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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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April 16: Immigration Politics May Turn on Trump If the Cruelty and Chaos Continue
Like many Americans, I’ve been watching with fascinated horror the Trump administration’s first big steps towards mass deportation, and wrote about the political underpinnings of the issue at New York:
To those who are worried about the threat to the rule of law represented by the first president to enter the White House as a convicted criminal, the brinkmanship being exhibited by Team Trump over court orders involving an erroneously deported immigrant seems ominous.
The Trump administration has been taunting the judiciary via dilatory tactics and obfuscation in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. This protected-status immigrant from El Salvador, who is married to a U.S. citizen and has three children, was shipped off to a brutal Salvadorian rent-a-prison without due process, based on a faulty identification.
U.S. district court judge Paula Xinis has ordered the administration to find and return Abrego Garcia so that he can receive due process prior to deportation, and a 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court concurred that the order must be obeyed, albeit with some consideration of the complications of the case. But even though Judiciary Department lawyers have admitted in court that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was the result of an error, the White House has stalled in complying with Xinis’s order. And in a bizarre Oval Office meeting with Salvadoran president (and self-described dictator) Nayib Bukele, Trump and his attorney general suggested it was now Bukele’s problem. The Salvadoran leader said he would not “smuggle” a “terrorist” back into the United States. Right there in front of the cameras, White House policy director and infamous nativist Stephen Miller misstated the Supreme Court decision and kept referring to Abrego Garcia as a terrorist, the disputed attribution at the very center of the legal case. It all seemed like an extended mockery of the rule of law.
The administration is clearly playing rope-a-dope on the entire situation. And while it may ultimately comply with the courts, extract Abrego Garcia from prison, and give him a real hearing, the political question is why Team Trump is dragging this out in the glare of global bad publicity. Is this really the ground on which the 47th president will trigger a much-feared constitutional crisis by openly defying the judicial branch of government, including the Supreme Court that has been so very good to him? That’s what a lot of Trump critics believe is happening before our incredulous eyes.
I personally believe the administration will eventually submit to the courts, albeit as minimally as possible. But it’s possible Team Trump thinks the president’s foreign-policy powers, which they claim are at stake in such cases, are strong enough that it’s the Supreme Court that will submit to Trump’s authority to do as he wishes with immigrants.
Politically speaking, this is a fight the administration is eager to take on even if it temporarily loses, because it’s all happening on Trump’s favored turf at the intersection of the immigration and crime issues. At a time when the president is losing popularity steadily thanks to his economic policies, and particularly his tariff policies, it’s probably a relief to get back to the argument that America is succumbing to an “invasion” by criminal immigrants eager to rape, pillage, and eat pets. It seemed to have worked in 2024. Why not in 2025?
Recent polls regularly confirm that of all the controversial things Trump has done in the first 11-plus weeks of his second term, his handling of immigration policy is the most popular. This is true in polls that rate his overall job performance negatively (an April 8 Economist–YouGov survey giving him a net minus-seven approval rating overall but a plus-six approval rating on immigration) and positively (an April 10 Harvard–Harris survey giving him a net plus-two approval rating overall but a plus-seven approval rating on immigration). It’s entirely possible, and even likely, that when the full implications of the Trump-Miller immigration agenda become manifest, particularly when legal immigrants and even citizens are affected, this general-public approbation will fade or even head due south. Indeed, pollster G. Elliott Morris has published an analysis arguing that support for Trump’s positions declines steadily as questions about them become more specific:
“[W]hen various pollsters asked if they would support deporting immigrants who have been here more than 10 years (as in the case of Abrego Garcia), U.S. adults said “no” by a 37 percentage point margin; Americans disapprove of deporting immigrants who have broken no laws other than laws governing entry; they oppose deporting U.S. citizens convicted of crimes to foreign jails, such as [El Salvador’s] CECOT, and they oppose housing migrants at Guantanamo Bay while they are processed. All of these are policies the Trump administration has now floated or is actively carrying out.”
So the administration may be guilty of rhetorical overreach on immigration at a time when the mass-deportation program is actually going pretty slowly. But what about all the constitutional fears raised by cases like that of Abrego Garcia? Won’t Americans recoil at those signs of a presidency determined to become imperial? Maybe not.
