If We Want to Save Democracy, We Must Oppose Mass Deportations

Democratic Party leadership presented the 2024 presidential election as a choice between Donald Trump and democracy. That messaging seemed not to resonate with the majority of voters as Trump is now president. Despite his extreme policy stances, Trump captured nearly two-thirds of the Christian vote. Trump and his ilk will accelerate the nation’s lurch toward authoritarianism, Christian nationalism, and fewer rights for already marginalized communities. The campaign promises of then-candidate Trump — many of them already being enacted — will devastate millions.

Perhaps most jarring among these plans is Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to execute a mass deportation of the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants. It would be the first mass deportation carried out in the United States since President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1954 operation that deported one million Mexican Americans nationwide and displaced hundreds of thousands more.

While the Republicans’ approach to immigration is especially regressive, the Democratic position is not much better. As immigration reporter Tina Vásquez noted last October, the Democrats’ current stance is to the right of its historically cruel but predictably incrementalist approach to immigration: Previously, Democrats were willing to make concessions to longtime immigrants in exchange for increased militarization at the border and the criminalization of recent arrivals. During the campaign, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris demonstrated a willingness to go even further toward the right on immigration when she attempted a Democratic rebrand of Trump’s earlier immigration priorities such as increased security at the border.

Democrats’ ongoing willingness to sacrifice immigrants for short-term political gain leads me to doubt that this country’s opposition party could resist the rise of fascism in the United States. For as much as Democrats decry violence and how it has entered our national politics, they seem to be willing to deploy it on millions of immigrants: flouting international asylum law, increasing militarization, abandoning due process, separating families, and sending people to concentration camps. A generous interpretation is that this reveals a naive optimism that allows us to think that we can beat back fascism while wielding its tactics on vulnerable populations.

Think back to the Sept. 10, 2024, ABC News debate between Harris and Trump, when the latter falsely claimed that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating local pets. Lost in the subsequent fervor over this deliberate lie was that Trump was responding to a question about why he worked behind the scenes to kill a draconian anti-asylum seeker bill that Harris vocally supported and Biden was prepared to sign. The bill would have added 1,500 more border personnel, increased border technology, and funded construction of the border wall in exchange for increased funding for legal representation for minors aged 13 and under. Indeed, this was an important talking point from both Biden and Harris as they each jockeyed to show the public that while Trump talked tough on immigration, the Democrats would be even tougher.

Things haven’t improved with the commencement of the 119th U.S. Congress. On Jan. 7, 46 Democrats joined Republicans in making the Laken Riley Act the first bill voted out of the House in 2025. The bill is named after a Georgia woman who was murdered by a Venezuelan immigrant. If signed into law, it would mandate that immigrants charged with even petty crimes be detained. Two days later, Axios reported that Trump plans to use an executive order to reinstate Title 42, the pandemic-era health policy that used the fear of disease spreading to expel migrants at the border without the possibility of an asylum hearing. States often use claims of deviance and disease to justify inhumane treatment.

The Christian response to these anti-immigrant sentiments and laws has been mixed. In a post-election gathering last November, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops signaled that they would speak out against any mass deportation plan if enacted. The rhetoric from Trump and JD Vance — the latter who was poised to be the nation’s second Catholic vice president — did little to dampen support for the Trump-Vance ticket among the conferences’ members. This ambivalence from religious leaders and the bipartisan race to the Right are shaping the public.

Data suggests that there is increased public support for mass deportations. In 2024, polls from Axios, Ipsos, and the Pew Research Center all show a slight majority of U.S. citizens are in favor of visiting this catastrophe on millions of our undocumented neighbors. U.S. citizens’ incremental acceptance of something like mass deportation is not a contradiction of Enlightenment values such as individual autonomy, the primacy of reason, and social contract theories emphasizing a peaceful collective life. Instead, the growing support for such an endeavor is a direct result of holding these modern values while maintaining that there is a subhuman other — immigrants — who threatens them.

Writing after the Holocaust — a modern genocide that was perpetrated by a nation state that similarly embraced Enlightenment values — the Caribbean poet, politician, and critic, Aimé Césaire asked a prescient question in his Discourse on Colonialism, published in 1950: How could the projects of modernity — the nation state, colonization, and capitalism — ever lead to any outcome except genocide? What Western powers hadn’t accounted for in the centuries prior, he tells us, was that their colonial domination abroad had decivilized them, brutalizing their internal lives to such a degree that an eruption of violence at home was inevitable.

Speaking of Europe’s ruling class Christians, he noted that Nazism was the supreme form of barbarism but Christians had embraced it anyway: “[B]efore they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated the Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.” The dehumanizing, bureaucratic operations of government and non-state actors, the very technologies that ravaged mid-century Europe, were first developed and used to exploit the peoples and lands of the so-called new world.

In our time, Democrats in the U.S. want to believe that it’s possible to selectively wield eliminationist policies against immigrants without endangering the republic at large.

But it’s not so simple: You don’t get to whet the public appetite for destruction and think they’ll reliably stop just short of embracing self-destructive policies. Violence is, as Césaire reminds us, a “terrific boomerang.”

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Attitudes about deportation are much more complex than earlier polls suggest. Outlets such as Vox and Data for Progress, a progressive think tank and polling firm, have shown that, depending on the framing of the question, mass deportation is still a small minority opinion. When Data for Progress pollsters focused their questions on the common situations immigrant families found themselves in — such as “a person brought to the U.S. as a child without legal status who has lived here for 20 years” — support for deportation plummeted. That tension shows that there is room for effective political education on the matter.

Christians who hope to save the nation’s democracy must pull the Democratic Party back to a more just, humane stance on immigration. Thankfully, there is already an infrastructure to build on. Faith-based organizations such as the Hope Border Institute and the New Sanctuary Movement have long worked to build solidarity on both sides of the border by defending families facing deportation proceedings and fighting for just legislation. To save the people and principles we love, we will need to employ every tactic: political and theological education, community organizing, and policy advocacy.

The body politic, along with the political will and any virtues that inhabit it, are not constituted once and for all. Rather, they are endlessly cultivated — or neglected — for as long as political union persists. They must be nurtured. Individual and group desires and tastes are not static things to which politicians pander. We must offer an alternative vision of political freedom that doesn’t hinge on alienating immigrant communities, and communities of color more broadly. If we don’t then there won’t be a democracy to save.