How the Democrats Can Play Offense on Immigration

If all politics is spectacle in the era of Donald Trump, few episodes illustrate this more vividly than that created by Republican governors who bused asylum-seeking immigrants from their states into Northern cities during Joe Biden’s presidency. Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida ensured that in the run-up to Trump’s 2024 reelection effort, the news media—and millions of social media feeds—were flooded with imagery of immigrants camped out in urban areas: desperate mobs swamping blue states and cities and straining their social service systems to the breaking point.

It was a reprehensible but crafty tactic: By manufacturing a wildly distorted and undeniably powerful and shareable display that became a stand-in for Biden’s Border Crisis, as Trump and Republicans branded it, these governors probably helped Trump get reelected in 2024. To this day, some reporters still describe it as akin to a political masterstroke.

Yet now something just as powerful is happening, albeit in the other direction, and, mystifyingly, the savvy media almost never describe it in such terms. A handful of Democratic governors have found an innovative way to leverage the power of spectacle against Trump by relentlessly highlighting his ICE raids, kidnappings, and paramilitary abuses, in part by encouraging countless ordinary people to join in the project of using their phones to, as the old left phrase has it, document the atrocities. And it’s working: It’s done real political damage to Trump, just as those GOP governors damaged Biden. It’s creating a cultural moment around immigration that’s perhaps more powerful than the one created by those GOP governors. And it’s forging a new way for Democrats to go on offense on this issue—if they’ll seize upon it.

The Democratic governors in question are JB Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California. This role was thrust upon them as stewards of the biggest, most densely populated, immigrant-heavy urban areas in the country—Chicago and Los Angeles—which are in the crosshairs of Trump’s immigration crackdown. This has created an opening to experiment with new kinds of opposition politics well suited to the information wars of the Trump years—the wars of spectacle. It’s no accident that both Pritzker and Newsom are plainly considering presidential runs in 2028. That’s incentivizing them to break through to national liberals and Democrats with novel forms of confrontation with Trump.

In short, intentionally or not, Pritzker and Newsom are engaged in a kind of shadow war over who will be perceived—by national liberals and Democrats—as the most prominent obstacle to Trump’s goal of purging the nation of as many immigrants as possible. And in a surprise, this dynamic has been a salutary thing: It’s pushing both men to create modes of pro-immigration politics that carry lessons for political battles to come.

“Out of necessity, the two governors are in a race to the top in a way that’s having major implications,” Chris Newman, general counsel for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, told me. “At a time when skittishness on immigrants’ rights is the norm in Washington, D.C., it’s a very good thing that these two governors’ political interests and immigrants’ material interests are urgently aligned.”

Most obviously, the two governors have played a lead role in thwarting Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to urban areas, ostensibly done to protect federal immigration officers carrying out mass deportations. Both Illinois and California aggressively challenged the operations in court, winning numerous victories, and in December the Supreme Court temporarily blocked Trump’s ability to send National Guard troops to Illinois—leading him to end the deployments in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland with a whimper.

But that’s only the beginning. Pritzker, for instance, signed legislation in December that protects immigrants from getting detained for civil arrests at or outside court during certain proceedings and allows civil actions against federal officers who violate their constitutional rights. The bill also limits federal law enforcement actions against immigrants in schools and hospitals. In October, Pritzker established by executive order a state accountability commission that formally documents misconduct by federal agents for potential legal action against them.

Newsom, for his part, signed a package of bills in September that are similarly about protecting immigrants from Trump. These measures bar schools from letting federal immigration agents on campuses without warrants, prohibit enforcement agents from wearing face masks while conducting operations, and require them to identify themselves, among other things. He signed measures allocating tens of millions of dollars to bankroll both state lawsuits against the federal government and groups defending immigrants from deportation. And he created a legal way for parents who face deportation to designate other adults to care for their kids.

