The Opinions - What the Democratic Party Still Doesn’t Get About Deportations

Episode Date: July 26, 2025

This week on “The Opinions,” the national politics correspondent Michelle Cottle and the columnists Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Goldberg discuss the growing anger over President Trump’s mass deportation policy and the local resistance movements forming in response.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm Michelle Cottle, and I cover national politics for New York Times Opinion. And I'm here this week with my fabulous colleagues, opinion columnists Jamel Bowie and Michelle Goldberg. And we're going to take a temperature check on the Trump resistance and one of the key areas where it's gaining ground, which is mass deportations. So friends, hello, welcome. Thank you for doing this. Hi, Michelle.

Hi, Jamel. Howdy, howdy. All right. So, Michelle, we're going to start with you because you have been out in L.A. reporting on the local resistance movement to Trump's deportation efforts there. So what drew you and what did you find out?

I think what drew me is that, you know, I've been wanting to write about, maybe call it resistance 2.0, which I think looks very different than the resistance the first time around. and has led some people to think that maybe there isn't as much of a resistance to Trump as there was in his first administration. I think that's probably true among elite institutions, but there actually is a huge amount of

activism going on. It's just kind of below the surface or in ways that are harder for outsiders to see, as I'll explain. So earlier this month, I was going in New York to immigration court. Some of you might remember when Brad Lander, the Comptroller of New York, got arrested at immigration court. So basically, ICE used to not, there was an agreement or policy that ICE wasn't going to go to sensitive places like immigration court because obviously it dissuades people from following the law. So that's changed to ICE is now you go to immigration court in New York. You go there and anybody can go there. They're open to the public.

And, you know, you see these knots of men looking like foreign paramilitaries, basically. They're in kind of plain clothes with store-bought tactical vests and, you know, balaclavas or gator masks come up to their eyes. They've got hats. And they wait for people to come out of their hearings and then they grab them. And when you talk to lawyers and volunteers, the sort of the rules. or the norms change from day to day. So at first, they were only grabbing people when their cases were dismissed,

which, you know, having your case dismissed is a good thing in criminal court, but it's not a good thing in immigration court because it basically means that your claim to asylum has been dismissed. So when that happened, they would take people. Then that changed. And the judge would, you know,

in some of these cases, the judge would tell them to come back for their next hearing. But nevertheless, they walk out the door and people grab them. And sometimes they grab one member of the family and not the other, and you can't really tell why because their claims are conjoined. And you can imagine how terrifying this is for the people waiting in a waiting room

to go into their hearing, seeing one person after another dragged off. And so what you've seen is kind of ordinary people in New York, volunteer to just be there to do what they can. And what they can do is pretty limited. I mean, they can take down their immigration ID number so that somebody's following them through the system. They can get an emergency contact information so that they can call their loved ones and inform them that the person isn't coming home has been sucked into this system. They might be able to, in some cases, connect them to lawyers. So anyway, so I've been reporting on this. But my understanding for what I was hearing was that these efforts in New York are far more widespread in L.A. because the deportation regime is just much, much more aggressive in L.A.

And one of the things that really struck me being there, you know, they have this kind of rapid response network where people are constantly patrolling their neighborhoods to see if ICE is in the area, to alert their neighbors. And one of the things that really struck me, though, was when I was interviewing the mayor, Karen Bass, and she told me that she relies on the rapid response network to know about what ICE is doing in her city because they're certainly not telling her anything. I mean, I think the ethos of this movement is that kind of no one is coming to save us. There's, you know, nobody is kind of exercising power on our behalf with a few exceptions. And so people feel like they have to organize to protect their neighbors as best they can. And that was a moment when she said that that really drove that home for me. Just listening to Michelle describe ICE activity in courthouses. the mask, the snatching.

Like, my blood is boiling. Like, I'm genuinely furious, like, very angry, just, like, hearing it described. And it's not like I haven't been watching videos and, like, reading descriptions. So it's not new to me, but just sort of thinking about it and thinking about what a profound, like, violation it is. Like, whatever, you have to have immigration enforcement. Sure. If you think that, sure. We got to have immigration enforcement, whatever.

