Today’s article is from Blas Nuñez-Neto, a Searchlight Senior Fellow and former Biden administration assistant secretary for border and immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security, and Daniel Delgado, a Searchlight Senior Fellow and former deputy assistant secretary for immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security.
Voters are turning on Donald Trump, and that extends to what used to be his best issue: immigration.
The Administration’s reckless pursuit of its indiscriminate and chaotic immigration agenda, and the overtly racist way they talk about it, has achieved something that would have been unthinkable a year ago: A recent New York Times / Siena poll found that voters now support Democrats by a seven-point margin on immigration.
How is the Administration responding? By launching a messaging blitz that doubles down on their darkest nativist impulses.
Earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security’s X account posted this:
After a storm of criticism, including from Hasbro, the post was eventually removed. But the message was exactly what we’ve come to expect from America’s top immigration enforcement agency and the president who leads it.
Inflammatory and xenophobic language is hardly new to President Trump or his administration. For years, they have claimed the country has been invaded by immigrants, going as far as accusing migrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”
While DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin promised senators he would get the agency out of the headlines when he was sworn in this past March, this promise has not held. A spate of shootings by ICE personnel has been accompanied, according to a recent Politico analysis, by DHS increasingly posting about “hunting” illegal immigrants online.
This has all contributed to the slide in Trump’s immigration numbers, and Republican politicians are starting to run for political cover. This week, Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) demanded on X that ICE coordinate with local authorities, while Representative Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL) released a remarkable video last week telling President Trump that his immigration crackdown had “gone too far.”
Democrats have an opening here to win on immigration this election cycle. But they can’t let Republicans down-ballot seize the moderate ground.
This means avoiding the temptation to swing the pendulum too far to the left and rejecting many of the policies that defined the Democratic Party during the early days of the Biden Administration. Instead, Democrats should run on a commonsense immigration agenda that restores trust with the American people.
What voters want on immigration
Last month, Searchlight asked persuadable voters in battleground districts to describe what they’re looking for in our immigration system. Their responses made it clear that they are tired of the chaos. Importantly, they do not respond well to hyperpartisan messages that focus on our “obligation” to protect migrants on the left or to stop the “invasion” of illegal immigrants on the right.
When asked to describe their ideal immigration system, persuadable voters said they wanted it to be humane, consistent, and fair—a clear rejection of the wildly swinging pendulum we’ve seen on immigration over the past 15 years.
Notably, the messages being put out by President Trump and his Department of Homeland Security are deeply unpopular with persuadable voters. When we asked voters to choose from a list of ideologically diverse immigration messages, only 11% chose the one that was concerned that the “country has been invaded by illegal immigrants.”
Similarly, only 17% of persuadable voters selected a message that said, “Every illegal immigrant is a criminal. All of them should be arrested and deported.”
Instead, voters preferred messages that emphasized the need to enforce our laws firmly, but fairly (33%) and requiring migrants to come through the front door (35%).
To the politicians who want to know what this looks like in practice, listen to James Talarico on his “Frontera Tour” or Bobby Pulido speaking to voters in South Texas. Their messages are helping win back people who supported Trump in 2024 because of the border crisis, even as they remain deeply opposed to Trump’s inhumane and chaotic immigration policy.
How to navigate the toughest issue
Our message testing also dove into a topic that is quite controversial inside the Democratic Party: the question of whether to call for reforming or abolishing ICE in response to the long parade of horribles the agency has delivered over the past 18 months.
When it comes to America’s top deportation agency, Democrats should keep in mind that persuadable voters in our poll strongly supported immigration enforcement in the interior. However, they also wanted ICE reined in and the agency to be held accountable. Specifically, the best-performing message with persuadable voters was: “I’m for fair immigration enforcement, not abolishing ICE. ICE needs to be held accountable, and that means reforming it from the ground up.”
Democrats can and should call for significant reforms at ICE, but if the goal is reaching persuadable voters, they should steer clear of calling for “abolishing” ICE.
It has only been two short years since voters soundly rejected the party’s immigration platform and reelected Trump. And while voters are recoiling from President Trump’s inhumane and chaotic policy, they still believe our immigration laws need to be enforced firmly—they just also want those laws to be enforced fairly, and humanely.
Persuadable voters—and even some Republicans—are becoming fed up with the chaos that Trump has unleashed in our immigration system. Democrats have an opening to win on the issue. But in order to maximize that opportunity, they should focus on messages that connect with the persuadable voters who will decide elections in the fall.
That means choosing their words and their policies carefully.