A Revitalized Opposition Politics

Perhaps the deepest innovation from both governors has been at the level of language and politics. Newsom, who as leader of the country’s most populous state is probably the most prominent Democratic 2028 hopeful, is widely assumed to be Trump’s chief antagonist on immigration. But Pritzker has, with less fanfare, challenged Trump in a way that deserves attention. He has repeatedly called on Illinois residents to help document abuses of power toward immigrants. “People of Illinois, we need your help,” he posted on X last fall. “Get your cell phones out—record what you see.... We need to let the world know this is happening—and that we won’t stand for it.” At a presser around the same time, Pritzker added: “Look out for your communities and your neighbors. Know your rights. Film things you see happening in your neighborhoods and your streets and share them with the news media. Authoritarians thrive on your silence.”

It turns out there’s a deeper theory of the case behind these directives, as Anne Caprara, Pritzker’s chief of staff, told me. Countless Illinois residents were horrified by what they were seeing but felt deeply lacking in agency. “People needed to feel part of the pushback here,” Caprara said, noting that the goal was to “empower them to do something” and “give them something to do.”

Pritzker has paired all that with language about ICE that consciously depicts it as a hostile invading army. “This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will swing back,” Pritzker said over the summer, when Trump’s military deployment to Chicago had just become known. “If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.” And in October, Pritzker said: “There’s one thing I really want to say to Donald Trump. If you come for my people, you come through me.”

Taken all together, this can help revitalize opposition politics against Trump. For one thing, it takes seriously the current state of our information environment. Trumpworld understands that the battle over mass deportations is an information war: The administration sends camera crews along with its deportation operations, producing slick propaganda videos that portray paramilitary, hyper-armed ICE goons as liberating heroes. The Department of Homeland Security’s social media accounts pump out enormous amounts of vile agitprop depicting immigrants as menacing criminals.

There’s an informational method to this madness. As Johns Hopkins University professor Filipe Campante noted, the basic reality of the “modern information environment” is that “censorship is no longer viable,” meaning the administration must use its “own content provision to drown out any negative facts.” Trumpworld understands this, and the Pritzker approach also takes it seriously, by encouraging ordinary people to help overwhelm his propaganda with real information.

And it’s working. In Chicago, the citizen documentation of ICE atrocities has been positively staggering. Indeed, Pritzker’s team consciously has sought to make ordinary people find empowerment amid dark times through participation. As Caprara describes it, the governor and his advisers realized that this had the makings of a cultural moment during early ICE raids, when they started “seeing suburban ladies out in their Lululemon pants with their whistles.” The result, Caprara said, is that for every one propaganda video Trumpworld puts out, “there are 50 videos in everybody’s timeline of actual incidents where people can see what’s happening.”

This is happening all over the country: After all, everybody is carrying around a handy documentary tool in their pockets. In videos of these events, you invariably see lots of other people in the background using their phones to film them from different angles. The effect has been palpable: When an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis in January, bystanders instantly supplied videos of the killing from all different angles that decisively debunked Trump’s false claims that it represented justified self-defense. Tellingly, Trump and JD Vance aggressively pushed their own video of one angle that muddled the issue, but citizen-produced videos won the day, preventing Trumpworld’s preferred content from drowning out the truth. The same happened after federal agents killed Alex Pretti soon after. Pritzker has advanced the cause by urging Democrats to recognize that we’re in a brutal information war and to adapt accordingly.

Newsom has put his own spin on these info-wars. He has aggressively highlighted Trump’s immigration raids to sound a warning about the broader threat of Trump’s authoritarian lawlessness. “Following the dictator’s playbook, Donald Trump has unleashed a blitzkrieg,” warned an ad run by a Newsom-allied group during the victorious referendum push to allow mid-decade redistricting in California. “You have the power to stop him.” Note, again, the theme of empowerment.

The California governor has regularly highlighted the dispatching of the National Guard to his state to warn all Americans that this previews something bigger: use of the military to suppress voting across the country. “This is existential,” he intoned last August. “He’s militarizing American cities. This is Putin’s playbook. This is authoritarianism. It’s happening.” He’s made this point over many months, not hesitating to call Trump’s agents “secret police.”

