How Trump and Republicans ‘won the war’ on immigration

MILWAUKEE — Donald Trump’s signature pledge to “build the wall” was a taboo-busting provocation when he first ran eight years ago. Now, it sounds almost conciliatory.

The Trump 2.0 agenda goes beyond sealing the border by promising to enact “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” And Democrats, finding themselves on the defensive on border security, are dropping their long-standing insistence that any clampdown must be coupled with a systemic overhaul. To that end, President Joe Biden recently issued executive action to restrict asylum-seekers.

The result is an immigration debate that has lurched unequivocally to the right and squarely on to Republican terrain. Even before Election Day, on immigration Trump has already won.

“Before we were talking about a pathway to citizenship for 35 million people,” said Felipe Benitez, a Latino political strategist and immigration advocate. “Now we’re barely figuring out if we can get 500,000 spouses of U.S. citizens protected status.”

“[We’ve] been on defense since 2016,” Benitez added. “That’s the reality.”

Democrats’ retreat, coupled with polling showing independents and a growing share of Latinos are clamoring for a border crackdown, has given Republicans’ the upper hand on an issue Trump has staked so much of his platform and political identity on. Voters’ trust in the GOP on border issues is helping power Trump’s lead over Biden in the polls and threatens to spill over into down-ballot Senate and House races.

Descending on Milwaukee this week to nominate Trump for the presidency, Republicans are leaning into immigration as an electoral winner. The issue got frequent mention by speakers on Monday night and is the official theme Tuesday, serving as a testament to Trump’s thorough remaking of the party in his image. The GOP Senate candidates — including border hawks Kari Lake of Arizona and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz — are marquee speakers.

Trump has said immigrants are “ poisoning the blood of our country. ” And if he wins again, a centerpiece of his agenda is a plan to deport up to 20 million people , using the military if necessary. Trump’s advisers have floated a “blitz” of enforcement actions, including building detention camps and trying to end birthright citizenship.

His escalatory plans coincide with election victories by anti-immigrant hard-liners in Italy, Germany and other European countries as well.

No single politician has jolted the intractable immigration conversation quite like Trump. But even he cannot claim sole credit for yanking the border fight to the right. A migrant surge under Biden , covered extensively in the media, has stirred a visceral public response beyond the border states, including in heavily Democratic cities.

The takeover of the GOP by immigration hard-liners is particularly striking given party leaders’ position just a few years ago that unless Republicans moderated on the issue, the growing ranks of Latino voters eventually would doom them in national elections. The notorious “autopsy” on Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 White House bid called for championing comprehensive immigration reform in an effort to appear more inclusive.

That impulse is “not just snuffed out,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that backs a restrictive approach to immigration. “They poured water over it and then they buried it.”

Trump did not pioneer hawkishness on illegal immigration in the GOP, but Krikorian said the former president deserved credit for his follow-through.

“It was largely rhetorical in the past, and under Trump, in the first administration, there were actual moves in the right direction,” he said. “The wall is shorthand for that, but it’s more than just the wall,” he added, citing the Remain in Mexico policy that requires asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases are adjudicated.

Krikorian also credited Trump for making progress on the border wall, including reinforcing aging infrastructure, “in the face of almost maniacal opposition.” Still, Trump took heat from the right, including in the GOP primary, for failing to finish the project or, as he promised, make Mexico pay for it.

With GOP immigration doves largely eradicated, Trump has cleared the way for hawks to fly further to his right.

Trump aims his ire largely at illegal immigration and continues to speak positively about legal immigration, including stating that every foreigner who graduates from college in the U.S. should be eligible for a green card . But other Republicans, such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), have been more comfortable talking about reducing all types of immigration — including legal.

While Republicans have coalesced on the right, the Democrats’ trajectory induced whiplash. The party tacked left during Trump’s first term, powered by fury over Trump policies such as family separations at the border or the immigration ban from some Muslim-majority countries. Democratic presidential hopefuls in 2020 jostled to prove their pro-immigrant bona fides, with most vowing to decriminalize illegal border crossings.

