When President Donald Trump won the White House last year for the second time, many Democrats concluded they would need to moderate on a cluster of issues on which they were on the wrong side of public opinion. Chief among them was immigration, after nearly four years of willful neglect at the border had left the party’s reputation in tatters.
On the day Trump returned to office in January, the Senate voted 64 to 35 to pass the Laken Riley Act. Named after a 22-year-old woman who was murdered by an illegal immigrant while she was jogging at the University of Georgia, the legislation stiffened penalties on illegal immigrants who commit crimes in the United States and mandated detention for more offenses.
Twelve Democratic senators voted in the affirmative. Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), John Fetterman (D-PA), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Jon Ossoff (D-GA), Raphael Warnock (D-GA), Gary Peters (D-MI), and Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) all represented battleground states Trump carried. (Ossoff and Warnock also hail from the state where Laken Riley was slain.) Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), and Maggie Hassan (D-NH) came from states where Trump cut the Democrats’ margin of victory to single digits.
Forty-six House Democrats also voted for the bill. “Most Democrats waved the bill off as a political messaging effort last year when Republicans first proposed it,” NPR reported on Jan. 22, saying the vote “marked a sharp shift from recent immigration debates on Capitol Hill.”
Activists were incensed, with one group calling the bipartisan vote “a betrayal” and another denouncing it as “shameful” and “anti-immigrant.” A third advocacy organization complained the new law, which Trump signed nine days into his second term on Jan. 29, “calls for the unjust detention of undocumented people accused of theft-related crimes, as small as shoplifting, and allows state attorneys general to sue the federal government if they believe their states had been harmed by its failure to enforce immigration laws.”
Democrats seemed finally ready to buck the activists behind their dramatic leftward lurch on immigration. They had just lost 45% of the Hispanic vote, and most Hispanic men, to Trump. But the shift proved short-lived. As protesters rage against Trump in the streets, Democrats are being pushed even further to the left on immigration than they were before losing the election.
The Democrats’ new embrace of immigration radicalism is being led by none other than Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), who initially seemed desirous of presiding over a pivot back to the center. Newsom attempted a rebrand from symbol of blue-state liberal misgovernment to thoughtful podcaster who was going to get Democrats on the right side of those “80-20 issues” that bedeviled fellow Californian former Vice President Kamala Harris in her campaign last year.
Newsom interviewed conservative influencers Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon, both deeply ensconced in Trumpworld. He exhorted Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), Harris’s running mate, to join him in trying to understand MAGA, even if only to figure out how to defeat the president’s political movement. “When you talk to a guy like Steve Bannon, he talks about working folks, and he talks about how we hollowed out the industrial core of this country,” Newsom explained to an underwhelmed Walz, later adding that what Bannon says “reminds me a lot of what Bernie Sanders was saying, reminds me a lot of what Democrats said 20, 30 years ago.”
That all went up in smoke as quickly as a car on the streets of Los Angeles, as the city was convulsed by violent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “My understanding is that protesters essentially attempted to barricade ICE inside where they were staging for their raids, which is an activity that has been going on around the country for some time now,” Kyle Shideler, an expert on radical protests with the Center for Security Policy, told the Tablet. But things soon got out of control.
Newsom sided with the mob and against Trump, who sent in the National Guard and active-duty troops to protect federal buildings and keep the peace. Newsom said it was democracy that was under attack. He seized the anti-Trump opportunity in front of him while projectiles were being hurled at police.
“This isn’t just about protests here in Los Angeles,” Newsom said in a video. “This is about all of us. This is about you. California may be first, but it clearly will not end here. Other states are next. Democracy is next. Democracy is under assault before our eyes.”
“This moment we have feared has arrived,” Newsom warned, harkening back to his party’s repeated warnings that Trump posed a unique threat to democracy.
Newsom’s comments echoed those of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, whom Joe Biden had passed over for vice president five years earlier. “It makes me feel like our city is actually a test case,” Bass told reporters in a sudden burst of federalism, “a test case for what happens when the federal government moves in and takes the authority away from the state or away from local government.”
