For many weeks now, Senate Democrats have been trying to home in on the right message against the Republicans’ preposterously titled Big Beautiful Bill. While the budget bill narrowly cleared the House after some false starts, its deficit-busting characteristics have thus far kept it from the unified GOP support it needs to clear the Senate. Yet the Democrats similarly are not united on the best strategy to turn the bill into a political loser among voters: The bill is a tax break for the rich. It will kick millions of people off Medicaid and food stamps. It will explode the federal deficit.
All of this is true. But the Democrats have been largely silent on perhaps the bill’s most ominous characteristic: an orgy of resources for Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller’s shock troops to carry out President Trump’s indiscriminate crackdown on immigration and protest.
My sense is that Democrats are used to their Republican counterparts (and some within their own ranks) pushing for increased “border security” and immigration enforcement funding during budget negotiations and think the public will view it as old hat. This is a sort of learned defeatism, but it also ignores that we are talking about an entirely different scale here. Taking into account previously allocated funding this fiscal year, we’re looking at some $200 billion in spending on immigration enforcement, far above what’s allocated to any other federal law enforcement function and more than has ever been spent on immigration enforcement.
The bill is effectively a blank check, funding pretty much every aspect of the administration’s ramp-up of enforcement, detention, and surveillance: hiring nearly 20,000 additional immigration agents across Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, constructing more border walls, building detention facilities for tens of thousands of additional people, and so on. It would take everything we’ve seen so far—the targeting of activists for their speech, masked agents grabbing people off the street, sudden flights to Guantánamo or out of the country, ramping up detentions—and crank it to 11.
Beyond that, the bill furthers the transformation of federal law enforcement toward a focus on immigration enforcement specifically. The Cato Institute estimates that immigration and border funding would equal about eight times the FBI’s entire budget and 36 times more than tax and financial crimes enforcement. That funding disparity is compounded by Trump’s penchant for pulling agents from other functions to the all-encompassing immigration dragnet: For months now, thousands of federal agents who work on everything from child abuse to money laundering have been reassigned to raiding businesses in search of undocumented workers. Meanwhile, ICE is spending so wildly on its crackdown that it may run out of money next month—unless Republicans manage to pass this bill.
These elements should be slam dunks for Democrats as they fight the bill without majorities in either chamber. The masked and unidentified agents trawling around in tactical gear, breaking windows, raiding Home Depot, dragging away soon-to-graduate high schoolers, and arresting protesters? Republicans want tens of thousands more of them, and quickly, which will almost certainly mean lowering hiring standards (just as Trump did during his first term when quickly trying to ramp up the immigration agent head count).
Trump and his minions want to cram tens of thousands more people who mostly have either no criminal contact or minor infractions into slapdash new facilities as they already struggle to provide basic safety and living standards in existing detention spaces while illegally preventing oversight. And they want to do all of this while making it the best time in generations to be a child predator—the most infamous of whom, Jeffrey Epstein, Trump’s former BFF Elon Musk just publicly tied him to—or a financial scammer or a bona fide terrorist as the Trump administration surges resources away from policing all that and toward dragging off your bodega guy or your child’s teacher while breaking your skull if you use your constitutionally protected right to protest it.
And still, presented with this ready-made argument that appeals to Americans’ foundational disdain for authoritarianism and natural distaste for a secret police, Democratic leaders have largely ignored it, preferring instead to focus on the bill’s cuts to social services, raising of prices, explosion of the deficit, and the wealth transfer up to the rich, all of which are valid criticisms. Cuts to services like Medicaid directly threaten lives, a reality to which Republican counterparts have had very unsatisfactory answers, most infamously Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, in her retort that “we all are going to die.”
But a lot of the fiscal responsibility stuff that the Dems are most comfortable harping on seems frankly pedestrian in comparison to a massive expansion of Trump’s police—nay, military—state. Democrats clearly are still reeling from Trump’s victory, which convinced them that immigration is his most popular issue and thus their own weakest line of attack. The leadership’s strategy seems to be that the less they say about immigration, the better—which explains why they’ve been largely silent on the Los Angeles protests, as if waiting for some more politically advantageous news to emerge. If it were up to these leaders, the party would talk only about Medicaid cuts and egg prices every day.
Democrats are failing to grasp that, despite their minority power, they’re able to shape political opinion rather than simply responding to it. Their timid strategy on immigration also ignores two key facts. The first is that this is only tangentially about immigration. Immigration enforcement is just the pretext for, and the mechanism to execute, an autocratic power grab to crush civil society and democratic constraints, as we’re seeing now in Los Angeles. Democrats don’t even have to tease out this argument; officials in the administration reportedly are talking about using the resources provided by the legislation to make an L.A.-style assault happen in every oppositional blue city, a prospect Trump apparatchik Stephen Miller is practically frothing at the mouth over.
Second, Trump is not really that popular on immigration; he’s been underwater for a while and dropping fast, with a Quinnipiac poll of registered voters this past week putting him at 54 percent disapproval on immigration and 56 percent disapproval on deportations specifically, basically matching his terrible numbers on the economy. The public pushback and the panic from businesses that rely on immigrant workers has gotten so acute that the administration reportedly is ordering agents to cool off on raids in the agriculture and hospitality industries.
Trump’s supposed political strength on immigration is proving to be a weakness, and his bumbling deployments in L.A., which seem to be further sinking his popularity, are the perfect opportunity for Democratic leaders to drive the point home, in the process striking not only at the Big Ugly Bill but at Trump’s broader project to make himself look invincible. If they can associate the bill in Americans’ minds with images of armed, masked men racially profiling a U.S. citizen who’s minding his own business on the sidewalk and drawing their guns on a church pastor (after stuffing one of her parishioners into a black SUV), the bill is probably dead in the water.