But with Biden occupying the Oval Office amid a historic surge of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, Democrats have abruptly changed their tune. They supported a bipartisan border security bill that lacked a pathway to citizenship — a major backtrack from party orthodoxy. When Republicans tanked the bill at Trump’s urging, Biden issued an executive order that effectively closed large swaths of the border.

“Republicans won the war. That’s what Biden’s shift signaled,” said Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump GOP strategist based in California.

Mindful of his party’s left flank, Biden followed with an executive order to shield immigrant spouses of U.S. citizens from deportation. But advocates still see the immigration debate as playing out on conservatives’ terms — and say the party shoulders some blame.

“There’s been a lot of fear and backtracking and not enough pushback on so much of the xenophobia we’ve seen over the last several years,” said Julian Castro, the former Housing and Urban Development secretary whose progressive immigration stance was a centerpiece of his 2020 presidential campaign.

But some of the most strident voices about an immigration system in disarray have been Democrats themselves — particularly mayors Eric Adams of New York and Brandon Johnson of Chicago, who are struggling to absorb migrants in their deep-blue cities hundreds of miles from the southern border. House Democrats in tough races are increasingly following the lead of colleagues like Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York, who won a special election in a bellwether district earlier this year in part by promising to tackle an immigrant influx spilling into his suburban district.

George Nassar, a Republican pollster who works on races across the country, said the steady stream of headlines about violent crime committed by people in the country illegally and government resources being diverted to new migrants has given the issue newfound oomph beyond the hard-right base.

“Back in the day when I would test immigration messaging, it was only moving Republicans. Now it’s moving independents and persuadable voters,” Nassar said. “That’s why Democrats are now trying to say, ‘We’re strong on the border.’”

Republicans in swing districts who once twisted themselves into political knots over Trump’s harsh border policies no longer appear to be on their heels. Democrats used to use immigration as a cudgel against GOP members like California Rep. David Valadao , who represents a heavily Latino agricultural district. But instead of emphasizing the distance between himself and his party on the issue, Valadao — and most GOP members in competitive, diverse districts — voted in favor of impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas earlier this year.

“The conversation has changed dramatically. I don’t think it's something that we’re afraid of,” said Jessica Millan Patterson, chair of the California Republican Party. “There still absolutely needs to be reform on it, but we cannot have those reforms until we secure our border.”

Paving the way for this new political calculus is a raft of polling that suggests a hard-line immigration stance has not made the GOP radioactive for Latino voters, bucking well-worn conventional wisdom.

For decades, Democrats had wagered that a welcoming immigration policy was essential for holding their commanding lead with Hispanic voters. But recent elections have seen Republicans cut into those margins with this key constituency — despite their politicians ratcheting up the anti-illegal immigration rhetoric.

Polling has shown that Latino support for a border wall has jumped substantially in recent years and that more than half of Hispanics back a national program to deport all immigrants currently living in the country illegally.

Such attitudes should come as no surprise, said Madrid, whose recent book, “The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority is Transforming Democracy,” examines the changing nature of the Latino electorate. As Latinos increasingly assimilate, they grow more and more distant from the immigrant experience and are less likely to factor the issue into their votes.

“They’re not worried about ICE. They’re not worried about their families anymore,” Madrid said. “The third-generation, the fourth-generation [Latinos] are like, ‘What are you talking about? He’s not going to deport me any more than he’s going to deport the third or fourth generation of Irish people.”

But the reality of a national deportation program may end up sending the immigration pendulum swinging away from the hard-liners, predicted Castro, who now leads the Latino Community Foundation.

“Mass deportation is one of these things that is very one-dimensional in polling, but would be very three-dimensional, shocking and unacceptable in real life,” Castro said. “The second that some state force actually starts rounding people up, it would send shock waves through any community that it happens in.”