President Donald Trump got his first major legislative win on Wednesday when the House passed the Laken Riley Act. The legislation requires that immigration authorities detain anyone who is arrested with theft, burglarly, larceny or other related crimes.
Republicans moving immediately on immigration makes sense. Trump won largely because voters believed that immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border was out of control during the Biden administration. Kamala Harris famously laughed off a question early in the Biden presidency about why she had not been to the border. The president was even displaying a chart about the influx of migrants when he was shot and wounded in Butler, Pennsylvania in July.
On top of that, Trumpworld knows it only has a limited amount of time before voters potentially turn on the president for his actions on immigration if they come off too cruel. As a result, he’s signed a slew of executive actions on immigration.
By the same token, Democrats still have yet to craft a winning message on immigration. On Trump’s first day in office, 12 Democratic senators joined Republicans to pass the legislation. Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania’s decision to jump on should not surprise anyone since he has pivoted considerably to the center despite the fact his wife Gisele was at one point an immigrant. Nor should Georgia’s Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock’s votes come as a surprise since the bill’s namesake was killed in Georgia.
The bigger surprise came in the fact that Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego, consistently a voice for immigration reform and a former member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus in the House, co-sponsored the bill. The same goes for Catherine Cortez Masto, who hails from Nevada and who openly supported immigration reform in the past. Mark Warner, who represents purple Virginia, also voted for it.
On Wednesday, 46 Democrats in the House voted on the final passage of the bill, giving the bill an imprimatur of being bipartisan and therefore, “common sense” in the eyes of the Beltway, even if the bill essentially deputizes every state attorney general and would remove due process for migrants accused of stealing.
All of this shows that Democrats still have not picked up the pieces after the election to craft a winning message on immigration. Most Democrats chose to focus on hammering Trump for pardoning people who committed violent crimes on January 6, inflation or prescription drugs.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, perhaps the most outspoken voice for relief for undocumented migrants, put it bluntly.
“I think we need to be clear with the American people that if you want to keep if you want to make life more affordable, if you want your life to be easier, the thing that makes America different, and what has made America distinguished from the rest of the developed world and being able to outperform on the economy has been our ability to welcome and immigrate, and integrate immigrants and immigrant population that sustains our economic growth,” she told The Independent.
But two of the Democrats who voted for the Laken Riley Act – Vicente Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar – represent districts of the Rio Grande Valley, an ancestrally Democratic and Hispanic area of Texas that shifted to the Republican Party in the last two elections, largely on the back of immgration.
The sharp turn shows how Democrats largely lost the message eight years after many people considered Trump’s rhetoric about Mexicans being drug dealers and criminals to be racist.
Even as Cortez Masto criticized Trump for trying to roll back birthright citizenship in the US Constitution, she voted for the Laken Riley Act, which makes a sort of sense given that Trump won Nevada with a large chunk of Hispanic support.
Rep. Delia Ramirez from Illinois has a personal stake in it given that her husband Boris was previously undocumented. Ramirez feared that Democrats have not defined what they support.
“And I do worry that we're not actually establishing what the red lines are when it comes to immigrants, what are the things that are non negotiable,” she told The Independent. “What are we unwilling to vote yes on, because the reality is that in this moment, it feels like immigrants are the most vulnerable.”
Rep. Norma Torres of California lamented “the message around immigration and the reform that has never come that we've been waiting for all of these years” and said Democrats needed to put Republicans on record.
“We need to get back to those basics,” she told The Independent. She also spoke about how she understood why some Democrats voted for the Laken Riley Act, despite the fact she voted against the bill because of the way it creates a patchwork immigration system in every state.
“So at the end of the day, we're not going to take a page from the Trump or Elon Musk playbook and start targeting our members or threatening our members,” she said. “I think our members ultimately need to vote their districts, but it's up to us to explain why this was a bad deal.”
But the fact that Democrats are scatterbrained means not only do they not agree on how to push back against Trump. They have to figure out what they actually support.
