Democrats face a defining choice on immigration
On Friday, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton added her voice to a growing chorus of condemnation and disgust against Donald Trump’s mass deportations policy.
“The crisis in Minneapolis reveals a deep moral rot at the heart of Trump’s movement,” the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee wrote in the Atlantic. “Whatever you think about immigration policy, how can a person of conscience justify the lack of compassion and empathy for the victims in Minnesota, and for the families torn apart or hiding in fear, for the children separated from their parents or afraid to go to school?”
She highlighted the gross hypocrisy of the Christian right and its role in the MAGA movement, comparing Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old nurse killed by Border Patrol officers while helping a fellow protester, to the Good Samaritan. “Jesus tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves and help those in need,” Clinton wrote. “‘Do this and you will live,’ he says. Not in Donald Trump’s America.”
The former secretary of state concluded her essay with a call to action: “These are dark days in America. To rekindle our light, we must reject cruelty and corruption.”
Clinton joined former presidents Barack Obama, Joe Biden and her husband Bill Clinton, as well as former First Lady Michelle Obama, who have also condemned the Trump administration in the aftermath of the killings of Pretti and Renee Good by federal agents in Minneapolis.
Congressional Democrats have a choice to make. Will they hold the moral high ground on immigration and use it to gain momentum against Trump and Republicans? Or will they, as Democrats have so often done, retreat?
The moral stand of the former presidents and their wives made it clear: Congressional Democrats have a choice to make. Will they hold the moral high ground on immigration and use it to gain momentum against Trump and Republicans? Or will they, as Democrats have so often done, retreat into “compromise,” “bipartisanship” and play the performative role of “adults in the room,” effectively surrendering to Republican hostage-taking?
At least for now, Democrats in Congress appear to be finding their spine. Over the past week, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have used the threat of a government shutdown as leverage to rein in Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Trump’s larger machine of mass deportation.
On Thursday night, Senate Democrats agreed to a two-week extension of funding for the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that houses ICE and Border Patrol. But since the legislation hasn’t been passed by the House, the government has been in partial shutdown since Saturday. According to Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., the House looks set for a Tuesday vote on the measure, although with Republicans holding only a one-vote majority and many Democrats in the chamber taking a harder line than their Senate counterparts, the outcome is far from assured.
Schumer’s strategy is to use this window of time to force Republicans to agree to modest, common sense reforms that include adopting a universal code of conduct for all federal law enforcement agents and officers, banning masks, requiring DHS officers to wear body cameras, stopping the use of roving patrols and expanding the requirements to obtain warrants.
House Democrats have staked out a far stronger position. They propose banning ICE from operating anywhere in the United States, and barring the federal detention and deportation of American citizens.
In an interview with reporters last Thursday, Jeffries explained, “In what country are we living in where ICE and DHS have free rein to detain and deport American citizens? That’s inconsistent with the Constitution. And so if the extremists don’t get it, it should be made explicit.”
This is an easy real-life morality tale for Democrats to tell voters about the Trump administration’s extremism versus the country’s democratic values and traditions. The story has high stakes, with clear heroes and villains. There is little moral ambiguity when video footage shows unarmed people being shot and killed by federal agents, or children and other innocents being taken away by heavily-armed men in masks.
Public opinion is on the Democrats’ side. A range of high-quality polls show that a majority of Americans oppose the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. Nearly half the public — including approximately 20% of Republicans — wants to abolish or greatly restrict ICE.
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Democrats, then, do not need to lead public opinion on this issue. The American people and the party’s own voters are already far ahead of Democratic leadership when it comes to restraining ICE and ending mass deportations. For them, the fight is both deeply personal and painfully political. The administration’s mass deportation campaign has produced a trail of human misery and suffering, including a harrowing account in USA Today from Patty O’Keefe, a Minneapolis resident who was detained by ICE and released eight hours later without charges.
“On my way to that cell, I passed holding cells filled with people who appeared to be of Latino and East African descent,” she wrote. “The despondent faces and the screaming, wailing and pleading from these men, women and children — reportedly as young as 5 years old — will forever haunt me… Perhaps more haunting still was the sound of agents nearby laughing.”
Schumer, Jeffries and other Democratic leaders should read O’Keefe’s words. They should also take seriously a new CNN/SSRS poll showing that a scant 28% of registered Democrats of the party’s leadership — and that 71% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents believe the party has done too little to oppose Trump and Republicans. Nonetheless, rank-and-file Democrats continue to be much more motivated than Republicans about the upcoming midterm elections.
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If congressional Democrats do not boldly take up the moral crusade of stopping ICE thuggery as part of a larger defense of American democracy — at a time when Trump’s fascist grip is tightening — they will have more than earned the ire of the American people and their own base.
They are already in danger of doing so. As the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland warned, the Schumer’s decision to negotiate may “have let slip their moment of maximum leverage.” In other words, the two-week negotiating period, coupled with the near-week that it could take the Senate bill to pass the House, could cause a loss of pressure and momentum. “They will have walked right into Trump’s trap,” Freedland wrote, “as spelled out by the administration official who admitted that this week’s ‘de-escalatory measures’ were designed to placate Senate Democrats just enough that they failed to seize the moment.”
Democratic leaders must decide whether they are going to be narrowly focused, single-minded seekers of reelection, or if they will instead use their power to advance the moral good in defense of the country’s democratic life.
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