Over the last two and a half months, the Trump administration has purged the government of those it deems disloyal, fired tens of thousands of federal workers, enacted a fascistic immigration policy built around mass deportations, embarked on a nationwide crackdown on free speech and dissent, and more or less legalized corruption. Where courts have pumped the brakes on these moves, the administration has sometimes openly defied their orders. And now, after the stock market recorded its worst quarter since 2022, the president is prepared to levy steep tariffs against several key trading partners and allies. He’s calling Wednesday “Liberation Day,” but it may very well be economic suicide.
Some Democrats, like Senators Bernie Sanders and Chris Murphy and Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Maxwell Frost, have stuck their necks out in MAGA country to criticize Donald Trump and his co-president, Elon Musk. Others are using their congressional pulpit: Senator Cory Booker this week spoke for 25 hours straight on the Senate floor—a record for the chamber—to draw attention to Elon Musk’s gutting of the federal government. But these are the exceptions to the rule. The party does not have a unified response to Trump’s worst abuses, and that’s in part because it willingly enabled some of them.
After being caught flat-footed by Trump’s victory in November, and then apparently sleepwalking into his presidency without any plan whatsoever, the Democrats did finally coalesce around a message by late February: Eggs are too expensive. They saw it as a winning issue because it was a true and straightforward pocketbook concern—unlike abstractions about, say, the administration’s violations of due process.
“When that is your day-to-day worry, the philosophical conversations about a constitutional crisis or the democracy is simply not a luxury you can afford,” Kristen McDonald Rivet, a Michigan representative, told the Associated Press last month. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t worry about those things, because we should and they are important, but they are not primary in the minds of the people in Saginaw, Michigan.” Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota’s senior senator, was more succinct, telling The New York Times that egg prices are emblematic of a “bigger picture” of chaos, dysfunction, and broken promises.
Having just lost an election where high prices were the biggest—and arguably most decisive—issue, Democrats were eager to turn the tables. There’s another way of looking at this approach, however. The 2024 election may have been a referendum on inflation, but it also saw the Democrats scramble to the right to adopt slightly less inhumane versions of Trump’s draconian immigration positions. Voters either didn’t buy it or they wanted Trump’s full-throated blitz, not some Democratic Lite version of it. Democrats are now in an awkward position, to say the least. They can’t stick with last year’s message because the voters rejected it, and if they try to revert to their more compassionate positions from the first Trump presidency, voters might be skeptical of their about-face. So they’re terrified of taking any position at all.
But the Democrats don’t need a fully fleshed-out immigration policy. The Trump administration is giving them all of the material they need—all they have to do is speak up.
In a court filing on Monday, the Trump administration admitted that it had deported a Maryland father and legal resident to a violent, notorious Salvadoran prison based on an “administrative error.” This is outrageous in and of itself. But it gets worse. The man in question, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, had been granted protected status in 2019 that explicitly forbade him from being sent back to El Salvador, where he was from. And now the administration is saying they’re powerless to bring Garcia back to the U.S.
None of this has stopped the senior officials brazenly lying about what happened. Vice President JD Vance spent Tuesday morning viciously smearing Garcia as a “convicted MS-13 gang member.” That lie was later repeated by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who claimed to have seen evidence from the Department of Homeland Security that he was not just a “convicted” gang member but a leader of the violent MS-13 gang. Why would DHS, yet no one else, have evidence of that conviction? The simple answer is that Leavitt is lying. We know this because Trump administration lawyers already acknowledged that Garcia had been deported based on an error.
As for the “conviction,” legal filings made on Garcia’s behalf explain the alleged MS-13 tie. Several years ago, Garcia had been arrested while soliciting work with three other men outside a Home Depot parking lot. One of the other men told officers that Garcia was an MS-13 member—likely in an effort to curry favor with the cops—“but the man offered no proof and police said they didn’t believe him,” The Atlantic reported. “Police did not identify him as a gang member.” Nevertheless, the Trump administration is using the accusation to justify deporting Garcia to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center.
This is outrageous. It’s illegal. It’s un-American. The Trump administration is ruining the lives of innocent people all across the country. It is flagrantly ignoring due process while it treats anyone born outside this country, even those here legally, as a criminal and invader. Kilmar Abrego Garcia is neither of those things. He has followed the law by checking in with ICE every year, and he works full-time as union sheet-metal apprentice to support a 5-year-old son with autism and a hearing defect. He’s precisely the kind of immigrant America should welcome.
Even if Democrats are too cowardly to speak about the importance of immigrants to America, and why we need more of them, they can speak out about this flagrant abuse of power against Garcia. They can do so while still casting themselves, as Kamala Harris tried and failed to do last fall, as the party that can keep the country safe by deporting only truly dangerous immigrants—and not destroying families with sloppy and lawless mass dragnets. There’s no better time for Democrats to put this issue at the center of the party’s “bigger picture.” With egg prices plummeting, they need a new message anyway.