Democrats Haven’t Found Their Footing on Immigration

By Audrey Fahlberg

Monday, August 04, 2025

 

Have Democrats found their footing on immigration?

 

“I think they’re getting there. I think we have to emphasize where the American public is,” first-term Senator Ruben Gallego (D., Ariz.) told National Review in a recent interview. To win the border-security debate, Democrats must put forward a “sane” immigration strategy that “fights the abuses of Trump” while not coming across as out of touch.

 

The notion that Democrats are “getting there” on the immigration strategy front is surely an exaggeration for a leaderless and wildly unpopular party whose failure to secure the border under former President Joe Biden helped vault President Trump to a second term.

 

Winning back voters’ trust on the issue will be a tricky balancing act, Gallego concedes. “I think sometimes Democrats get in this belief that it has to be either one way or the other,” the Arizona Democrat continued. “No, we can say what Trump is doing is wrong. It’s an abuse of the system. They’re racially profiling, they’re acting in an inhumane manner. They’re skipping due process,” he says. But the challenge, he said, is criticizing Trump’s approach while also presenting to voters an immigration agenda “that still brings border security to our country.”

 

Easier said than done. As New York Times reporters Lisa Lerer, Jazmine Ulloa, and Reid J. Epstein wrote last month, the party is struggling to find consensus on how to proceed: “What the party does to change its approach — and to change how voters see Democrats on immigration — may be the most consequential and difficult decision it faces as it searches for a path back to power.” More:

 

Some are pushing for a course correction they see as overdue. A new proposal from the Center for American Progress, the party’s leading policy shop, calls for expanding legal immigration while embracing ideas long championed by conservatives, including making it harder for migrants to qualify for asylum.

 

…Many on the left vehemently disagree, insisting that more conservative policies will only aid what they see as an insidious and ambitious effort by the Trump administration to demonize and deport Black and brown immigrants who have been in the country for years, remaking the fabric of a nation that once took pride in its diversity.

 

“Democrats have to stop talking about the issue of immigration within a Republican frame,” said Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. “This has nothing to do with law and order. This is about power, control, terror, and it is about racism and xenophobia. Donald Trump wants to make America Jim Crow again, and then some.”

 

Some Democratic political consultants believe Democrats would be foolish to go on offense on immigration during the 2026 midterms given the party’s strategic missteps on the issue in recent years.

 

As one Democratic strategist put it to NR, the party is “not going to flip any seats by running against Trump’s immigration agenda.” But highlighting the perceived excesses of Trump’s deportation strategy — due process concerns, student visa revocations, small businesses who rely on immigrant labor, and photos of non-violent criminal aliens who are being arrested by masked ICE agents in the street — can help neutralize Republicans’ electoral advantages on the issue, this consultant said.

 

Put simply: The messaging strategy that the Trump administration is “going too far” in its deportation strategy must coincide with an acknowledgment that deporting criminals is a good thing, moderate Democrats say.

 

Diverging from the far-left wing of his party on immigration rhetoric, for example, Senator John Fetterman (D., Pa.) maintains that the administration must find the “happy middle” with its deportation strategy. “Target the criminals, target the predators, target those kinds of people and deport them. Absolutely. I support that,” Fetterman told National Review in a recent interview. “But if you go after industries like agriculture or hospitality, that’s the wrong thing and that’s not what America really wants.”

 

The administration’s worksite raids have indeed put some Republican lawmakers on edge. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal’s Molly Ball put it back in June:

 

The Trump administration’s aggressive deportation program is testing the political bounds of what Americans will tolerate, spurring a backlash from voters and some Republicans and testing the administration’s resolve. . . .

 

Republican members of Congress from California, Texas and Florida have publicly urged the White House to give priority to deportations of criminals rather than migrants who have resided in the U.S. for long periods and have otherwise obeyed the law. The chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson (R., Pa.), called the farm raids “just wrong.” The co-founder of Latinas for Trump, Florida state Sen. Ileana Garcia, wrote on X that the administration’s actions were “unacceptable and inhumane” and “not what we voted for. . . .”

 

Presidents of both parties have historically hesitated to pursue large-scale immigration enforcement in the country’s interior precisely because it tends to be politically unpopular. Trump’s push for deportations far from the border has begun to trigger a backlash in public opinion, with polls showing his approval rating on immigration and deportations — formerly one of his strongest issues — has now turned negative.

 

Recent polling does suggest that Republicans are losing some ground here and that border security is falling down the list of voters’ top electoral issues, a natural response to the Trump administration’s incredibly successful immigration crackdown that has brought illegal border crossing down to their lowest levels in decades. (An incredible success, mind you, that he achieved solely through executive action.)

 

Democrats Taking the Rhetoric Too Far

 

But Democrats are already falling into the trap of characterizing immigration enforcement officers as a modern-day Gestapo and renewing calls to abolish Immigrations and Customs Enforcement entirely.

 

Back in June, Representative Stephen Lynch (D., Mass.) insisted during a House Oversight Committee hearing that Trump’s mass deportation strategy “is letting dangerous criminals roam free while it kicks off peaceful, peaceful contributing members of our communities, bus boys at restaurants, day laborers at Home Depot, parents who were taking their kids to school.” He continued: “My dad served in the Second World War. He fought the Nazis in Northern Africa. He fought the Nazis on the Italian peninsula. And I think he’s looking down right now, he’s happy that I’m fighting today’s Nazis.”

 

Not every Democrat is pleased with this kind of language. “Don’t ever, ever, ever compare anything to Nazis” or “Hitler,” Fetterman told National Review in a recent interview when pressed on his party’s embrace of extremist language. “Don’t ever f***ing do that. . . . It’s always inappropriate.”