It’s Newsom vs. Trump on Mass Deportations
As polls show Americans increasingly fed up with the administration’s cruelty, California’s governor emerges as a leading opposition voice.
LAST MONTH, A MASKED MAN IN A TACTICAL VEST pointed a long gun at a pastor.
In the parking lot of Downey Memorial Christian Church, a half hour outside of Los Angeles, Revs. Tanya and Al Lopez went outside to see why five men dressed for combat were surrounding another man sitting in the shade.
The agents objected to the pastors recording the encounter, and they repeatedly demanded that Tanya back up. At one point, one of them pointed his gun at her.
The Lopezes had a simple message for the agents: “We don’t want this on our property.”
But Al said the chilling response he received from one of the masked men will remain with him.
“The whole country is our property,” the agent told him.
“When someone tells that to you with a weapon in their hand, that was a very clear message,” Al said. “And as a man of faith, that . . . goes against everything that our country stands for.”
Whatever the legal veracity of the anonymous agent’s claim to jurisdiction, it was politically upside-down: The American public now opposes Trump’s mass deportation nightmare. A CBS News poll released Sunday showed that while mass deportation had a +18 net approval at the outset of Trump’s term, it’s now underwater at -2. Recent CNN and Gallup polls have shown similar drops.
This swing in public opinion, as mass deportation has gone from an abstraction to something Americans have seen vividly and with increasing horror, has created an opportunity for Trump’s opponents to demonstrate leadership by showing they are willing, even eager, to fight the president on the issue. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has recently stepped in to do just that.
Last week, in response to the ugly incident in Downey, he visited the church, met with Tanya, and gave a press conference during which he lauded the pastor for exercising her rights to film the encounter. He also discussed the plight of a church employee who has worked at Downey Memorial for fifteen years but now won’t come to work for fear of being targeted, even though he has documentation.
“He hasn’t shown up in weeks since four raids occurred nearby. He won’t even show up, because he’s scared to death of being pulled over for a simple reason: because of the way he looks, because he’s being racially profiled,” Newsom said. The governor then dropped his closing message.
“We must be vigilant and resolved, that as we focus on Epstein, we focus on the next day or distraction, that communities like Bell and Downey are being torn apart,” he said.
This was a marked change in tone for the presumed 2028 presidential candidate, who in April claimed that Trump’s immigration policy was itself a “distraction” from the economy.
Newsom said that in Bell, one town over, he visited “generational” businesses that have lost 80 percent of their sales because of ICE raids.
“And they said they’ve lost something more precious,” he said. “They said they’ve lost a sense of community. They said they missed their customers, not the business. They missed the tables being filled.”
THIS MORE OPENLY COMBATIVE VERSION of the governor—a man aides say has always felt this way on this issue, and who critics argue has only come around more recently—has won over even some of his past critics.
“He’s been super helpful, checking in on me and the organization,” Angelica Salas, the executive director of the powerhouse advocacy group the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) told me. She said beyond Newsom using his platform to support their cause, the governor’s office has been helpful in quieter ways, too. For instance, she is in regular contact with Gina Da Silva, Newsom’s senior policy adviser for immigration. This connection was critical during the beginning of last month’s crisis as Trump’s masked agents descended on L.A., where they caused chaos and provoked strong protests, which in turn led to violent responses by law enforcement.
She said that one of the reasons Newsom chose to visit businesses like he did in Bell is that CHIRLA showed his office a heat map of where ICE and border patrol agents had gone—“not once, but twenty times”—and this informed the governor’s itinerary.
“It has led to devastating impact in certain areas, not just L.A., but Latino L.A.,” she said. “Certain places in Southeast L.A. have been hit multiple times. These are ghost towns, including in Pasadena, which just went through the fires, and is a Latino and black neighborhood.”
Salas said Newsom has helped her organization and the community they serve by acknowledging that people are frightened—and by showing “a lot of indignation” at what the federal government is doing to local communities.
“This is when people figure out who is your friend, who is supporting you,” she said.
Newsom’s team told The Bulwark they have seen “whiplash” among activist groups like CHIRLA that faced funding shortfalls after progressive donors shied away from immigration issues following Trump’s 2024 victory. But the tragedies visited upon California—the multiple devastating fires, most importantly—brought communities within the state together.
Walking along streets lined with ruined homes and cars, Newsom and his team noticed a trend: Right after the EPA folks and people in hazmat suits arrived to clear debris, the next group of people to arrive were consistently day laborers. The truth they saw in L.A. and San Diego holds for California more generally, and anywhere in America disaster strikes: Much of the physical act of rebuilding will be done by immigrants helping to stand up their hurting communities.
While Newsom’s team maintains that he has a nuanced view of immigration—one that includes protecting the southern border more aggressively than Joe Biden was willing to do—they also told me the governor understands exactly why Trump has lost support on immigration, formerly his strongest issue.
“When immigration moves from law and order to anti-Latino sentiment and going after communities who are not actually criminals, and when everyone comes to understand what is required to rebuild a community, a backlash begins,” a political strategist for Newsom told me.
OF COURSE, IN A STATE AS BIG as California, a longtime governor is bound to elicit complicated reactions from constituents.
While Salas spoke glowingly of Newsom in our most recent conversation, in an interview with me last month as ICE descended on L.A., she sharply criticized him for proposing cuts to health care for undocumented immigrants. The governor caught worse flak earlier this year for his flirtations with “manosphere” podcasters, which gave rise to headlines that upset some progressives. The core complaint that many critics have against Newsom is that he is a cynical opportunist: He decides whether to sit down with Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk using the same calculations that helped him determine whether to go to bat for immigrants.
But as Democratic strategist Michael Trujillo, a longtime critic of the governor, told me, politics is about opportunity.
“I’m always happy to criticize Newsom, but I honestly can’t on this issue. I want every office to see this as an opportunity to stand up for a marginalized group, our undocumented community,” he said. “If people see political opportunity or political oxygen on this issue, I’m happy to hand out oxygen masks, shit.”
He reiterated the ways recent polling has contributed to a political opportunity for Democrats, who can show a concerned public how the next Democratic president would differentiate themselves from MAGA on immigration.
Newsom came out of the gate strong last month, when Trump decided to make an example out of Los Angeles and called on his border czar Tom Homan to arrest him.
“When he told Homan to arrest him, I was fired up, like, ‘Fuck yeah, arrest me, too, Tom, bring out more handcuffs!’” Trujillo said. He noted Newsom has a “kickass” social media team, and they have succeeded in positioning the governor to take on not just Trump but also Trump’s top domestic policy and immigration adviser, Stephen Miller. When the new Harry Potter show announced that they had cast Voldemort, Newsom’s account reposted the news with a wry caption: “Congrats @StephenM!”
But Newsom’s advocacy doesn’t end with dunks on X. Salas noted that, after Trump’s inauguration but before the more dramatic ICE raids hit L.A., Newsom called a special session of the legislature to create one $25 million pot for the state attorney general to draw from to fight the federal government in court, and another $25 million pot for legal groups to defend immigrants.
“Many of the lawsuits against the federal government come from California, especially those that help immigrants,” Salas said. “These are not just empathetic words, these are actual real investments in the state.”
Nice piece. We need a fighter because we are in a fight
As a 25 year Californian, I can see the fear, the disruption, the evil, and the community standing up and taking care of each other. We cannot afford purity tests in this fight, not can we tolerate hatred. Newsom is walkin what he talkin and that's what counts.