Given that the promised mass deportation of Latino immigrants is near or at the center of Donald Trump’s second term pitch to voters, it’s been notable that the Harris campaign and other Democrats have avoided a full-on condemnation of such an unprecedented measure. In a recent piece, political strategist Michael Podhorzer takes aim at this reluctance, critiquing polls that purportedly show support, particularly in the Latino community, for deportation. He points to vaguely worded questions that obscure what is actually quite weak support for such measures among Latinos, particularly those whose families are relatively recent arrivals in the country. As he puts it, “there is abundant evidence, often in the same surveys, that there is much less Latino support for the reality of what mass deportation would entail than for what survey respondents think they are being asked.”
Podhorzer’s thorough analysis of the polling, and of a misleading discourse based on this misleading polling, provides yet more evidence that Democrats are taking a big risk in not pushing back on Trump’s deportation plans and these distortions in the public debate. In particular, it appears that the Democrats risk leaving on the table large numbers of Latino voters who might be persuaded to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris if they knew the details of Trump’s plans. He notes that, “Often, Latinos open to voting for Trump presume that his deportation plans are principally aimed at those crossing the border in the last few years. On the contrary, Trump allies have been open that they can and will sweep up non-citizens – documented or not – who have lived here for decades.”
One final point I’d highlight from his analysis — he reminds us that Trump’s deportation plans are rooted in fascistic, dehumanizing language about immigrants poisoning the blood of the country, and that Trump promises such mass removals will be “bloody.” As I wrote in my piece about mass deportations last week, Democrats seem to have given Trump something of a pass on his deportation threats because they perceive immigration as a weak issue for themselves. At the same time, though, Trump’s mass deportation stance may actually be a counter-intuitively weak issue for him, given that it involves language and ideas that are simply outside the mainstream traditions of American politics. When Democrats don’t push back on his mass removal plans, it also gives Trump something of a pass on dehumanizing language that is borrowed at least in part from fascist movements of the 20th century.
A pair of recent events also add fuel to arguments that mass deportation may be a greater liability for Trump than many Democrats think. First, in an interview on 60 Minutes, Trump’s former acting ICE head Tom Homan added some details to what the deportations would involve that should shock the conscience. Homan pushed back against the idea that there’d be family separations under a mass removal regime. Rather, whole families would simply be sent over the border — including American citizen children whose parents were being deported. But as journalist Ron Brownstein points out, “There are about 4 million Latino US citizen children w/at least one undocumented parent. So Homan is talking about deporting millions of US citizens in the name of family preservation,” which takes Trump’s deportation plan “much deeper into the realm of ethnic cleansing.”
This admission by Homan, whom The Atlantic’s Caitlin Dickerson has labeled as the “father” of the Trump administration’s family separation policy and who would surely be involved in a second Trump term, goes exactly to the point that Podhorzer argues — American simply aren’t being told the gory details of Trump’s deportation plan when they’re asked if they’re for or against it. Let’s be clear — shipping millions of American children across the border wouldn’t be a kind-hearted plan to keep families united, it would be an unconscionable deprivation of these kids’ rights to live in the United States and to enjoy the many blessings of American citizenship.
This is what the Democrats are giving up when they fail to take on mass deportation plans head on: the way that Trump’s plans inevitably cascade into full-on assaults against American citizens in a way that seeks to redefine them as not fully American, and the way his plans are the thinnest veneer for attempting to change the ethnic makeup of the United States. Trump’s confident bluster around mass deportation hides an untenable authoritarian assault against our fellow Americans, as well as against undocumented workers scapegoated for problems that Trump doesn’t have the faintest idea how to actually solve.
Finally, though it does not go to the mass deportation issue directly, the MAGA rally at Madison Square Garden intended as Trump’s closing pitch to voters foregrounded the party’s animus to Latinos in all its racist and xenophobic grotesquerie. From an opening act comedian who disparaged Puerto Ricans and Latino immigrants more generally, to the vampiric Stephen Millers’s declaration that America is for Americans only, the message couldn’t be any clearer: if you are not white, or if you are a recent immigrant, you are not part of the real America. As Ron Brownstein observed in relation to the family separation policies noted above, this is the sort of rhetoric the Trump campaign is engaging in even as it’s aiming to pull record numbers of male Latino voters into Trump’s camp. The pushback we’ve seen from Democrats in the last few days against the rally’s blatant anti-Latino racism means that they smell blood in the water now that the mask has come off the MAGA movement; we’ll see if this pushback grows to encompass racist and inhumane deportation schemes that sprout from the same rancid ground. It’s clear that Trump and his allies are trying to rally Latino voters their side while also telling their white base that they actually hate Latinos (or at least the ones who are the wrong type of Latino); it’s well past time to draw this hateful contradiction into the full light of day.