This is exactly what many Democrats and Democratic-aligned interest groups want to hear. And Trump has been known to overreach at times, so it is always possible the situation in Los Angeles could evolve, or deteriorate, in unpredictable ways.
But it wed the Democrats to a series of unpopular positions from which they were trying to disassociate themselves. “Abolish ICE” was a kissing cousin of “defund the police” that even Biden had spent years disavowing, though as president from 2021 to 2025, he did undermine the agency and limit its reach in various ways. Democrats began backsliding on that before the Los Angeles riots commenced.
Like defund the police, joining the anti-ICE protests makes it seem as if Democrats oppose all immigration enforcement. So does advocacy for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, alleged to be a gang member and human trafficker rather than just a simple “Maryland man,” and Emiliano Garduno-Galvez, an arrested LA rioter alleged to have lit and tossed a Molotov cocktail at Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputies.
Democrats were initially emboldened when their position on Abrego Garcia seemed to poll well. But most of those polls appeared to test narrowly whether Trump should obey valid court orders and avoid mistaken deportations, which most people would reasonably want. They did not reference the criminal allegations against him.
The focus of the protests and mainstream Democrats’ outrage is supposed to be on hardworking busboys and long-settled grandmothers who have not followed up their immigration violations with subsequent crimes. Some illegal immigrants caught up in the Trump dragnet might otherwise be sympathetic figures, and deportation quotas could lead officials to make occasional mistakes. But these are not the poster children the Democrats have chosen.
“Emiliano Garduno-Galvez is a criminal illegal alien from Mexico who threatened the lives of federal law enforcement officers by attacking them with a Molotov cocktail during the violent riots in Los Angeles,” Department of Homeland Security official Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “These are the types of criminal illegal aliens that rioters are fighting to protect. The Los Angeles rioters will not stop us or slow us down. And if you lay a hand on a law enforcement officer, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Working-class voters have shifted toward the GOP under Trump in part because they don’t believe their wages should be undercut by even sympathetic illegal immigrants. Many of them believe people should be deported for violating immigration law, not just using these violations as a pretext for punishing them for breaking other laws, even if most think criminal immigrants should be the top enforcement priority.
Moreover, it was the mishandling of the border under Biden and Harris that contributed to a hardening of public attitudes on immigration. A recent CBS News poll found that 54% supported Trump’s deportations, and a plurality believes they are making the U.S. safer. CNN found a 40-point swing in favor of the Republicans on the issue of immigration among legal immigrants. The RealClearPolitics polling average finds most voters approve of Trump’s job performance on immigration, with only Quinnipiac finding net disapproval.
A 2024 Gallup poll found that 55% wanted to reduce immigration, the highest percentage taking that position since 2001. Only 16% wanted to increase immigration levels. While the results varied, some polls found a plurality to majority support for the mass deportations Trump was promising on the campaign trail.
Biden did not take the most radical position on immigration in the 2020 Democratic primaries. He had opponents who favored decriminalizing border crossings and dismantling some aspects of internal immigration enforcement. But he did call the Obama-era deportations that took place while he was vice president, which were unpopular with progressive Democrats and immigrant activists at the time, “a big mistake.” Once he was in office, at least 8 million illegal immigrants poured across the border. The New York Times described Biden as having presided over “the largest immigration surge in U.S. history.”
After his last State of the Union address, Biden apologized not for mispronouncing Laken Riley’s name but for describing her murderer as an “illegal.” No human is illegal, the activists would say. Not even a convicted murderer.
Although Biden and most Democratic elected officials would never put it this way, the progressive activists who influence the party’s decision-making in this area fundamentally do not believe it is legitimate for wealthy, Western countries to enforce immigration limitations meaningfully against poor people of color. This is regardless of how unregulated immigration affects working-class citizens and lawful residents of all races and ethnicities, or what the voters want.