But immigration enforcement that involves essentially kidnapping people. Right. And I think, can I do? I don't want to interrupt to demelt, but I think it's important to just underline. These are people who are doing everything they're supposed to do, right? The people who show up for their immigration appointments are kind of by definition following the law. Right. Yeah.

To your point, this discourages people from showing up to try to do the right thing because it's the obvious target. Right. They're following the law and are being kidnapped, stolen, and whisked away by these public servants, right? Like, ICE agents work for us, technically, but who are behaving in an imperious and unaccountable way, hiding their faces, behaving like an actual secret police. And it's just, it's, it's, it is infuriating. and if Americans witnessed it in any other country, they would immediately clock what it is, right? Like, the only reason why there's any hint of a debate

about what's happening here is because of some perverse American exceptionalism. But if this were taking place in any other country, Europe, South America, Asia, it doesn't matter where if we're happening any other country, it would immediately clock that what we're witnessing is a disappearance program, by an unaccountable secret police. Right. One of the organizers of the National Day Laborers organizing network that I was spending time with is from El Salvador and kept saying to me, this is familiar. I know what this is.

Right. So next to the economy, immigration was considered one of Trump's strengths in the last election, and he was pretty harsh about it. He didn't make any secret of what he planned to do, mass deportations. So he campaigned on mass deportations. And he campaigned on removing 20 million people, Vance and the vice presidential debates, hammering 20 million people. Of course, there are not 20 million undocumented immigrants. There are around 10 to 12 million tops.

And so the 20 million number was always inclusive of a large number of people who are here illegally and following the law. I think, and this is to some extent Trump's political superpower, I think that people just didn't believe it. I think that's really, I think he, you know, he would say we're going to deport 20 million people. We're going to have mass deportations. And what voters heard was we're going to remove all the criminals and, you know, secure the border. But everything will be basically the same. And there's this delta between what he, Trump and Stephen Miller, especially intended, and what voters heard that explains, in my mind, the sharp decline in this standing.

on immigration and deportations. Because if you look at the polling, he is underwater on both. And I think it has everything to do with the fact that what voters heard was the status quo, except when they turn on the TV, they don't see images of, like, you know, people at the border. That's what they thought. What's actually happening, of course, is kidnappings and renditions. Of people that most people know, I saw a recent poll that said a quarter of Americans are worried that someone they know,

loved one friend, whomever, a co-worker is going to get caught up in this kidnapping program, this deportation program. And that just speaks to both the expansiveness of it and the fact that you can't do this kind of thing without touching the lives of ordinary people of citizens. I mostly agree with you, Jamel. I think the thing that I maybe see it a little bit differently

is that I think there was, in this, case two groups of Trump voters. There are certainly Trump voters who look at those videos of, say, a mother being ripped away from her screaming children and will post online. This is what I voted for, right? There's people who sort of eat up the sadistic, you know, kind of deportation porn that official White House sites are pumping out. And I, so I see Trump's superpower a little differently. I see it as he was able, he had the trust of both the people who said he's going to do exactly what he said he's going to do and the people who thought that it was all just hyperbole or that he just meant criminals.

You know, that, and so that was always a kind of fragile coalition because you're only going to make one of those two groups happy. Yeah. I'll say that I do think that the people who are like, this is what I voted for, I think that's a little bit of saving face, right? Like, I do think that's a bit of sort of like, well, this is, I don't know. I think there's a sadistic part of the. No, there's a sadism there.

but I also think there's a bit of like, this is unpopular, people don't like it, it's striking them the president, and so they have to say, well, this is what I wanted, obviously. This is what I like, rather than having to reevaluate any of the choices that they made.

That's a more optimistic view than I have. It's not optimistic. I mean, what I'm saying is that when confronted with sort of like any kind of divergence between what they may be anticipated and what's happening, they're doubling down on what they're erroneous beliefs. I do think that there are people who love it.

