This spring, the Immigration Hub, a progressive advocacy group, commissioned polls about immigration in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Colorado. Likely voters were asked if the United States should “welcome immigrants responsibly” or if the country was already “full,” as President Donald Trump has said. An overwhelming number of the respondents—sixty per cent in Pennsylvania, sixty-nine per cent in Michigan, and sixty-four per cent in Colorado—supported the idea that the U.S. should be a place of refuge. The next question was whether these same voters backed proposals that included “addressing the root causes of migration, investing in programs to better process refugees, and ensuring that refugees have the right to apply for protection.” Similar majorities in all three states embraced the pro-immigration policies, while rejecting measures designed to make it harder for asylum seekers to enter the country.
What these views have in common is that they are the explicit positions of the Democratic Party. In May, for instance, a group of Senate Democrats reintroduced the Central America Reform and Enforcement Act, a bill designed to address the root causes of migration from Central America and to improve the processing of asylum claims at the U.S. border. For the past two years, Democrats have also consistently opposed the harshest policies of the Trump Administration, from the travel ban to family separation, while Republicans have largely remained silent. But, in response to the final question on the survey, which asked who is “best addressing” the crisis at the border—Republicans or Democrats—a majority of respondents in all three states felt that Republicans were doing a better job. “Voters choose responsible and humane solutions,” Tyler Moran, the director of the Immigration Hub, told me. But the polling results “tell us that they aren’t connecting these solutions to Democrats.” That doesn’t mean that Democrats should chase after a “more conservative audience,” Moran said. Instead, they need to more clearly articulate their positions. “Wide swaths of voters are turned off by Trump’s rhetoric,” she said. “But they often aren’t clear about where Democrats stand.”
This isn’t a problem that the Republicans share. Trump made immigration the centerpiece of his 2016 campaign and has redoubled the message in his reëlection bid. Within the last year, he has twice tried to ban asylum at the border, forced more than twenty thousand asylum seekers to wait in Mexico, announced nationwide immigration raids, and cut aid to Central-American governments. Admittedly, many of these efforts came up short of their intended goal. A federal court blocked both asylum bans; a recent operation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement designed to target two thousand migrants led to the detention of thirty-five. A former ICE official told me that Trump has brought a sense of chaos to the agency, with incomplete directives and operational holdups. The Obama years, the agent said, were far more efficient, with less drama and more arrests. Yet Trump, with his constant thrum of anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy announcements, has created an impression of decisiveness. No one wonders where the President stands on immigration.
By contrast, last month’s fight among House Democrats over a supplemental funding bill, drafted in response to the humanitarian crisis at the border, highlighted the Party’s disunity. For weeks, Congress had been considering measures to supply additional money to the Department of Homeland Security, which it claimed to urgently need to process a record number of families seeking asylum. At the same time, Trump was threatening to arrest “millions” of people in ICE operations across the country, and there were fresh reports of a Border Patrol facility in Clint, Texas, where hundreds of children had been forced into tiny cells without food or basic provisions for weeks. Both news items provoked outrage, raising the stakes for members of Congress to craft a solution. A senior Democratic aide told me that the Party’s members recognized the need to allocate additional funds for humanitarian relief, but they were also wary of giving the Trump Administration a blank check; after all, the agencies tasked with temporarily housing migrants at the border—Customs and Border Protection, for one—were also active in the President’s enforcement agenda. Members of the Congressional Hispanic and Progressive caucuses, in particular, argued that the problem couldn’t simply be solved with more funding. “Money is not the issue here,” Representative Pramila Jayapal, of Washington, the co-chair of the House Progressive Caucus, told me. The squalid conditions of borderland detention facilities, she said, “were being kept that way because the Trump Administration continues to trade in cruelty and to use it as a deterrent. None of this is because they didn’t have money.”
The Senate and House bills that emerged before a July 4th deadline included checks to prevent the Administration from using the humanitarian money to arrest and deport more people. The House version went even further, attaching additional conditions that the government would have to meet, including basic medical care and improved legal and social services. Even so, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, backed by members of the Squad, a prominent group of freshman progressives in the House, refused to vote for a House bill that funded any aspect of D.H.S. operations at the border. Eventually, it didn’t matter. Their counterparts in the Senate grew impatient and passed their own bill, with bipartisan support. House leadership was stunned. “The Senate has a good bill,” Pelosi said at the time. “Our bill is much better.” A senior House aide told the Washington Post, “Schumer destroyed all our leverage.”
In the House, where Pelosi was struggling to hold together a diverse caucus, moderate and conservative Democrats, many of whom consider immigration a risky issue, saw an opportunity. They lobbied colleagues to oppose the House bill in an attempt to force Pelosi to adopt the Senate version instead. Eighteen members, from the Problem Solvers Caucus and the Blue Dog Coalition, formed a block, which was enough to sink the House bill. Progressives felt betrayed. (At one point, after a progressive House member tweeted that the Problem Solvers Caucus should be called “the Child Abuse Caucus,” a confrontation erupted on the House floor.) “A lot of these moderates are scared to seem too pro-immigrant,” a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus told me. “Many of the moderates seem to wish we could just not talk about immigration at all.”
