Democrats are squabbling over their immigration stance as Trump returns to power

A fast-moving immigration bill is showing how deeply divided Democrats have become on the thorny issue on the eve of President-elect Donald Trump’s return to power.

Republicans made the first bill of the new Congress the Laken Riley Act, a bill designed to crack down on unauthorized immigrants accused of nonviolent crimes and give state attorneys general the power to challenge individual federal decisions on immigration. The bill is named after Laken Riley, a nursing student who was murdered at the University of Georgia in 2024 by a migrant who had been arrested multiple times for other alleged crimes. It passed the House last week with nearly one-quarter of Democrats voting for it, and has bipartisan momentum in the Senate.

The bill’s Democratic backers warn that their party better get on board.

“If we can’t scrape seven or eight votes out of our caucus, that’s one of the reasons why we lost,” says Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a Senate sponsor of the bill. “I am very pro-immigration. That doesn’t mean we are pro for every immigrant.”

Senator Fetterman’s support, along with that of freshman Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona, who had voted for the bill last year in the House, set off a stampede of swing-state Democratic senators toward supporting the legislation, which needs at least seven Democrats to become law. Senate Democratic leaders, caught by surprise at the bill’s rapid movement, eventually agreed to allow debate on the bill so long as they could offer changes. Democrats unveiled a list of amendments Monday night; it remains to be seen which, if any, will be adopted.

A GOP advantage, but polling is nuanced

The past election showed that voters generally favored the GOP on the issue: Exit polls found that voters said they trusted former President Trump to handle immigration more than Vice President Kamala Harris, by 53% to 44%.

“Immigration was on the ballot. Being tougher on crime, on these particular issues, was on the ballot,” says Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida, who voted for the bill.

But those same exit polls showed a muddled picture. A solid majority of voters (56% to 40%) said that unauthorized immigrants should be offered a chance at legal status rather than face deportation. That suggests that if Mr. Trump seeks widespread deportations, as he and his aides have suggested, he could face political blowback. And only 12% of voters said immigration was their top issue this campaign, with 14% naming abortion, 32% the economy, and 34% democracy.

The biggest shift in voting this election actually came from Latino voters. Mr. Trump won 46% of the Hispanic vote, a 14-point jump from 2020 and the highest share of any Republican presidential candidate since at least 1972. Exit polls showed that Hispanic voters were about evenly divided on which candidate they trusted more on immigration, but two-thirds opposed deporting most unauthorized immigrants. Latinos were no more likely to name immigration as their most important issue than non-Hispanic voters – 13% said it was their top issue, while 37% chose the economy.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (far left) is joined by other Republican Sens. (from left) James Lankford, Ted Budd, John Barrasso, and Katie Britt, speaking to reporters in the U.S. Capitol about the Laken Riley Act. The bill is putting pressure on Democrats to define their position on unauthorized immigrants who have been accused of certain crimes.

But many Democrats recognize that they need to shift public perceptions of their immigration stances.

“They’re recalibrating and trying to meet the electorate where the electorate is rather than where some Democrats wish the electorate was when it comes to immigration policy,” says Fernand Amandi, a pollster who served as the top Hispanic-focused strategist on both of President Barack Obama’s White House campaigns.

Even many Democrats who oppose the bill say they think the party needs to closely examine what happened in the past election and acknowledge that immigration was an issue that hurt their party.

“The party is still sorting out what happened and what our messaging is going to be, and, of course, [its] positions on key issues, including immigration,” Rep. Chuy García of Illinois, who opposed the bill, said in an interview.

Mr. García saw his Hispanic-majority Chicago district swing 18 percentage points to the right in the last election. He said that inflation and cost-of-living issues were the biggest reasons for the swing, but the surge of new migrants bused into his community from border states also infuriated some constituents. “The messaging around the ‘chaos border’ and the surge in border crossings, along with the experience of having new arrivals in communities, made people resentful, made people think that they were being left behind one more time.”

Mr. García says he thinks some of his colleagues supported the bill because they felt “It’s easier to just go along and vote for it” than try to explain the problems with the bill to their constituents while facing attacks that they’re “favoring criminality.”

What the Laken Riley Act would do

The bill would require Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency to detain unauthorized immigrants arrested for nonviolent crimes including “burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting.” It would also empower state-level officials to sue the federal government to overturn decisions to release individual migrants – which detractors say could lead to a chaotic legal morass.

ICE warned lawmakers over the weekend that the the bill is an unfunded mandate that could require it to detain as many as 60,000 people, far more than the 42,000 total detention beds they currently have funding for. The agency says it would need more than $3.2 billion for enough detention beds and new agents to be able to enforce the law – or it could be forced to release tens of thousands of other immigrants it currently detains, including some deemed public safety threats. The bill doesn’t currently include any funding to help ICE carry out these widespread detentions.

Plenty of Democrats are rallying hard against the bill.

“The Laken Riley Act is a gross violation of civil rights for the American people writ large. And what people need to understand is that if we start rounding people up just based on that accusation of a crime, remove people’s day in court, eliminate the basic constitutional rights that we are all afforded in this country – that’s the beginning of the end when it comes to the erosion of our civil liberties in America,” says Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii warns that the bill would let 10-year-old migrants “be detained for shoplifting a piece of gum.”

“If we’re going to do immigration reform, it should be comprehensive. This bill is not it,” she continues.

“A balance that we need to find”

Democrats moved hard to the left rhetorically on immigration issues during the 2020 election cycle. After Joe Biden became president, the southern border saw a major surge in illegal crossings early in his administration. Then, as public concern mounted, the Biden administration looked to crack down on border security, placing new restrictions on asylum-seekers. Illegal crossings plunged.

Vice President Harris leaned hard into more hawkish language on border security and highlighted her fight as California attorney general against transnational gangs, while hitting Mr. Trump for torpedoing a bipartisan border security deal negotiated in early 2024 by Oklahoma GOP Sen. James Lankford.

Mr. Amandi, President Obama’s pollster, said that pivot was “done too late” to help the party.

It’s clear the election results jolted Democrats. Thirty-seven House Democrats voted for the Laken Riley Act last March; this time, the number rose to 48.

But Mr. Trump has also faced blowback for his immigration policies in the past. The Trump administration’s family separation policy proved immensely unpopular when enacted in his first term, driving a dip in his poll numbers, and he was forced to walk it back.

A number of the new votes in the House came from freshman Democrats from competitive districts. They include Rep. Suhas Subramanyam of Virginia, whose parents are immigrants and whose northern Virginia district has a large number of first-generation Americans.

He thinks Democrats, and the United States, need to find a more balanced approach to immigration. Still, the congressman says he opposes most of what President-elect Trump has proposed on immigration – a sign that once the new president starts governing, Democrats might find more common ground to unite against his policies.

“I’m not in full agreement at all with Trump on his immigration plan. I think that it’s not realistic to try to deport 15-million-plus people,” Mr. Subramanyam says. “I do think the pendulum swung quite a bit over the past four years or so on immigration, and now it might end up swinging back too far the other way. And I think there’s a balance that we need to find.”