Team Trump has clearly internalized one of the big lessons of the 2024 presidential election: that threats to “the rule of law” or “the Constitution” or “democracy” don’t mean a lot to persuadable voters who are most concerned about living costs and their own sense of well-being. If what Trump tried to do on January 6, 2021 doesn’t rise to the level of a voting issue for well over half the electorate, then is there any reason to believe that Abrego Garcia’s “due process” rights will matter? What is “due process,” anyway? Like the “presumption of innocence” from which Abrego Garcia should also benefit, it’s a legal concept that an awful lot of regular folks either don’t understand or find problematic, particularly when applied to someone the president of the United States has labeled an alien criminal terrorist.
So Team Trump is happy to defy the rule of law, at least at a level short of overt defiance, in any controversy involving immigrants. It pleases the nativist MAGA base immensely to see the administration run circles around “activist judges” in ridding the country of the people Democrats allegedly brought in to “replace” the country’s historic white majority. And it’s unclear at this point that Democrats and other Trump critics can make smash-and-grab ICE operations that land peaceful American residents in overseas hellholes as frightening as they should be. But as with the increasingly unpopular Trump tariff program, the immigration agenda may lose support the longer, the louder, and the more chaotic it becomes.
No one is more tribal than Republicans — and their tribe is WASPs. Doug Jones showed that you don’t have to hide who you are in order to win. So did Ralph Northam. Both were pro-choice, pro fairness in the tax code, and pro medicaid. Both were pro civil rights. They aren’t down the line doctrinaire liberals, but they wer
One thing that Republicans have that we don’t is the illusion of authenticity and devotion to principle.
We don’t have to be strident, but we DO have to be authentic. The more we tailor our message to particular audiences, the less authentic we become. That was one of Hillary’s greatest weaknesses — the perception that she was a phony.
People liked Trump and Bernie because they came across as being authentic. Bernie was truly authentic.
Trump was faking it, but had enough of the nativist GOP base to win, and he was running against Hillary and all of her baggage. Joe is authentic, and that’s why Conor Lamb is having him campaign.
Authenticity and lots of shoe leather.
Gregory
You really aren’t getting it. It is about winning elections, not about your personal ideology and prejudices.
We have ceded the “Jobs” messaging to Mr. Trump. A large number of Obama voters flipped and voted for Mr. Trump. Why was that?
You want to to keep losing? Continue the self righteous dialog with yourself and continue disregarding potential allies of differing creeds, beliefs and priorities. It is a surefire recipe for keeping the Repubs in power.
One fundemental flaw in current Democratic strategy is the emphasis on groups of people. We have excluded the white male in democratic retoric and apparently some of their wives took that pretty personally too. We need to speak loudly in an “all lives matter” tone and stop being a society of exclusivity. At this point, everyone is special except the white male; women, LGBT, minorities, immigrants, veterans, etc. We have to stop parsing people into exclusive groups.
Naomi, although what you said is well written, and sounds good; especially to those who you felt was left out, but the fact of the matter is that the past, and current system of government was built around the special privilege of the white male. So to make the white male feel so called “special” now would be to add special to the existing special; given white males special special privilege while everyone else have to deal with just “special privilege”.The Democratic party intent to deflate the arrogance of the white male was met with push back from certain states not the American People as a whole.Let me be clear, deflation of arrogance is not the same as marginalization.The arrogance being some whites believe; that whites inherently are better and therefore deserve “special special treatment” when it comes to running this country among other things,and because everyone else has been elevated to the same level we must be on a higher level or given more special treatment.
The strategy should be to awaken the same abolition sentiments of the Union to abolish the electoral college that was born out of slavery .Explain to the american people that the popular vote is the will of the “American people” and that the attempt to marginalize the many is an affront to the values of the founding fathers pure thought that all men was created equal with no caveats .
Thank you.
Why do some Republicans become Democrats?: Do you have a rank-ordered list of the reasons that Republicans become Democrats?
It seems clear to me that Dixiecrats became Reagan Democrats because of their racism; that they otherwise more or less were with the 99% and got snookered by Reagan and Southern tribalism.
What is most likely to bring not-racist Republicans back into the Democratic fold? Talk about recruits and recruiting.
Best,
Monty Johnston