I recently spoke to six current and former congressional staffers about the Party’s political dilemma on immigration. Everyone was frustrated by the outcome of the border-funding debate. One of them told me the Democrats were shifting “too far to the left,” while another worried that skittish moderates were shifting to the right. (Both staffers—one currently working in the House, the other retired from the Senate—are left-of-center progressives.) “Moderates want to do something to bring numbers down, even if that means changing some asylum laws,” a Democratic staffer in the House said. “But the far left is loath to do anything like that. Most of the rest of the Party is stuck in the middle. Because they feel like they can’t win, they just keep their heads down.” The situation within the Party will only get worse, a number of the staffers told me. The Presidential primary is pulling the Democratic candidates further to the left, and budget votes scheduled for the fall, including measures to fund the agencies executing the President’s immigration-enforcement agenda, will force the Party to restage contentious debates about its policy priorities. “We are going to get split apart in our party,” the Democratic staffer told me. “That’s a war I see coming.”
At the U.S. border with Mexico, there are two overlapping policy problems for the Democrats. One is the actual situation there, and the other is the response of the Trump Administration, which has made the situation worse by using the border crisis as a pretext to increase detentions, intensify immigration enforcement, and dismantle the asylum system. There is no shortage of concrete policy proposals to address the first problem. Last month, Representative Zoe Lofgren, of California, introduced a comprehensive bill to increase aid to Central America, provide additional legal avenues for asylum seekers in the region, and improve the conditions at detention centers on the border. With a divided Congress, however, legislative solutions have become impossible. Instead, the policy clashes have mostly revolved around funding, and the Trump Administration has made that increasingly contentious. The D.H.S. budget for the current fiscal year, for instance, included thirty million dollars for N.G.O.s to provide humanitarian assistance. But the current Administration has considered using that money to expand D.H.S. detention instead. Since 2016, ICE has also been exceeding its existing budget, meaning that it’s detaining more people, at a higher cost, than Congress authorized. Each year, according to one staffer, “ICE has figured out that they just spend as much as they want,” and, when it comes time to renegotiate appropriations for the next year, “they say, ‘Give us more money or we’ll release people.’ ICE has been overspending on purpose.” As a result, in the Trump era, the senior Democratic aide said, “new representatives have absolutely no trust in these organizations. More seasoned lawmakers have longer-standing relationships with these agencies, and they have more faith in career staffers.” The aide added, “It’s a generational issue.”
Another major source of disagreement within the Democratic caucus concerns enforcement priorities away from the border: Who within American cities and communities should ICE be going after? “Appropriations are all about enforcement,” another aide said. “And that’s where the schism is. Democrats can’t articulate enforcement priorities.” In the final two years of the Obama Administration, ICE had a clear mandate: only convicted criminals and certain recent arrivals were priorities for arrest. “When you write these priorities, you want to give officers discretion, but you also need to be very specific,” Felicia Escobar, a former Obama adviser, told me, in 2017. The over-all idea was to spare those who were law-abiding and had deep personal ties to the U.S. One of the first things Trump did after taking office was to rescind those priorities, making anyone unlawfully in the U.S. subject to deportation. Some Democrats in Congress were uneasy about Obama’s enforcement agenda, but Trump’s extremism has made them skeptical of compromise. “No one is willing to say who they are willing to deport,” Cecilia Muñoz, who worked in the Obama White House, told me. “It sounds harsh, but you need to be able to articulate that so you can be clear about who you want to protect.”
The border-funding bill ultimately passed in the House, as expected, but ninety-five Democrats registered their frustration by opposing it. Despite all the acrimony, the bill, which Trump signed on July 1st, provided humanitarian aid to detained migrants, created new standards for care in borderland facilities, funded more immigration judges, and extended grants to nonprofit relief groups. It also included a prohibition: the Administration could not use the money for a border wall or expanded enforcement operations. Still, the political damage was considerable. Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez traded public jabs, until Trump entered the fray with a racist attack against Ocasio-Cortez and three of her freshman colleagues.
Pramila Jayapal shares Ocasio-Cortez’s wariness about D.H.S.—last year she became the first representative in Congress to openly endorse calls to shut down ICE, according to the Times. But, during the negotiations last month, she made an important decision. Rather than withdraw from the talks and reassert her opposition to Trump’s D.H.S., she opted to work with Pelosi to strengthen the House bill. The responsibility of House Democrats, she told me later, was to “demand more” and “to use tools we’ve never had to use before.” The House bill included some measures to hold the Trump Administration more accountable, but she wanted to go further. “We should either dole out money in tranches—we’ll appropriate this amount of money, but you can’t get it all at once; you need to show us you’re complying—or we cut off money to agencies like ICE and Border Patrol.”
Jayapal, who is fifty-three, stands out among her colleagues for her fluency in immigration policy. An immigrant herself, from India, she came to the U.S. at the age of sixteen, on a student visa, and became a citizen in 2000. For more than a decade before her election to Congress, in 2016, she worked as an immigrant-rights advocate. “The House is the only place where we can demand some accountability,” she told me. “The only tools we have are money. That’s why you see the fight come up in appropriations bills. You can’t take for granted that the President will use the money how he says he’ll use it.” Her main concern, though, was that Democrats were cowering from the issue; in political terms, not to mention moral ones, this struck her as a missed opportunity. “Progressive versus pragmatic is the wrong framing,” she said. “We have to get everyone comfortable with taking Trump on with immigration. It’s a winning issue on many levels. We can win, because the cruelty is so extreme.”