Newsom has also responded to Trumpworld’s depiction of immigrants as criminals with his own info-warring, by highlighting the positive contributions they make to American life. He has underscored the role of immigrants in rebuilding after the Los Angeles firestorms. He has highlighted small businesses who lament the loss of trusted immigrant workers. He has devoted whole speeches to the contributions of immigrants to the state’s history. And he has held events showcasing immigrant entrepreneurs. As Fernando Guerra, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount University, told me, Newsom sees “making immigrants much more visible and humanizing them” as central to his politics.

In short: Whereas Trumpworld devotes an enormous amount of state-sponsored propaganda to pushing the message that immigration is bad, Newsom regularly amplifies the message that immigration is good.

So what does all this tell us about how Democrats should handle the politics of immigration? 

An Argument Over How Persuasion Works

Obviously, Pritzker and Newsom come from blue states, where messages of resistance are more likely to find a receptive audience. Others will note that in places like California and Illinois, Democrats still have to prove that liberal governance can really deliver. All of that is fair enough, but on immigration in particular, the two governors’ approach nonetheless carries important lessons for how the national party should proceed. It even has something to offer for Democrats in red or swingy areas, though they may want to modify it a bit.

What’s really at issue here is a bigger intraparty argument over how voter persuasion really works. One school of thought—associated with some Democratic consultants and the so-called popularists—holds that swing and low-info voters won’t even consider voting for Democrats until they firmly establish that they are laser-focused on “kitchen table issues” that really matter to them. Even when big things happen on immigration—such as when Trump wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a gulag in El Salvador—Democrats shouldn’t focus too much on them. That’s because doing so would make Democrats appear unfocused on voters’ “real” concerns and would raise the “salience” of immigration, where Trump has the advantage due partly to leftist positions some Democrats have adopted under pressure from activists, which they must cast off.

The rebuttal to all this—one offered by writers like Brian Beutler and data analyst G. Elliott Morris—is that public opinion doesn’t work this way. Instead, voters who tune out politics are regularly buffeted by gale force deluges of information from all directions. Their convictions about public policy—and their views on what the parties stand for—are shallowly rooted at best. Their impressions are largely formed when big, jarring events, intense media coverage, social media saturation, or loud enough drumbeats of criticism vaguely disrupt their algorithmic torpor and get them to fleetingly pay attention.

What’s more, goes this line, even if it is unwise for Democrats to take very unpopular positions, this realization alone can’t solve much. Voters’ negative impressions of Democrats are also due to them getting bombarded in the present by vicious MAGA-GOP propaganda. As it happens, this is particularly true on immigration: Not a day goes by without Trump or Stephen Miller declaring that Democrats are enabling “criminal illegal aliens” to steal your jobs, bilk taxpayer-funded welfare programs, and contaminate pristine rural communities with drugs and culturally alien habits—in essence, enabling them to rape, pillage, and kill.

In this understanding, not engaging on the issue just lets that agitprop dominate low-info voters’ information streams. And here again, even if some activist positions are politically damaging, aggressive distancing from them won’t alone address the larger, ongoing problem of MAGA-GOP information dominance.

The events of the last year strongly favor the second interpretation. Trump’s approval rating on immigration has plunged throughout 2025: In December, an Associated Press poll found it to be at an abysmal 38 percent, down 11 points from March; a New York Times/Siena poll in January put Trump 17 points underwater on the issue. Crucially, Morris shows that Trump’s approval has dropped particularly during moments when Abrego Garcia’s deportation dominated the news, which some Democrats worked hard to highlight, and during moments when Trump’s hypermilitarization of immigration enforcement captured media attention.