Yeah, I think we're talking about kind of a question of degree, like what percentage of people are the ones for whom this is their dream scenario and they want to go farther. And then I do think a huge chunk of people were like, well, I didn't think they were going to come after my kids' soccer coach. That's terrible. Okay, so let me push back a little bit and say when this first started in L.A., there was this huge uproar nationally. It got a lot of attention, you know, elected officials all over were standing up and pitching back. it has not remained in the public eye quite so much. What are the odds of this activism gaining traction nationally and what will it take for us to see what's happening in LA

take off broadly across the country? So I'm not sure that kind of whether the media is covering protests is the best gauge of how widespread they are because, you know, again, these protests are sort of hard, to cover in just like the argot of, you know, TV news especially, right? If you have kind of 12 people keeping watch on a Home Depot and, you know, that's happening in 10 different places. It's not a real, like, spectacle.

The reason I expect it to catch on nationally is because I think that the tactics we've seen in L.A. are going to spread nationally, right? I mean, L.A. I think was a demonstration project of what they intend to do. And ICE has just gotten this unbelievably massive infusion of money in the tax bill that Republicans just passed and, you know, is going to be bigger than most countries and militaries. And so they're going to have to do something with all those people. And so I would expect what we've seen in L.A. to spread to other places. I mean, already in New York, they've talked about kind of flooding the zone here in the last. couple of days. And so as it spreads, I think you also just see a lot of people out there who are horrified by what's happening but feel powerless or don't know where to,

don't know what to do about it. You know, they don't really think that kind of marching and chanting is necessarily going to have any effect. Obviously, this is a generalization, but the resistance, the first time around when Trump was first elected, was very, very focused on trying to shore up and influence institutions. So you had Indivisible that was formed by two former Hill staffers when Trump was first elected and organized people by congressional district. A lot of the work they did was trying to influence their representatives. People don't necessarily have the same kind of faith that there's any institution that's

coming to save us. And so people are looking for things to do. Can I say real quick just on the question of national media coverage that I think it's important to remember, right? That like there are, you know, there's CNN and this agency, whatever. But there's also like local news affiliates. And a lot of this stuff is being covered. Are there still local news? There are still local news.

There's still local TV news 100%. Right. And local TV news actually does cover this stuff on the regular, right? Because it involves community members. It involves like, you know, public space to people are familiar with. So it doesn't even necessarily. have to catch on in the national media for people to be aware of this and aware of it, the sense of it's pervasive. The one last point I want to make is thinking about the huge amount

of funding ICE has just received from Congress and the administration. You know, pre this, ICE was having a hard time hiring and retaining people. It's not like a great job in terms of like things that make you feel good at the end of the day. And there are people in ICE right now who are like, well, this isn't necessarily what I signed up for. I didn't sign up to like, you know, kidnap someone's abuela, right? And I do wonder, you can shovel money at an agency, but I do wonder if they're going to be able to hire the 10,000 people they say they're going to hire. Like, that's actually not easy. And when you consider that local municipal police departments from the country are having a hard time hiring new people. When the U.S. military is having a hard time hiring

people, you know, the thing about the past couple years of a strong labor market is that like a kind of job that requires a lot of psychological stress is just like not, is A, not appealing to people, and B, not really necessary. See, I look at it from a darker perspective, is that they've shoveled all this money into it. They're going to hire all these people. They're going to wind up hiring people who are really into it. And there are a lot of people out there who you just don't want doing this. But I would think that if what you're talking about is a kind of self-selection where the people who have moral qualms about this don't want it, it just leaves more rooms for the people who, you know, the cruelty is the point. Sure. I just, I've heard some, one day when I was

