In the less than two weeks since an ICE agent killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, public opinion on immigration has shifted. A plurality of Americans now say that federal agents are making cities more dangerous and nearly 60% disapprove of how immigration laws are being enforced. A majority believe Good’s shooting wasn’t justified and — perhaps most damning — that it “reflects bigger problems” with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Many politicians in President Donald Trump’s shoes would look at this polling and back off. Maybe tone down the rhetoric. But Trump has instead flooded Minneapolis with even more federal agents and upped the ante by threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the military.
It’s no wonder Democrats believe they have an opportunity to seize the momentum on one of Trump’s signature policy issues and, in the process, reclaim some of the credibility the party has lost on immigration.
With neighborhood groups, church congregations and PTA moms arming themselves with whistles and taking to the streets of US cities, there is unquestionably a new mass movement that’s ready to be tapped. Yet recent history should remind Democrats that the energy behind such movements can be fickle. The racial reckoning of 2020 is but one example.
There are already red flags. A big one: In addition to the dismal opinion most Americans now have about ICE, polls also show that, for the first time, a plurality — 46%, according to YouGov — supports doing away with the agency altogether. And on Thursday, US Representative Shri Thanedar of Michigan introduced the Abolish ICE Act to “dismantle” the agency by completely defunding it.
As a Californian, I’m always skeptical when lawmakers from the country’s interior start copying, even rhetorically, what progressives on the coasts are doing. I have my doubts that the “abolish ICE” slogan will be as popular once this wave of outrage passes. Politically, Democrats could be climbing out on a limb that’s about to break.
In many ways, though, what’s happening now does have roots in progressive Los Angeles.
After the Trump administration sent federal agents to conduct aggressive immigration raids last summer, California Senator Alex Padilla was manhandled during a press conference held by Department of Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem. “This should be a wake-up call,” Padilla told the New York Times, and state lawmakers took it as such. They introduced several bills in hopes of checking federal agents, including a first-in-the-US ban on masks and another that limits access to schools and hospitals without a warrant.
“Immigrants have rights,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said in September, shortly before signing the bills. “And we have the right to stand up and push back.”
Four months and many violent interactions with ICE and Border Patrol later, Democrats across the US are following California’s lead. There’s a bill in New York that would ban federal agents from wearing masks and another that would create a statewide dashboard tracking their activity. In Tennessee, Democrats are backing legislation that would prevent agents from entering churches. In Illinois, a lawmaker wants anyone who takes a job with ICE to become ineligible to work in state or local law enforcement. And numerous states are considering legislation that would let residents sue agents who violate their constitutional rights.
At the federal level, there’s a discussion under way in Congress about whether to withhold funding from the DHS, shutting down the government again, or whether to force the Trump administration to require all immigration agents to wear body cameras, ditch the masks and get more training.
It’s understandable why Democrats would choose this moment to copy California’s progressive, hard-line approach to ICE and Border Patrol. The human cost of Trump’s violent and authoritarian deportation campaign has become increasingly obvious.
There’s the 10th grader — an American citizen — whom agents put in a chokehold in Texas. The nurse — another American citizen — in California who had an agent kneel on her neck so long that she passed out. And, of course, Good, the mother of three.
Still, Democrats shouldn’t misinterpret the public’s outrage with ICE as a mandate to pursue overly permissive immigration policies. As Mike Madrid, a strategist who specializes in Latino voters, told me: “Just because people don’t want US citizens rounded up and women shot does not mean they want open borders.” Americans haven’t suddenly decided that border security and deporting violent criminals are bad things.
A new poll from Reuters bears this out. Although Trump’s approval rating on immigration has hit a record low of 40%, that’s still higher than the rating Joe Biden had on the issue.
This week, the centrist think tank Third Way released a paper encouraging Democrats to focus on reform. “Every call to abolish ICE,” its authors wrote, “risks squandering one of the clearest opportunities in years to secure meaningful reform of immigration enforcement — while handing Republicans exactly the fight they want.”
Misjudging the political moment can have consequences. One doesn’t have to look far to be reminded of that. Good was killed less than a mile from where George Floyd took his final breaths under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer in 2020. His death turned an existing movement for racial justice and policing reform into a national one. Americans were all in — until they weren’t.
Calls to “defund the police” curdled once crime rates started to rise. Republicans used the slogan to cast all Democrats as weak on public safety and to undermine criminal justice reform. A backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion policies followed. Last year, Pew Research found that 72% of Americans believe the focus on racial inequality in 2020 did not lead to policy changes that have helped Black people.
Activists I’ve spoken to tend to disagree. They point to policies that did change and argue there is more accountability. Body cams, for example, are now common. Some police officers, including the officer who killed Floyd, have gone to prison. As Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights lawyer and activist in Minneapolis, told me, mass movements “ebb and flow.” The arc of the moral universe may be long and bend toward justice, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, but that doesn’t mean it bends consistently. There’s progress and retrenchment.
It’s inevitable that a similar swing of the pendulum will happen with immigration enforcement. But the goal for Democrats, as they try to capitalize on the current protest movement, is to focus on fixing what’s broken with ICE, not on the more symbolic — and potentially more short-lived — calls to “abolish” it.
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