Six months ago, voters in rural Lee County, Iowa, voted for Donald Trump by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. But on Tuesday, residents filled Senator Chuck Grassley’s town hall there with heckles and jeers. “If I get a court order to pay $1,200 can I ignore it like Trump ignored the Supreme Court?” one attendee asked Grassley, referring to the administration’s defiance of the court’s order to “facilitate” the return of Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, mistakenly deported to an El Salvadoran gulag. Another suggested they tear down the Statue of Liberty, while others shouted, “Due process!” The message was clear: Even in Trump country, people are outraged by this case.
Some Democrats have watched scenes like this and decided to spring into action. Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador on Tuesday, where he was denied a request to meet with Garcia; several of his colleagues in the House are currently preparing to follow in his footsteps, though Republicans seem unlikely to allow them to do so as an official delegation. But others in the party and the media fear standing up for Garcia and the rule of law is a mistake: By focusing on Trump’s strongest issue—immigration—they reason, Democrats are not only playing on his turf, they’re bolstering the impression that they care more about foreigners and criminals than they do about American citizens.
This is cowardly and amoral. It’s also politically birdbrained. Trump’s refusal to follow a ruling from the Supreme Court isn’t just flagrantly unconstitutional: It’s a gift to a Democratic Party struggling to articulate its own immigration policy. In the case of Garcia and others who have been wrongly sent to a notoriously violent Central American prison, Democrats can channel righteous outrage that people are feeling everywhere—even in deep red places like Fort Madison, Iowa.
The lily-livered Democratic case for backing down on Garcia is relatively straightforward: Speaking anonymously to Axios, one Democratic member of Congress dismissed the issue as a “soup du jour”—a flashpoint that the public and the media will quickly move on from. Trump is “setting a trap for the Democrats, and like usual we’re falling for it,” the member of Congress said. “Rather than talking about the tariff policy and the economy … the thing where his numbers are tanking, we’re going to go take the bait for one hairdresser,” they said—referring, incredibly, to a different outrageous deportation of an innocent person. This lawmaker is essentially arguing that Democrats should hold their fire for now and only spring into action when Trump deports an American citizen to El Salvador.
Chris Cillizza, who recently went from being the wrongest man on cable news to the wrongest man on Substack, made the same case at greater length, arguing that people really only focus on one story at a time, so any distraction from Trump’s tariffs is bad for Democrats. The Dow Jones, Cillizza noted, had dropped nearly two points on Wednesday—but “you probably didn’t hear much about” it because Democrats and the media were talking about Garcia instead.
There is nothing new about the idea that defeating Trump requires discipline. Hopscotching from negative story to negative story, according to this argument, means nothing will ever stick. Not only that, it risks focusing on the wrong things. The people who adhere to this line of thinking argue that not every damaging story is actually bad for Donald Trump, and some attacks—maybe many—actually make him stronger either by making the opposition seem flighty and feckless or by inadvertently bolstering his tough-guy credentials. For anxious Democrats already disinclined to take moral or humanitarian stands on immigration, Garcia’s case would seem to tick both boxes.
Yet it’s hard to think of a more out-of-touch descriptor of Garcia’s case—an extrajudicial removal to an El Salvadorian gulag and an open refusal to obey the Supreme Court—than “soup du jour.” (At the very least, why not just dispense with the French and call it the soup of the day?) In any case, there are many, many signs that Garcia’s case is not something of passing interest to Democratic politicians or to voters generally. Nearly all of the evidence we have, in fact, suggests that Trump is vulnerable on immigration—and that the circumstances surrounding Garcia’s deportation are good politics for Democrats.
For one thing, outrage over Garcia’s case has been growing for weeks and is being felt across the country—as Grassley’s disastrous town hall testifies. For another, polling suggests that this outrage is helping to destroy the one policy that Trump is still polling well in: immigration.
Even polls that show voters broadly favoring Trump’s approach to immigration show that the public is furious about his handling of cases like Garcia’s. Fifty-six percent of respondents to a late March Reuters/Ipsos poll said that the administration should not “keep deporting people despite a court order to stop,” with only 40 percent agreeing it should keep doing so. Nearly every poll tracking the administration’s refusal to obey with court orders stopping deportation shows something similar: Voters really do not like it when Trump ignores court orders. And the issue is bringing down overall support for his approach to immigration.
This isn’t a trap, in other words. If anything, it’s the opposite of a trap. For months, the Democrats have agonized over how to respond to Trump’s immigration policy. By refusing to obey court orders—including one from the Supreme Court—the Trump administration has handed them an opportunity on a silver platter. It’s a story that captures everything awful about the Trump administration: its lawlessness, its incompetence, its disregard for basic humanity. Speaking up for Garcia would be the right thing to do even if it wasn’t good politics. Thankfully for Democrats, it is.