How the Democrats Can Play Offense on Immigration
If all politics is a spectacle in the age of Donald Trump, few episodes illustrate this more starkly than the one created by Republican governors busing asylum-seeking immigrants from their states to Northern cities during Joe Biden’s presidency. Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida ensured that as Trump’s 2024 re-election effort approached, the news media — and millions of social media feeds — were flooded with images of immigrants camping out in urban areas: desperate mobs flooding states and blue cities and straining their social service systems to the breaking point.
It was a reprehensible but clever tactic: By manufacturing a wildly distorted and undeniably powerful and shareable spectacle that became a stand-in for Biden’s border crisis, as Trump and Republicans called it, these governors likely helped Trump win re-election in 2024. To this day, some journalists still describe it as a political masterstroke.
Yet today something just as powerful is happening, albeit in the other direction, and, surprisingly, the savvy media almost never describes it in those terms. A handful of Democratic governors have found an innovative way to harness the power of spectacle against Trump by relentlessly highlighting his ICE raids, kidnappings and paramilitary abuses, in part by encouraging countless ordinary people to join the project of using their phones to, as the old left phrase goes, document atrocities. And it’s working: It’s done real political damage to Trump, just as these Republican governors have done damage to Biden. This is creating a cultural moment around immigration that is perhaps more powerful than the one created by Republican governors. And it gives Democrats a new way to take offense on this issue — if they care to take it.
The Democratic governors in question are JB Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California. This role has been imposed on them as stewards of the nation’s largest, most densely populated and most heavily immigrant urban areas – Chicago and Los Angeles – which are in the crosshairs of Trump’s immigration crackdown. This has created an opportunity to experiment with new types of oppositional politics well suited to the information wars of the Trump years – the spectacle wars. It’s no coincidence that Pritzker and Newsom are clearly considering running for president in 2028. This is prompting them to rally around national liberals and Democrats with new forms of confrontation with Trump.
In short, whether intentionally or not, Pritzker and Newsom are engaged in a sort of shadow war over who will be seen — by national liberals and Democrats alike — as the most significant obstacle to Trump’s goal of purging the nation of as many immigrants as possible. And, surprise, this dynamic has been beneficial: it pushes the two men to create modes of pro-immigration policy which bear lessons for the political battles to come.
