Trump is now panicking and starting his election denial routine early. But Trump shows signs of realizing that he overreached, demoting the head of the Border Patrol and making some other halting moves toward de-escalation.

This is progress (at least if you dislike unaccountable secret police, race wars, warrantless searches, summary executions of protesters, and so on…which I do). But it’s possible that Democrats — and especially progressives — will take the wrong message from their first small victories in the battle against autocracy.

For one thing, the Minnesota anti-ICE protests are starting to show some signs of being taken over by the same kind of radicals who made the 2020 BLM protests go overboard in Seattle, Portland, and a few other cities. Some protesters in Minneapolis are setting up illegal checkpoints to stop vehicles and screen them for ICE. Others have been harassing various people. Some leftist protesters have even denounced progressive activist Will Stancil, who was recently punched in the face.

Obviously, if this kind of thing continues, all Trump and Stephen Miller and ICE will have to do is to back off and not kill any protesters for a while, and watch as the more extreme street activists reenact the ill-fated CHAZ from Seattle 2020. That would sap some (but not all) of the momentum from the backlash to the recent ICE killings.

But the other danger is that Dems will take a midterm victory as a sign that they don’t need to recalibrate their position on the immigration issue. In a post two weeks ago, I pointed out that although they hate Trump’s heavy-handed tactics, Americans still don’t support the permissive immigration policies of the Biden years.

Recent polls confirm this. For example, a recent Fox News poll found that Americans still favor the Republican Party over the Democratic Party on immigration in general, and on border security in particular:

The same poll found that although the public now disapproves of Trump’s overall immigration approach by a substantial margin, he’s at +5 on border security specifically.

Other polls find much the same, as Eric Levitz reports:

In a Wall Street Journal poll taken after Good’s killing, voters said that the Republican Party was “better equipped” to handle immigration than the Democrats by an 11-point margin…Apparently, the only thing more unpopular than a nakedly authoritarian immigration policy is a Democratic one.

This is a big red flashing warning sign for Dems. Watching Trump’s ICE in action has reminded Americans of the danger of authoritarianism, but it hasn’t changed their basic idea of what immigration policy ought to be.

Right now, Democrats and progressives are primarily reacting to ICE’s brutality and Trump’s authoritarianism. That’s fine, but it’s not enough. Democrats need to proactively think about what kind of immigration policy they want — not just because they’ll need a plan if and when they get back into power, but because they need to credibly promise the American public that they’re going to do something about the public’s legitimate concerns. If voters think Dems are just going to snap right back to the permissive Biden-era immigration policies that everyone hated, it will be a lot harder for Dems to win in 2028 — and it’ll give Trump much more of a free hand to pursue his authoritarian policies.

Thus, Dems should be thinking about what a liberal immigration policy would look like. Here are some of my own suggestions.

Don’t delegitimize America with “stolen land” rhetoric

Donald Trump and the MAGA movement want to delegitimize immigrants as a group — to say that people who choose America are fundamentally less American than those who have ancestral blood ties to the land. It’s natural to sort of kick out against that idea by trying to turn the tables, and delegitimize the MAGA people themselves. This, I think, is why progressives often respond to anti-immigrant movements by saying that America itself is “stolen land”:

The idea here is that if America itself has no rightful claim to the land on which it sits, then the claim of any MAGA supporter to belong on this land is no better than the claim of any immigrant — legal or otherwise.