at immigration court, there was a public defender who, Actually, I don't know if she was a public defender, but like a, you know, a volunteer lawyer who worked for a group that sent lawyers. And she was really, really good at engaging some of these ICE agents and kind of trying to draw them out and talk about the law. And it was fascinating both sort of how little some of them knew about the law. They had been, you know, repurposed from the southern border. But also there was as she drew them out as she talked about the sort of people. that she represented and what they had been through. There was just this, even just in that short amount of time,

this kind of change in the vibe. They were still grabbing people, but there wasn't the same kind of barking, like agro. It just, you, I had the sense that she had planted a tiny seed of unease in some of these people's minds, which I imagine, you know, again, how much that is ultimately going to make a difference. I don't know, but I do think that's, there is going to be for some people the sort of moral injury. And I suspect that, you know,

they're covering their faces because it's intimidating. But I also wonder if some of them are covering their faces because they're ashamed. Okay. So as we've noted, this is what the Trump administration campaigned on. Clearly disorder at the border was a real issue. And people wanted it under control. And, you know, draconian or not, the administration seems to have figured out how. how to slow the border flow. So do you think, even with these harsh videos and protests, I mean, is it fair to say that this could still work

for Republicans at, you know, election time? I mean, we're also talking about a good stretch of time before anybody can make them, you know, can even think about making them pay for this. So, I mean, on the one hand, these are such egregious human rights violations. These are such egregious constitutional violations that, like, you know, he said he was going to do a lot of things. He said he was going to try a bunch of former officials for treason.

That doesn't mean that if he went out and put Obama in handcuffs, we would say, well, you know, promises made, promises kept. That said, I also think that, you know, we can see in the polling that it's not. working for them, right? We could see that he's way underwater on immigration enforcement in particular. It actually drives me crazy when people say, well, he figured out how to stop, you know, how to kind of stop chaos at the border. Yeah, he did that at the cost of ending asylum in America. You know, and so that's why previous presidents couldn't do it, because they didn't want to end America's place as a destination for people. They're following the law.

Right. And so, you know, and so the only way that they could kind of get the border under control would have been with a massive surge of resources to have more judges and kind of officials to process people since they didn't have that. They were sort of unable to get things under control. But yes, by kind of ending America's status as a place that provides asylum and instead shipping people seeking asylum to foreign gulags and keeping them in like the most degrading. And sometimes deadly conditions, they have been able to get the border under control. I suppose that there's people who are going to give them political credit for that, but I don't see the need to join them in that. Or there's people who just won't. There just won't be there driving vote. I mean, I think, I think one thing to consider is Michelle, not, I know, we were waiting for you to do that. I know. Michelle C. The words you used were chaos at the border. And I want to sort of lob off the border and focus on the chaos part.

Because I think that the thing that was actually driving the dynamic in favor of Trump last year was a sense of chaos. Voters do not like chaos. One of the things that drives me a little crazy is whenever people talk about the 2020 protests and they say, well, the 2020 protests, you know, contributed to Trump, blah, blah, blah, wholeness, blah, blah, blah. But when you actually look at what happened, like in terms of public opinion, the 2020 protests were a huge drag on Trump. That if they didn't happen, Trump would have been in better standing for re-election. And the mechanism there is not so much broad public sympathy with every single message coming out of them, but that people don't like chaos. They saw all the protests and they were like, this is disorder and I don't like it.

And they blame the incumbent for the disorder. People blame whatever disorder and chaos was at the border on Biden. What Trump has done is traded one form of chaos and disorder for another, right? He's taken whatever may exist at the southern border and then just plopped it into American cities. And so if he's just trading one form of chaos and disorder for another, there's actually, I think, a good amount of evidence to suggest that this is going to be harmful, like actively harmful to him because he isn't getting rid of the chaos.

He's just redistributing it. So here's my question to you, which is that, yes, that is true. But what it's going to come down to is a PR war, because what his argument is, is that, as you note, he's transporting it into Democratic-led cities. He's pitching the idea. I get it in my feed. I'm sure you do all the time. Lands in my inbox. Look at the chaos in New York.

