Exclusive: The Dems’ New Plan for When Mass Deportation Fails

“Trump bad” or “No more mass deportation” just won’t cut it.

Two men are detained by plainclothes officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the hallway outside of a courtroom following their court hearing at New York-Federal Plaza Immigration Court inside the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building in New York City on June 6, 2025. (Photo by Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images)

AMERICANS MAY BE REJECTING the execution of Trump’s mass deportation program, but if Democratic candidates want to have a shot at sustained electoral and governing success, they will need to offer a new path forward on immigration. A top advocacy organization has released a report exclusively to The Bulwark it hopes will mark the first steps towards restoring badly damaged public trust in the rule of law and returning credibility and humanity to a broken immigration system.

The American Immigration Council (AIC) report recognizes the country is at a crossroads regarding immigration enforcement. It lays out how Americans’ views of mass deportation have soured. In fact, the polling has become so negative that in March the Trump administration urged Republicans to stop talking about “mass deportations.” But this strategy of reticence hasn’t worked. (Just this week, Tom Homan, the White House border czar, promised that “mass deportations are coming”; the Cava enthusiast put quite a point on it, saying, “You ain’t seen shit yet.”) An April Politico poll found that “half of Americans—including one quarter of [Trump’s] 2024 voters—said Trump’s mass deportations campaign, including his widespread deployment of ICE agents, is too aggressive.”

AIC hopes Democrats will back their framework on interior enforcement as a constructive new approach to immigration. Built around four pillars—compliance, safety, proportionality, and accountability—it recommends fourteen areas of reform. The plan emphasizes making rules that people living in the country can follow; law enforcement that protects communities from threats rather than treating the community as one; consequences for civil immigration violations that are “tailored, reasonable, and humane”; and holding agencies—and individual agents—accountable, up to and including by firing those who abuse their power.

“We’ve seen Democrats over the last six months have become more aligned with what they are against on mass deportation,” said Nayna Gupta, AIC’s policy director, “but now we are at the moment where we have to absolutely pivot to what they stand for.”

The stakes couldn’t be higher.

Even if GOP majorities get washed away in a blue wave this November, polls and focus groups show that voters turned off by Trump aren’t in love with the Democratic party. For decades, Democrats have failed to present a proactive and motivating vision for the immigration system, and their perceived softness on immigration played a role in Trump’s rise. It is essential going forward that Democrats convince voters they have a plan to recalibrate a system that has been twisted and abused by this administration and made to punish everyone—from undocumented immigrants to people with visas and legal status (such as torture victims), to even U.S. citizens who have been targeted, beaten, and detained, often because of their language or presumed racial identity.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), who has forcefully advocated for the children and families stuck in the detention center in Dilley, Texas, told me he’s encouraged these conversations have begun. Castro envisions that in January 2029, the presidency, House, and Senate will all be under Democratic control, but he cautions that power can be fleeting and Democrats must make substantive changes to a system Trump exploited.

“This period has been an ugly reminder for the country about the value of immigrants and is another period in American history where we let nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment take us in a very cruel and inhumane direction,” Castro said. “For Democrats, it’s one thing to criticize Donald Trump when he’s committing abuses against immigrants, and another thing once we have power to actually put all your energy to help pass substantive immigration reform. A big part of the reason the country was frustrated with us is we would go on the campaign trail and say we’re going to do this or that, then we get into power and try half of it. People need to see you making an earnest effort to do what you said you’re going to do.”

A key section of the AIC report proposes reforming civil immigration enforcement by creating a new agency—or, Gupta told me, reappropriating funds for an existing agency like Citizenship and Immigration Services—that would act in a far less punitive fashion than ICE under Trump 2.0. Since the vast majority of immigration violations are civil, not criminal, there is a need for an agency that provides law enforcement without roughing up, handcuffing, and imprisoning detainees indiscriminately, including immigrants who have lived here for decades without a criminal record.

Jason Houser, chief of staff of ICE in the Biden administration and a Homeland Security counterterrorism official, advised AIC on the report and connected them with law enforcement sources around the country for feedback. He agreed that ICE, the Border Patrol, and DHS are not hallowed institutions breathed into existence by the Founding Fathers, but post-9/11 creations that can be altered. While Houser, like the AIC, believes enforcement is necessary, he also supports officers using far less aggressive measures.