What’s more, as Morris also shows, public perceptions of ICE have markedly deteriorated over the last year, dropping during periods of heightened public attention to its militarized enforcement tactics, especially during deployments in Los Angeles and Chicago. ICE’s standing plummeted further after the Minneapolis shooting. As Morris concludes, those anti-ICE opinion surges almost certainly helped drive Trump’s dropping approval rating on immigration, because more voters were “learning about the agency’s enforcement tactics.”

Why did all this happen? Is it because many voters heard about these things and concluded: Trump isn’t focused on my kitchen table concerns, which is what I really care about, so I no longer approve of his handling of immigration, or some such? Well, maybe a little bit. But a more dominant sentiment was probably something like this: Wow, I didn’t know this was happening. These images of violence, terror, and suffering are horrifying, and I sympathize deeply with the victims, who are being treated unjustly and remind me of undocumented immigrants I personally know. The dropping approval rating likely reflects something like that set of perceptions.

As we’ve seen from the remarkable events in Minneapolis after the deaths of Pretti and Good, the countless ordinary people bravely making a stand against Trump’s stormtroopers deserve the credit for drawing national attention to these atrocities. So it’s hard to know exactly what role Pritzker and Newsom played in these national opinion shifts. But their general approach captures the basic insight here: that politics in the Trump era is about conflict and attention. By picking big fights with Trump over his deployments in their own regions, they drew more national attention to Trump’s vicious and unpopular crackdowns. And Pritzker, by calling on people to film as much of this stuff as possible, is taking this understanding of politics as information warfare further. If elected Democrats did these things more concertedly, many more voters would get bombarded by all this dramatically negative imagery and would turn against Trump over it.

At this juncture, someone will point out that Trump’s dropping immigration approval rating won’t necessarily benefit Democrats, who still must improve their own standing on it and represent a concrete agenda of their own. As it happens, his sinking approval numbers do, in fact, give Democrats an opening to improve their own standing on this issue by engaging directly with Trump’s disastrous tenure, with the Pritzker and Newsom approach offering some guidance.

What Should Democrats Be for?

The Marquette Law School poll is one of the few high-quality surveys out there that gauges public opinion on immigration in a genuinely illuminating way. Its survey in late January found the following among American voters nationally:

Do you favor or oppose deporting immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home countries even if they have lived here for a number of years, have jobs and no criminal record?

Favor 44%

Oppose 56%

So a solid majority opposes removing undocumented immigrants who are longtime residents with jobs and no criminal record. Yet, tellingly, the same poll finds that when the question is framed differently—when it asks about “deportation of immigrants in the U.S. illegally,” but without qualifications—those numbers are largely flipped. A majority favors deporting the undocumented when asked about it as a general matter. But when respondents are asked if that includes immigrants who have generally and peacefully integrated into American life, a solid majority opposes it.

So here’s my theory of the case: Intense public attention to Trump’s mass deportations, and the brutality of them, has sharpened voters’ awareness of that distinction—the one between deportations in general and deportations of working, noncriminal, longtime residents. That explains why other polls find that large majorities continue favoring a path to legalization for most longtime residents, and why still others show a big spike in percentages of Americans who see immigration as a positive good for the country.

Trump’s victory in 2024 obscured these public opinion realities from view. This was partly because some centrist pundits decided that the win indicated a deep, durable cultural backlash against immigration more broadly, particularly among the working class. This idea is prominently associated with The New York Times’ David Leonhardt, leading Jerusalem Demsas of The Argument to memorably label it “Leonhardt-ism.” It’s the notion that a central national problem we face—and a central political problem Democrats face—is “the sheer number of immigrants.” As Demsas shows, that’s not supportable: There’s no obvious backlash to immigration itself, and we need more of it to offset population decline, an aging workforce, and depleted tax revenue for social programs like health care for the elderly.

But lurking behind that centrist reading is a bigger argument. It’s that Trump won because the American mainstream decided that he was in some sense right about immigration in general: that not only is undocumented migration out of control, but legal immigration is having all sorts of ill social effects, that it’s a central problem in American life.