Look at the chaos in California. He's intentionally targeting blue areas so he can plant the idea. that Democratic-run cities are a mess that need to be overseen. So it comes down to, in part, who can work this issue the best? So my question for both of you is, so how could the Democratic Party have shaped the narrative better on immigration instead of being reactive to it? And do you think, are you optimistic that they'll be able to do this going forward?

Okay, so, I mean, on the one hand, obviously, you know, I'm not a political strategist. I don't think that there's any signs, again, that what Trump is doing is working for him politically. I mean, it's interesting if you listen to say Joe Rogan on some of this stuff, right? Because him being aghast at what he's seeing is, you know, maybe a more important, much more important indicator than a bunch of New York Times colonists being horrified by what they're seeing. I think that part of when I speak to activists, they feel so profoundly abandoned by the Democratic Party and so disillusioned by the Democratic Party. because the Democratic Party, I think, has internalized the idea that this is a good issue for Trump. But we need, I think, Democrats who have a positive vision of immigration, who aren't just talking about how we can control, who are pushing back on the idea that is increasingly prevalent in MAGA world, that immigration is just a kind of net loss for this country and that we have given up something important about our heritage and are turning into some kind of third world. shithole, which, by the way, it's, like, bizarre to me that if your real concern is America's

devolution into a third world country that you want to elect the white idiomene. But I think that you need... How do I put this? Public opinion on immigration you see is, like, really thermostatic, right? And it's really kind of reactive to whatever the people in power are doing. So you actually see in polling much more support for immigration than we've seen in years. And Democrats, I believe, and I think I can't tell you for sure if this is the right thing to do politically, I can tell you for sure it's the right thing to do morally, is that they should be picking up on some of that energy and making a positive case for the role of immigrants in our society for what they, you know, for the way that they enrich and revitalize this country. and, you know, the way that what Trump is doing is an attack on, you know, not just their rights, but our rights, like foundational principles of what, at its best, it has meant to be an American.

Yeah. I think Michelle is absolutely right to say that the issue here, part of the reason I think Trump gained this advanced immigration is because Democrats ceded it to him. They said, oh, well, you know, the polls seem to be moving in his direction and these are big applause lines for him. So we also need to adopt this tough on the border language. By adopting kind of the framing of this, all Democrats did was further cede the issue space that Trump gave him space to mold it and dominate it and shape it even more. If you want like an especially dramatic example of this, like look across the pond to what's happening. in the UK, where Labor has adopted basically the kind of Brexit-ish sort of like migrants are harming the country language of Nigel Farage. And what it hasn't done is brought those immigration-sceptical voters back into Labor's

camp. What it has done is expanded Farages and like-minded figures political standing in the country. And so here, I think Democrats need to, as Michelle said, have a positive vision for immigration and not just a kind of, well, we're going to protect the border, but also immigrants are nice and we love them. But a full-throated, you know, this is a nation of immigrants. Immigrants contribute to this country that iPhone you're holding in your hand is a product of immigrants. Like the things that you love about this country are in large part a product of immigrants. I just wrote recently today about J.D. Vance's sort of vision of citizenship and how he cites

the Civil War all the time, you know, the Civil War, a war won by Union Army filled with immigrants. right? Like this, it's a part. It's a deep cut. It's a deep cut, but it's, I mean. Right, but I think it's key to his mythology. Right, right. I don't know.

To me, I mean, I totally take what everybody's saying. To me, this just smells like the Democrats approach of we just got to explain to you while we're right. Well, this isn't, this isn't explaining. I mean, you do. Like, you actually do have to explain to the public why we think we're right. But also, I would make the argument that it's when Democrats have been, for lack of a better term, this woke on immigration. that they've done better. Joe Biden did better in 2020.

Hillary Clinton, you know, we've had three Trump elections. Hillary Clinton, now we can say, did second best against Trump with this explicitly, like, pro-immigrant kind of rhetoric. And she reached a standing with Hispanic voters that no Democrat since has been able to match, right? So, like, maybe it is simply the case that what's missing in the political environment are just national political figures willing to say for, Can we curse on this?