“We believe these institutions, to carry out our laws, have to be here, but we’re in a moment, reflexively, where we have to question that,” he said. “I like the idea of challenging the need. There’s always going to be some enforcement that needs to be handled, but the massive gap is in the management.”

Houser said he hopes Democrats take advantage of the opening created by a framework like AIC’s, which runs counter to simplistic narratives and glib slogans about immigration that leave no space for nuance. He sees a deeper vision as being particularly necessary at a time when Republicans are ramming through $70 billion more for ICE and the Border Patrol in the face of rising gas prices and inflation.

“If we’re going to fund systems at those levels, how do we also create pathways for migrants?” Houser said. “Our laws protect more than just Americans, they protect noncitizens as well.”

I spoke to Gupta, AIC’s policy director, about the bevy of horrendous policies that have emerged from the mass-deportation era: masked agents refusing to identify themselves; flying migrants to Guantanamo Bay or El Salvador with nothing like due process; canceling visas for political reasons; ending programs for hundreds of thousands of people here under temporary protected status; immigration enforcement outside schools and churches; busting into homes without judicial warrants; and accosting and assaulting U.S. citizens. Gupta told me that the only thing that prevented many of these abuses in the past was agency policy, not laws. She said these thin protections for people’s rights demonstrate the critical need for new legislation to reform the immigration system, where laws on the books like the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act gave Trump a legal opening to terrorize people by, for example, putting people with civil immigration violations in detention.

Gupta said DHS has famously operated by issuing internal memos that “are subject to the whim and political interests of political leaders” and can therefore shift year to year. She warned Democrats who might be hoping to govern with a light touch via agency memos of their own that “there’s no way to guarantee [Border Patrol] and ICE agents hired under a second Trump administration are going to listen to memos by a new administration, whereas laws written by Congress create a consistent, stable rule of law.”

Houser agreed about the need to get away from relying on memos and internal policy to direct immigration enforcement.

“We know now that fails,” he said, “and it fails over and over again.”

How Trump Has Destroyed Our Faith in the Rule of Law

Kelly McCarthy is one of the people in law enforcement who has seen the scope of the mass-deportation regime’s failure up close. She is chief of police for Mendota Heights, a small town in Minnesota bordering St. Paul and across the river from Minneapolis. Kelly testified to Congress on federal agents’ stark lack of professionalism after the invasion of the Twin Cities earlier this year. She describes acting as a legal observer outside a Spanish-language Alcoholics Anonymous meeting near her home on a day off in January. A border patrol agent she encountered called her a “paid agitator” and told her to “get a job.” Kelly said she would have been embarrassed if the man had been one of her officers.

“All government is is the embodiment of the rules and processes we’re supposed to follow. We all came together and said, ‘These are the rules to this game,’” she told me, describing the deep damage Trump has done to both the rule of law and the perception of law enforcement in America. “When you have the referees and the arbiters not following the rules, it leads to a helplessness and a fear, and that fear spreads and impacts everyone’s daily life. If you’re not trustworthy, they don’t trust you in every avenue, and it’s everyone for themselves.”

Because Democrats are, after all, still Democrats, I asked Gupta: What’s the danger if, charitably, Democrats take the easier path, saying mass deportation was a very dark stain, but deciding to rely on those memos and internal policy to change enforcement instead of wading deeper into the fight over fundamental differences—or, less charitably, if they don’t do anything on immigration out of cowardice?

“The danger is, this is an extreme moment we’re in,” Gupta said. “The failure to act and make significant changes to the system is actually a threat to our rule of law and the credibility of the United States government.” She added a further warning: “They’re using the immigration system as the tip of the spear to go after political opponents, state and local leaders, and rights enshrined under the Constitution, and using the immigration system to encroach on principles of federalism and authority we give states to govern their communities.”

McCarthy was more succinct about the wisdom of a new way forward.

“If you had a cliff, and everyone fell off the cliff, you wouldn’t get more ambulances. We would install a fence on the top,” she said.