How the Democrats Can Play Offense on Immigration |
How the Democrats Can Play Offense on Immigration
Typically, Democrats run for the hills when immigration comes up. But as two blue-state governors are showing, the winning play is actually to confront ICE and MAGA xenophobia head on.
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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........