Dems Are Finally Getting Off the Mat in the Mass Deportation Fight

As the Trump admin revives ICE task forces and creates a national registry of immigrants, Democrats see an opening.

House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-CA) in Washington, DC on February 5, 2025. (Photo by Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)

DEMOCRATS SAY THEY’RE FINALLY READY TO FIGHT BACK. In a briefing with House Democratic Caucus leadership and Congressional Hispanic Caucus members organized by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ), senior congressional Democrats made clear that, along with Republican-authored Medicaid cuts, the next phase of the Trump administration’s mass deportations would be a focus of their opposition.

“Communities are relying on us to fight back against extremism,” Pete Aguilar, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, said at the briefing. “We will not let anyone use our community as political pawns.”

Aguilar’s comments come at a moment of intense trepidation for the pro-immigration forces in Washington D.C. Republicans are seeking to pass massive new funds to amplify Trump’s already aggressive deportation efforts, though the party has yet to come to a final agreement on a number. The Senate’s budget plan would allocate $350 billion of extra border security and military spending. The House budget passed on Tuesday would fund the effort with a comparatively modest $200 billion, though immigration groups argue there’s a slush fund disguised in there that would boost it to the $350 billion level.

The administration isn’t waiting on Congress. After a month of hardline, dramatic, and at times unlawful efforts to juice deportation numbers, its next step is to revive a program that trains local law enforcement to serve deportation warrants and conduct probable cause arrests for deportation. Trump’s team also wants local law enforcement to participate in federally-led immigration task forces that the Obama administration ended after flagrant racial profiling of Latinos in states like Arizona led to tens of millions of dollars in legal settlements, Florida Today reported.

State and local agencies in Florida, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Idaho have already signed up to reconstitute the controversial task forces, the Ohio Capital Journal reported. On Thursday, as I was writing this, Virginia joined in as well through a Gov. Glenn Youngkin executive order.

Democrats, having spent months smarting from an election in which immigration concerns hampered the party, finally appear ready to at least join the fight.

At the NAHJ briefing, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) listed protecting Dreamers, farmworkers, and families from the overreach of the Trump administration and “the fear that is being caused in neighborhoods all across America” as a top priority for Democrats. He also touted the need to secure the border—a top Trump talking point—but did so while accusing the White House of extremism in “the process of crashing the American economy.”

“There are farmworkers not showing up, there are construction workers who are not showing up, and there are food processing workers who are not showing up because of the fear that is being caused. And standing up the type of activity that we haven’t seen since what was taking place in Arizona is not going to make the situation better,” Jeffries said, referring to Arizona’s 2010 law that charged state and local agencies with enforcing one of the harshest immigration laws in the country. “It’s just going to create continuing problems particularly as it relates to the economy in this country.”

Also responding to The Bulwark’s question at the briefing, Rep. Darren Soto (D-Fla.) said that far from making America great again, this zombie program will just make America racially profile again.

“Nationally, this is going to make anybody who is Hispanic-looking or has an accent in the crosshairs,” Soto said. He added that it’s been a long time since the United States had an Arizona-style law (which was partially struck down by the Supreme Court) but that a lot of families remember how big a fight it was.

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A Registry for Immigrants Evokes 9/11

THIS WEEK, THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION began the process of finding and registering undocumented immigrants 14 years of age and older, announcing that there would be a national registry and a punishment for those immigrants who failed to sign up.

“An alien’s failure to register is a crime that could result in a fine, imprisonment, or both. For decades, this law has been ignored—not anymore,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.

For Democrats, it was yet another sign of an administration hellbent on pushing any button to satisfy Trump’s desire for big deportation numbers.

“They keep coming up with more and more ridiculous announcements and it does remind you of authoritarian regimes in other countries where they like to round people up, especially people who contribute so much to our society,” Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-N.M.) told The Bulwark Wednesday.

Democrats and activists described the announcement as another way to portray immigrants as criminals. Simply being in the country illegally is not a crime, but the DHS statement warns that, “An alien’s failure to depart the U.S. is a crime that could result in significant financial penalty.”

“They’ve just decided that everybody is a criminal, and the reality is that’s not the case,” Leger Fernandez said. “We are relying on the immigrant population to clean our house, build our house, take care of our elderly, take care of our children, and now we want to call them criminals?”

Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Ca.) laughed repeatedly before answering a question about the registry, which he had apparently not heard about before.

“Here’s the thing: if they don’t know where they are because they’re not documented, they’re not going to know that they broke the law because they’re not documented,” he said, befuddled at the notion that people would willingly give their names, addresses, and fingerprints to be found by the Trump administration. “It’s just the funniest thing I ever heard,” he said, laughing again.

Gomez called the policy “ridiculous” but said there is real danger in the approach. He noted that Elon Musk’s DOGE has sought to gain access to sensitive government data and records of Americans.

On the steps of the U.S. Capitol building, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) said a national registry for immigrants “is what we should be doing.”

“Even if you go back to the 9/11 Commission Report, what they wanted was biometric entry-exit systems,” said the congressman, who recently announced he would run for governor of Florida. “We built an entry system, never built an exit system, so we have to require more information to be able to track people down in the essence that we need to find them when, frankly, you’re a guest in this country.”

Democrats have, in the past, argued for building up some database information on undocumented immigrants. State officials have often debated the merits of allowing them to obtain drivers’ licenses for the benefit of safer travel.

The current Trump effort, though, is less geared towards keeping roads safe and more focused on facilitating deportations. Opponents see echoes of the mass surveillance programs put in place after September 11th.

The Immigration Hub, a national immigration lobbying and advocacy group, said the policy revives, in spirit, failed post-9/11 initiatives that disproportionately targeted Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities under the guise of national security, adding that the post-9/11 registry led to zero terrorism convictions but over 14,000 individuals being placed in deportation proceedings.

“This registry is a chilling echo of the darkest chapters in world history,” Beatriz Lopez, the co-executive director of the Immigration Hub said. “We have seen what happens when governments create lists of vulnerable communities—not to protect, but to track, detain, and disappear. This is not about public safety. It is not about security. It is mass surveillance with one purpose: to fuel Trump’s deportation machine at any cost.”

Even Donalds eventually conceded that there could be excesses in such a policy.

Asked if law enforcement needs to be careful stopping people because of the danger of racial profiling, he said, “Full stop, full stop, full stop, and actually we did this dance, I think this is what happened in Arizona.”

But even then, he added, he views the initiative as justified. “The reality is Joe Biden let more than 10 million people into our country,” said Donalds. “There are people that need to go home, and so we have to go through that process. If law enforcement is working to find out immigration statuses and/or helping to assist the federal government in repatriating people to their home country, that’s following American law. That’s what we’re going to do.”

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One Last Thing

I usually don’t want to provide a link you can’t click and read fully, but I think this item from Bloomberg Government is worth flagging.

In a report titled “Farm Group Says Finding Workers at Any Price ‘Almost Impossible,’” a representative of the International Fresh Produce Association told senators about the reality of labor shortages.

“We’ve tested the theory that if agricultural employers ‘just paid more,’ Americans would willingly seek jobs on the farm. It didn’t work,” Bret Erickson said.

Per Bloomberg, “Farmers are grappling with the government’s ‘unwillingness to address agriculture’s crippling shortage of reliable, legal labor,’ Erickson, SVP of business affairs at Texas-based Little Bear Produce, said in prepared remarks for a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing on the farm economy.”