Yet it’s hard to square this with the huge cultural backlash to Trump’s deportations, with large majorities continuing to want a path to legalization, and even larger majorities now saying immigration is good for the country. What’s far more likely is that voters rebelled against the overwhelmed border and asylum system under Biden and thermostatically turned against the party in power, and centrist pundits confused this with a more profound cultural shift. By the way: Marquette data provided to me shows that, as of late January, noncollege graduates oppose deporting longtime residents with jobs and no criminal record by 54 percent to 46 percent, which also undercuts notions of a major working-class anti-immigration backlash.

Indeed, everything we’re seeing now suggests an opening for Democrats to challenge Trump and MAGA on a deep ideological level. This can take several forms:

Democrats can express solidarity with longtime immigrant residents in Trump’s (sometimes literal) crosshairs. A core MAGA diagnosis is that immigration has undermined social cohesion—or “social solidarity,” as JD Vance puts it—and that this has driven a working-class backlash against it. Empirical work debunks the idea that immigration erodes social solidarity. But even in terms of public opinion, we’re seeing majorities reject this idea, too. At bottom, majority support for a path to legalization for longtime residents is an expression of support for a deeper notion: that they have become part of our communities and now have some sort of claim to staying.

Note that Pritzker and Newsom aggressively make the case that native-born Americans and immigrants, including noncriminal undocumented ones, have a shared interest in each other’s economic and social fates. Other Democrats could repurpose this and adapt it to their own regions. It’s powerful stuff that effectively challenges the MAGA worldview, which turns on depicting immigrants as a zero-sum economic, social, and even civilizational threat.

Joe Rogan’s now-famous denunciations of Trump’s deportations illustrate the point: All this searing imagery has awakened people to their social and economic ties to immigrants. It’s created an opening for Democrats to restate the case for letting the undocumented get right with the law and creating pathways to come here legally as an affirmative national good. That Rogan and the “manosphere” are alert to all this suggests this realization is reaching deep into informational spaces Democrats struggle to access. They should align themselves with a better way forward and reach into those spaces with that message.

Democrats can stand for an orderly system, as opposed to chaos and cruelty. They should not shy away from arguing that illegal immigration is caused partly by too many draconian restrictions on legal immigration. Many voters simply don’t know that a big part of the problem is that options for coming here legally have largely been wiped out, and that legal immigration could be managed well if Congress only tried to do so. Democrats can be for a path to legalization for most undocumented immigrants here, for a reinstatement of humanitarian pathways that Trump is erasing, and even for new economic and humanitarian pathways, while packaging this as a real way to bring order to the system.

People absolutely hate ICE raids and deportations. Just like an overwhelmed border, Trump’s degradations represent a different form of chaos and disorder—a far worse one. Democrats can say there’s another way. Those in politically difficult areas can emphasize border security and restrictions on asylum that will prevent any future asylum system from getting overburdened again, while calling for offsetting those restrictions with new proposals for people to apply for humanitarian entry from home countries without showing up at the border. The bipartisan proposal from a group of senators in 2022 doing all that is a starting model here.

Finally, Democrats can speak with conviction about what they know to be right, wrong, and true. Rather than haggling over the precise words “abolish ICE,” Democrats can stand for some basic principles: ICE is a catastrophic, irredeemable failure, and interior enforcement must be totally rethought from top to bottom. Enforcement is of course necessary—especially at the border and also inside the country—but armed paramilitary forces should not be patrolling our streets and residential communities. It’s correct to focus on serious criminals, but not on longtime noncriminal undocumented residents, who should not be hunted and deserve a chance to get right with the law.

Let’s close by returning to that Pritzker challenge to Trump: “If you come for my people, you come through me.” Democrats can say: We will defend you and your communities from this absolute madness. They can say: We need more immigrants, not fewer. They can say: ICE is bad and immigration is good. They can speak to voters like adults about these issues. Public opinion is incredibly fluid on these matters. Democrats: You have a rare opportunity. Don’t run from it. Seize upon it, forcefully and enthusiastically.