Democrats have not always thought or talked like this about immigration. When Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) first ran for president, he told liberal journalist Ezra Klein in an interview that open borders were a libertarian concept harmful to the working class. “No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal,” the Vermont socialist said.
The backlash was swift. Vox published an article calling Sanders’s “fear of immigrant labor” — remember we are largely discussing illegal immigration here — “wrongheaded” and “ugly.” By 2020, Sanders was listed alongside asterisk candidate former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio as one of the two hardest-core ICE abolitionists in that year’s Democratic presidential field. “Bernie Sanders was once wary of immigrant workers,” Vox noted approvingly in February 2020. “Now he’s on their side.”
“All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country,” then-President Bill Clinton said in his 1995 State of the Union address. “The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens.”
Clinton went on to mention his immigration reform commission, chaired by a former Democratic Texas congresswoman named Barbara Jordan. But she talked very differently about the issue than today’s Democrats do. “Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: Those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave,” Jordan said. “The top priorities for detention and removal, of course, are criminal aliens. But for the system to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process.”
Even the sainted Barack Obama acknowledged the moral legitimacy of immigration enforcement. While he was accused of cooking the books to make his deportation numbers look higher than they were as president, he did pursue a policy of removing illegal immigrants even if he was mainly trying to build support for “comprehensive immigration reform,” a mixture of enforcement and a mass amnesty for most illegal immigrants already in the country.
“When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment,” Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope, published in 2006 before he won the presidency. “When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.” (Though Obama did preface this with a confession of “nativist sentiments.”)
Obama failed. As president, he was unable to persuade Republicans, especially in the House, to join him in support of amnesty. Many in the GOP felt they had tried this under then-President Ronald Reagan in 1986, and it did not work. The enforcement proved episodic at best, the amnesty was permanent, and illegal immigration increased into the 1990s. (Indeed, some point to this amnesty when they look at the scenes unfolding in California, a reliably Republican state at the presidential level as recently as 1988, now.)
Left-wing activists were outraged that a Democratic president was the “deporter in chief.” They held placards saying, “No borders, no nations, stop deportations!” While Obama did not go quite that far, he then moved toward legalizing illegal immigrants by executive fiat despite arguing not long before that he lacked the legal authority to do so. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, remains in place today.
The Los Angeles riots, with their Mexican flag-waving and clashes with law enforcement, threaten to radicalize the Democrats beyond the issue of immigration. They are reminiscent of the George Floyd protests of 2020 and the anti-Israel demonstrations that unfolded on college campuses after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
Until recently, Democrats have treated 2019 and 2020 as a sort of fever dream from which they were trying to awaken. Harris spent most of her abbreviated presidential campaign trying to obscure or walk back positions she took during that period. The excesses of the pandemic and the so-called racial justice movement were regarded as at least somewhat regrettable.
Trump’s popular-vote plurality in an election that was framed as a referendum on democracy itself appeared to catch Democrats off guard. There was not even symbolic opposition to certifying the election results. In the months leading up to his inauguration and for several weeks afterward, Democrats appeared to be weighing accommodation rather than Resistance.
The pendulum soon swung back in the opposite direction, gradually at first and eventually drastically. Elon Musk, the Department of Government Efficiency, the tariffs, and ultimately the deportations deepened progressive anger. Now, it is in full force.
BORDERS VS. BUDGETS: TRUMP ALLIES SPAR OVER SECOND-TERM PRIORITIES
Trump appears willing to respond in ways he only talked about doing in 2020. Invoking the Insurrection Act if the riots continue to spiral, for example, remains on the table. His allies are already referring to the anti-ICE protesters as insurrectionists. (Though Trump has also signaled a willingness to accommodate certain industries, such as hotels and agriculture, inconvenienced by his immigration crackdown.) This time, voters have rejected the progressive fever dream at the ballot box. It isn’t 2020 anymore.
But we could be in for a long summer, nevertheless.
W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
