Trump is not invincible: Democrats, immigrants and the politics of due process

It’s a setup, they said: President Donald Trump, an accomplished demagogue with his finger on the pulse of America’s most reactionary voters, wanted Democrats to make a big fuss about his lawless deportations and extraordinary renditions — to show how out of touch they are with the majority of Americans who say they want fewer people to step foot in their country. 

“Look, what Donald Trump did was set up a trap for Democrats to run into,” Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., told a newspaper in Tucson last month. He was talking about the hundreds of Venezuelan men expelled from the country without due process and sent to a prison in El Salvador, where, according to the administration, they should remain until they die. “Of the 500 they sent there, I’m sure 200 of them are actually hardcore criminals,” Gallego said (reporting suggests that more than 90% have no criminal conviction anywhere in the world). “Now, are we going to go run to the podium and defend and try to get those people back? No, absolutely not.”

That, again, would be taking the bait.

“This is the debate they want,” Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., chimed in earlier this month, describing the Trump administration’s defiance of a Supreme Court order to “facilitate” the return of one man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, as “the distraction of the day.” That, he argued, is in part because court orders should not be the subject of a public back-and-forth between politicians — “When a judge adjudicates, it’s not in question. How in the hell are we even debating that?” — but he also suggested it’s bad politics. “It’s exactly the debate they want, because they don’t want this debate on the tariffs.”

Newsom has advocated for the return of one asylum seeker who was sent, without charge or trial, to spend the rest of his life in a Salvadoran hellscape. But his message, and long the conventional wisdom, was thus: Don’t get stuck fighting on Trump’s turf when “cruelty towards immigrants” is a big reason why a plurality of Americans — many with ancestors who stumbled onto a boat and got off at Ellis Island without a visa (“the right way”) — decided he should get another shot at being president.

Democratic timidity is an understandable reaction to seeing former Vice President Kamala Harris lose to an already-disgraced man who campaigned on little more than the idea that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and, accordingly, responsible for all of its problems. It’s also craven and wrong; even if throwing foreigners into a volcano polled at upwards of 90%, opposition would be both justified and required for the simple fact that civilized, free societies do not incinerate their guests.

It’s also not, it seems, such a big loser. Ignoring the advice of every Beltway consultant, some elected Democrats decided that there are worse things than falling into the “trap” of defending immigrants and the U.S. Constitution — like losing the republic (and one’s humanity). Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., traveled to El Salvador and demanded to meet Abrego Garcia, noting that if “you deny the constitutional rights of one man, you threaten the constitutional rights of everybody”; a delegation of House Democrats followed suit, draping their cause in the red, white and blue of the flag.

“To me, there is nothing more American than due process and the rule of law,” Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., explained to Fox News’ Laura Ingraham.

Recent polls suggest that framing could be broadly popular — and that refusing to bring back a man admittedly expelled by mistake, in defiance of the Supreme Court, is not. In a survey released this week, Reuters found that 45% of Americans now approve of Trump’s approach to immigration, down from 48% in January and below the 46% that now disapprove. YouGov likewise found that Trump is underwater on immigration: 45% approve compared to 50% who don’t, a double-digit drop from last month.

As G. Elliot Morris, former editorial director of data analytics at FiveThirtyEight, wrote about the latest numbers, the big reveal here is: “Public opinion can change!”

For too long, many Democrats have treated public opinion as something they must respond to rather than shape. That has resulted in cliched language that tests well in a focus group but feels inauthentic to real voters who do not actually care, in practice, about Bipartisan Solutions to America’s Policy Challenges. In the case of immigrants, some Democrats decided to just do the right thing — to not just abandon an inconvenient category of human beings — while noting that the rule of law benefits all.

The timid and cowardly do have a point, though: Americans, by and large, remain horrid on the issue of treating immigrants with dignity. Another recent survey from Pew found that 20% of Americans say they like Trump’s approach to immigration the “most,” more than double any other policy, with 48% expressing confidence in his handing of the issue, “his highest-rated issue”; this, despite — or more distressingly, perhaps, because of — the administration advertising its lawlessness and inhumanity.

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The median voter need not read an exposé in ProPublica to understand that abuses are being carried out in their name; the White House brags about it, images of immigrants in shackles packaged and shared on social media. Asked to defend specific abuses and the average American will likely say “no,” but tens of millions will nonetheless express confidence in the abuser.

The problem is not all Americans — with all due respect, it’s the white ones. After the Trump administration expelled a man by mistake and refused to bring him back; after the president promised to send asylum-seekers to a military prison at Guantanamo Bay, and then did; after the White House announced, fittingly, that only Caucasians from South Africa would be welcome as refugees — after all that, a majority of white Americans are telling pollsters that they like what they see.

The blood of the country has in fact been poisoned, and there’s no getting around the grim reality that, for millions of Americans, the evils imposed on others are not cause for outrage but just another form of sick content to like, share and subscribe to. But there is no alternative to confronting this darkness head on; if defending the rights of one’s neighbors is a trap — “poor politics and bad optics,” in the words of one newspaper editorial — then this is indeed the time for taking the bait. Public opinion may well reward a plucky fight for the soul of the nation — and if it doesn’t, then the republic was already lost.