Since the resounding election of Donald Trump, Democrats have struggled to gain any cultural foothold to exploit against the president and Republicans. Yet internal policy disagreements and a lack of clear leaders have left the party floundering. Their lone uniform policy agreement is opposition to Trump on every conceivable issue.
The trouble with making anti-Trumpism their guiding principle is that it has allowed Trump to stake out the stronger and more popular stance on nearly every major issue. On top of this, Democrats’ most committed voter base appears to be mostly made up of the radical left. Furthermore, it would appear that nearly half of Democrat lawmakers embrace this radical leftist ideology.
The one issue on which Democrats have been most antagonistic toward Trump has been his enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws. Long ago, the party has embraced a position that eliminates any practical distinction between legal and illegal immigration.
This resulted in Joe Biden’s intentional open border malfeasance over the last four years, which allowed millions of illegal aliens to pour into the country, and also served to turn many Americans away from the Democrats as they were negatively impacted by a mass influx of migrants into their communities.
The blame for the problem can’t simply be pushed onto the Biden administration, however, as many Democrat-run states and cities have explicitly adopted “sanctuary” policies, which are intended to prevent law enforcement from detaining and deporting illegal aliens. These “policies” are an outright effort to thwart and interfere with the federal government’s enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws.
This dynamic was on full display this past week when the Democrat governors of Minnesota (Tim Walz), Illinois (JB Pritzker), and New York (Kathy Hochul) sat before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
The primary issue for Republicans was these governors’ sanctuary policies and how they have been negatively impacting Americans. Democrat lawmakers, meanwhile, took the opportunity to spin the current anti-ICE protests and riots in Los Angeles as caused by Trump supposedly overstepping his authority in detaining and deporting illegal aliens.
When pressed about their states’ harboring illegal aliens policies, the governors spun responsibility for the issue onto the federal government. As Hochul argued, “You’re putting a federal problem on our laps. I wish you would just do your job.”
Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene blasted Hochul, pointing out, “This is the result of your sick and disgusting treasonous laws.” Greene then referenced the murder of the Georgia nursing student Laken Riley at the hands of an illegal alien. Riley’s murderer had been arrested in New York but was released before ICE agents had a chance to take him into custody. Furthermore, Greene noted that New York had paid for his travel to Georgia.
“You are responsible for the murder of this little girl, Laken Riley, and the Department of Justice should prosecute you for her murder,” Greene told Hochul.
Naturally, Hochul once again deflected, claiming New York had nothing to do with Riley’s murder.
Walz insisted that his state of Minnesota did cooperate with federal officials on illegal immigration enforcement, at least where “due process” was observed. Yet when he was confronted regarding his statement likening ICE agents to the “Gestapo,” he played dumb, saying he was making a “historical comparison” because ICE agents were using masks and not publicly identifying themselves.
As noted above, Democrats on the committee took the occasion to rail against Trump’s ICE enforcement, falsely asserting that his administration has been deporting illegal aliens without due process.
What is interesting about the Democrats taking this political position is that once again, it is not one that is popular with the majority of Americans. They appear to be banking on taking a stand against Trump’s ICE enforcement as a winning position; however, recent history should have them reevaluating this assumption.
Since 2020, Americans fleeing Democrat-run states to the greener pastures of Republican-run states is not a minor population bleed, but increasingly a migration. California leads the way in states with population loss, followed by New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. All these are long-time Democrat-run states, and they all have embraced sanctuary policies.
On the flip side, Republican-run states that eschew sanctuary polices are seeing their populations balloon. Florida, Texas, South Carolina, Arizona, Tennessee, and Georgia lead the way in domestic migration growth.
Even more troubling for Democrats is that this population migration out of blue states will soon cost these states congressional representation. California, New York, and Illinois will all lose seats. In contrast, the red states will be gaining seats. This, of course, boosts the Republicans’ future election outlook.
The big irony here is that Democrats have been banking on illegal immigration boosting their electoral power, but it now appears that calculation is backfiring. Americans are fed up with the failure of Democrats to uphold our nation’s immigration laws, and Trump has wisely taken up the immigration enforcement mantle.