Oh, you can curse. I encourage it. Come on. Willing to say, like, fuck you. No, we're going to have immigrants here. All right. So before we end this, do we think this energy is going to be sustained long enough to make Republicans pay a price for it? Because as long as everybody's mad right now, they don't give two shits.

Again, I just think that it's, I feel like there's such a disconnect between us, Michelle, because I feel like you're talking about the next election. I understand how important that is, like, believe me. But I also think that the framing of a lot of people I'm talking to, and I don't, think it's wrong, is that we're in a kind of situation of authoritarian breakthrough where these aren't the kind of things that can necessarily get fixed in the next election. I don't know that there is, I mean, I think we should demand and assume that the next election will be free and fair, but I also just think that we're not in the kind of system that we were

in a year or two before. And so the question, I mean, there's a problem for the Democratic Party in that there is like this huge disconnect between this activist energy. and the party itself. Yeah, and I want people to make sure they understand elections have consequences, and we're in this mess because people thought, oh, it doesn't really matter who we vote for. I think that that's right, but I also think that, you know, you're talking, I think that the way a lot of people feel is like their communities are under a hostile occupation

of people who hate them, and they want to know, like, how they can defend their neighborhoods. And so it's just a sort of a step away. you're going to see this energy spread, I think, again, because there is just a kind of, you know, among millions and millions of people, a very deep horror over what's going on and a desperation to do something, even though if they don't know exactly what.

I think that my guess is that how that will manifest immediately, politically, is in a demand that the Democratic Party change, right? You see that in Mamdani. I wouldn't be surprised if you see a lot more primary, challenges, the anger out there towards, you know, a democratic leadership that people feel is feckless and they feel like is not fighting for them and is not defending them is just so profound that I think that we will have a kind of a Democratic Tea Party. The political

consequences of that, I think, are hard to predict, although I don't even know if it's necessarily a question of moving to the left, right? Because Alyssa Slotkin has articulated this really well, that there is, you know, there's the left-right divide, but there's also the divide between people who think that Trump is an existential threat and people who think that, you know, kind of fixing this as an election away. She's often touted as, you know, the moderate future of the party, but she's also in the first camp. And I think the Democrats want to see more people like that. Yeah. I would say that as far as, you know, maintaining any kind of anger or momentum and going into the next election. I think Michelle's right to suggest that if the administration

continues along these lines to kind of kind of spread organically. But I also think that this is part of the role for political education. I think we have a habit as Americans just in general of thinking of political parties only in the context of like an election year. But it's like well within the capabilities of the Democratic Party as like fractured and decentralized as it is, individual state Democratic parties, local Democratic parties to begin working first with community groups to do this kind of vigilance work, to reference the Antebellum America again. After the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, you had what were called vigilance committees in lots of northern cities that worked often with maybe Northern Whigs or the Republican organizations

that were coming to four at the time to basically watch out for slave catchers. Entirely possible for local Democratic parties to do that kind of work. It's entirely possible for state, the state, state Democratic parties and national Democratic parties to basically, like, do, like, maintain a kind of media presence devoted to disseminating these images of these ICE kidnappings and these ICE assaults, right? Like, that's a thing they can do. So my advice is just for Democrats to think more creatively about what they can do. And there's a lot you can do, right?

There's no rule that says that you have to wait until the summer before an election to do messaging. You can engage in this stuff year-round all the time. And if I were talking to people who funded Democrats, I would say that you should spend less time looking for a liberal Joe Rogan, whatever that means, and more time funding the kind of information dissemination and community groups that are actually going to be able to activate when an election comes. Okay, I like this. You have an action plan. I'm always about creative action plans, so we're going to leave it there, I think. Both of you thank you so much for all of this. Come back again. Thank you. Happy to be here. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Veshaka, Christina Samuoski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin and Alison Bruzek. mixing and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabro and Afim Shapiro.

Additional music by Amon Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuelski. The director of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.