Don’t look now, but one of the great shibboleths of the MAGA era is unraveling: the notion that a brutal crackdown on undocumented immigrants represents a key political strength of the Trumpified Republican Party. The campaign to deploy blanket ICE raids to terrorize immigrants—and, simultaneously, the Democratic-led states and cities targeted by the White House—has proven to be so broadly unpopular that it’s emerging as a central worry for Republican political operatives on the eve of the midterms.

Just 37 percent of respondents in a recent Kennedy School survey approved of Trump’s mass deportation regime, and the paramilitary command structure of the immigration sweeps was even less popular, with just 33 percent professing support for ICE, 31 percent backing ICE raids in the workplace, and 34 percent approving of the use of the military in rounding up immigrants.

What’s more, voters are decidedly skeptical about the Trump administration’s belated—and mostly fictional—effort to make it seem as though it’s dialing back on ICE’s gestapo sieges. In a new Politico survey, carried out by the polling firm Public First, a majority of respondents agree that there’s been at least a small shift in the White House’s immigration tactics. But a 44 percent plurality say that the changes make no difference in how much they trust the administration, while nearly a third—30 percent—say that they’re now less likely to extend such trust. Notably, the same core top-line result holds for Trump voters in the survey: 71 percent said they observed a shift in enforcement tactics, but 48 percent reported that it made no difference in their trust in the White House. And while you might presume that trust level to be high, it’s nowhere near what the lords of MAGA messaging would want. Indeed, 15 percent of Trump voters now believe that the ICE raids are “too aggressive”—not what party leaders were hoping for when the 2024 Republican National Convention broke out into chants of “Mass deportation now!”

The scale of disaffection with Trump’s gulag state presents a huge opportunity for Democrats in the midterms and beyond—but for the party to seize it will require a thorough reconsideration of its milquetoast approach to immigration, which throughout the Trump era has been to raise procedural objections to a xenophobic moral panic that was always going to culminate in brownshirt deployments and concentration camps.

There are some heartening signs that such an effort is under way; last week, Democratic National Committee members approved a resolution calling for the abolition of ICE—a position that party leaders have long disowned as too fringe and unworkable. But the DNC isn’t dictating broader messaging to the party, and the consensus from on high remains mired in support for a set of “reform” proposals—such as requiring ICE agents to go unmasked and wear body-cams, the cessation of roving ICE patrols, and a revamped code of conduct—that would do little to derail the overall collapse of immigration enforcement into fascist squalor.

While some of these changes—particularly the sanction on patrols—would be helpful, they’re largely designed to create the appearance of improved conduct in a mobilization of state power that is fundamentally depraved. This strategy is very much of a piece with the craven support that Democratic lawmakers gave to the shameful and demagogic 2025 Laken Riley Act, which furnished the expansive legal rationale for ICE’s detention-and-rendition campaign. In all such policy debates, too many Democrats shun any robust challenge to right-wing calumnies about immigrants for fear of appearing “soft” on immigration enforcement—and so pre-emptively concede the authority to frame public discourse to a MAGA right obsessed with branding immigrants as dangerous criminals for whom even long-term detention is too good. As long as Democrats operate from this anemic, defensive posture, their reforms will come off at best as cosmetic afterthoughts, and at worst as outright capitulations in the Laken Riley vein.

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A better starting point would be to call out the lies that have abetted the buildup of the deportation police state in the second Trump administration—beginning with the glib and unfounded equation of undocumented immigration with criminality. It’s never been the case that undocumented immigrants commit violent crime at a higher rate than the country’s native-born population. Indeed, a recent study in the Journal of Urban Affairs surveying more than 11,500 neighborhoods in 100 US cities found that areas that experienced increases in undocumented immigration saw the rates of both violent and property crime decrease.

Then there’s the trespass that gothic-minded MAGA types have treated as a foundational and unforgivable betrayal of the country’s civic covenant: entering the United States by other-than-legal means, and remaining here to work and raise families. In reality, unsanctioned entry into the country isn’t a crime at all, but rather a civil misdemeanor. That’s right: the federal goon squads terrorizing our cities and neighborhoods are tearing families apart, arranging extrajudicial renditions, and placing ailing immigrants in squalid conditions that have repeatedly proved fatal, for the rough legal equivalent of traffic violations. It’s not being “soft” on the immigration issue to drive home this grotesque misapplication of state power—in fact, you can’t capture the full scope of the impunity unleashed under MAGA’s auspices without this basic framework—yet you will look in vain for any prominent Democratic leaders employing it.

Then there are the pernicious culture-war libels that the right continually trains on immigrants—from the flagrant and self-admitted lies about Haitians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, to the recent, fabricated scare about a sinister alliance of socialists and Muslim extremists. These politicized urban legends are obviously pivotal to the MAGA project of stoking unfounded fears to legitimize authoritarian seizures of power—yet the Democratic opposition again can’t seem to make this basic point land as it recoils from challenging the broader framework of right-wing fearmongering on immigration.

Finally, there’s the economic impact of immigration—arguably the biggest whopper in the MAGA clearinghouse of falsehoods. The overall contributions of immigrants to the US economy will work out to more than $7 trillion from 2024 to 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office. And Trump has continually proclaimed that undocumented immigrants are a debilitating drain on Social Security and Medicare—when in reality, they pay into both programs on a massive scale while deriving zero benefits. ICE’s terror campaign has already caused notable spikes in unemployment and small-business failures, since immigrants are integral to the labor economy. Every MAGA demagogue who blathers on about an immigrant “invasion” of the country should be asked to explain just what kind of invader it is that gives an occupied power $7 trillion.

These would be the makings of a successful Democratic bid to seize the political moment and recast the demented national debate over immigration in a register approaching sanity. But of course I’m a crazy dreamer; when House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries was asked about abolishing ICE on Meet the Press on Sunday, he delivered this response: “We need a safe, strong, and secure border. ICE should conduct itself like every other police organization in this country. We’re committed to dramatic reform.”

In other words, the word salads will continue, and so will the beatings, renditions, unlawful detentions, and killings. And come November, Democratic figureheads like Jeffries may yet again be left wondering just why they can’t seem to find an energized base to latch on to.