In less than two years, the Trump administration has upended the U.S. immigration system. The number of people in immigration jail has sharply increased. Hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants have lost their protections, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been deployed into cities that didn’t vote for Donald Trump to cause chaos, confusion and death. 

Though Trump won the 2024 presidential election partly by promising to embark on a mass deportation program, the agenda in practice has turned out to be politically and morally toxic.

Democrats, who have spent the last decade struggling to pinpoint where the party stands on immigration, now have a chance to reframe the conversation and offer a rejoinder to the White House’s unpopular policies.

While the mass deportation of immigrants has not quite panned out, the Trump administration has broken records for the number of people in immigration detention. And in 2025, 33 people died in ICE custody, the most in the last 20 years. Beyond the numbers, the federal government has essentially made it government policy to repeatedly post racist and degrading memes on social media. 

With those facts on the ground, it should be easy for Democrats to craft an alternative. But the opposition has to find its footing first.

“I think the Democrats have been so afraid of standing up to Republicans on immigration,” said Lynn Tramonte, an Ohio-based immigrant advocate with decades of experience on legislation and politics. “They’ve ceded the whole debate to Republicans.”

During the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Hillary Clinton supporters waved pro-immigration signs in the crowd. But after a bruising loss in the general that year, followed by a campaign to paint the Biden administration as having lost “control” over the Southern border, the Democratic message had shifted.

When met with the hardline Trump policies, Democrats decided to accommodate GOP views, instead of owning their own message.

“They really believe that they can stop immigration at the border, they’ve brought into this idea that you need to control it,” Tramonte said.

During the 2024 presidential election, then-Vice President Kamala Harris –– facing accusations of being soft on crime and the border ––  sought to paint herself as tougher on immigration than Trump, touting her prosecutions of drug smugglers and human traffickers.

“Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been talking a big game about securing our border, but he does not walk the walk," she said at a rally in Georgia in 2024. But moving further to the right is usually a failure for Democrats, as Republicans simply move the goal posts.

There’s already a roadmap for how Democrats can respond to the Trump administration's harsh and punitive policies and not just play on the Republicans' terms.

After a lengthy legal battle, the administration succeeded in ending temporary protected status for nearly 350,000 Haitians in July, many who had been living in the U.S. for decades. While prospects for it becoming law were slim, Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley introduced and passed a bill in the U.S. House to extend the program.

When Kilmer Abrego Garcia of Maryland was detained and illegally deported to El Salvador in March 2025, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and other Democrats traveled to the country to seek his release. 

And Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) personally went to investigate conditions at an ICE facility, and was subsequently pepper sprayed by federal agents.

Polling shows that pushing back on anti-immigrant policies and painting the Trump administration's failures as just that is a winning message. As the atrocities pile up, Democratic voters and people across the political spectrum are souring on ICE and what the federal government is doing on immigration.

A May 2026 poll from Pew Research Center found that 84% of Democrats believed that the Trump administration is doing “too much” on deportations. Across all voters, 52% believed the same. 

In a July 2026 survey from Data for Progress, 84% of Democratic voters said they did not trust ICE to provide accurate data to the public, while 60% of independent voters also believed the agency is unreliable.

And a July 2026 YouGov poll showed that 74% of Democrats favor abolishing ICE outright, and 48% of all voters felt similarly.

While Republicans are in power, it’s unlikely that any substantial defunding or significant reform of immigration agencies will actually happen, but immigrant advocates believe that even just voting against certain measures can send a message.

“I don’t think I should have to pay my taxes for putting ankle shackles on a pregnant Haitian woman,” Tramonte said about immigrants in Ohio who have been stripped of their legal status and subsequently been issued ankle monitors “And Democrats have voted for that. So, let’s start where they just vote no. Even if it still passes, just vote no.”