Immigration and elections

News broke this past week or so on two fronts that I want to cover here.

Immigration

On the American television series Law and Order, each episode begins with a narrator intoning, "In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime; and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders." (If that makes you wanna hear the "dun dun" sound effect, it's right here).

In immigration enforcement, that's not true.

First of all, immigration violations aren't, on their own, serious crimes, or even crimes at all. Illegally crossing the US border is a criminal misdemeanor – same category as a parking violation. Overstaying a visa is a civil, not criminal, violation. That means a judge can find someone who overstayed a visa "responsible" or "not responsible," but not "guilty" or "innocent."

Second, ICE is not "the police" and does not "investigate crimes." As operated and deployed by the Trump administration, it's a paramilitary force that operates for political ends, not for national security. It jails five-year-olds, kills mothers and nurses and tear-gases families during peaceful protests. It violates the First, Second and Fourth Amendment rights of citizens. It's not law enforcement; it's law violation. It is meant to intimidate, not to protect or to serve.

Third, the people today aren't represented by nearly enough district attorneys to manage the huge number of detentions ICE is making. A Federal prosecutor working for ICE in the Twin Cities explains how overwhelmed she and her peers are, confronted with a crushing case load and given no support by the Trump administration.

This is particularly galling: The MAGA One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year increased funding for ICE from $10Bn annually to $100Bn, virtually all directed at recruitment of more agents to swarm the streets of Democratic states and cities. Meanwhile, cuts and mass resignations of staff attorneys at the Department of Justice have crippled the government's abilities to conduct responsible prosecutions. That means cases can't be heard, the innocent (or "not responsible") can't be exonerated and judicial orders can't be complied with.

I've wrote about this almost a year ago, and stand by my prescription then.

The US absolutely has the right – the obligation! – to determine who may and may not enter the country. We have laws that govern those matters and should enforce them. We should secure our national borders.

A responsible administration that genuinely wanted to enforce immigration law would put trained officers into enforcement roles and would staff up the DOJ with attorneys and judges to handle the case load.

The US midterm elections are looming, and MAGA's "Mass Deportation Now" policy has backfired massively. I don't aim to articulate a position for Democrats, here. I'm anti-MAGA, not pro-Schumer. I want a principled, effective policy that centrist Americans who believe that legal immigration is good for our country will support, regardless of party affiliation.

The Congress last passed meaningful immigration legislation more than 30 years ago, when Bill Clinton was in office. The world has changed but our Congress is frozen by incompetence. People, including me, care about a secure border. We should articulate policies and draft and pass laws that welcome new members to the melting pot and provide humane and thoughtful paths for non-citizen residents. We should live up to the DACA promises that Barack Obama made but never codified in law.

I genuinely believe that Americans want to be better than MAGA. This issue is one on which we could build consensus and begin to sideline that extremist, nativist and racist movement.

Elections

Those looming midterms attracted a lot of attention from Donald Trump and his enablers this week. Heather Cox Richardson has done her usual excellent job of writing up the many instances of MAGA panic.

Trump advocated last year that Texas and other red states gerrymander their Federal Congressional districts to improve the odds of MAGA candidates winning midterm races.

He had middling success. Texas did what he asked; Indiana refused. In response, California governor Gavin Newsom proposed (and I advocated) that California redistrict to turn red seats blue. Voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50 to do just that.

Republicans in the state and nationally challenged California's (not Texas'!) action. Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled in California's favor. Nationally, it's hard to predict the net effect of individual state districts getting redder or bluer between now and November. But paired with 2024 Trump voters abandoning MAGA candidates in recent special elections, it's a fire alarm for the governing party.

I believe the Court was profoundly wrong in upholding Texas' right to redistrict in favor of a single political party. Voters should choose their representatives; representatives should not choose their voters. Given that ruling, though, I'm glad they were consistent in their ruling on California.

The backlash against MAGA led the President to propose this week that the Federal government administer elections in states with Democratic governors or legislatures. His justification of voter fraud has been thoroughly, and repeatedly, debunked (again, see Heather Cox Richardson). Obviously, the real reason is to count the votes he likes and not to count the ones he doesn't.

My social media feed lit up with panicked reactions from ordinary folks. I'm not personally worried that this will happen, though. Matt Blaze is a Georgetown professor with expertise in election law; he has a good thread on why. Simply put, the US Constitution puts the states in charge. The states delegate operations to local precints. There are more than 115,000 polling places run by precinct officials nationwide. Trump lacks the power, both legal and practical, to assume control of this distributed infrastructure.

I've volunteered as a precinct worker in prior elections. It's a good way to learn why actually stealing elections would be really, really hard, and likely to be discovered. Trump lost 61 lawsuits post-2020 not because of radical left judges, but because there's simply no evidence for MAGA claims of massive fraud.

I am worried, though, about use of ICE and MAGA true believers to intimidate voters in the midterms. This couldn't possibly be done in secret – you need to show massive force in order for intimidation to work, and that would draw scrutiny from the courts, including the Supreme Court.

That's a risk we can and must prepare for: Talk about it now, plan for precinct security using state and local forces, and get the courts to rule against voter intimidation well before election day.