Ronald Brownstein: This ICE crackdown is making the case for real immigration reform

One unintended consequence of President Donald Trump’s militarized mass deportation campaign may be to demonstrate that the iron fist alone can never resolve America’s immigration challenges. And that, ironically, may open the door to a more balanced alternative. One proposal is already quietly attracting bipartisan support in Congress.

Trump’s hardline approach to undocumented immigrants suffers from a fundamental mismatch between costs and benefits. The surge of masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents into cities nationwide has already generated enormous economic, political and social disruption.

Businesses are complaining about a shortage of workers — or, in heavily Hispanic areas, customers, as families curtail their time in public. Polls show that although most Americans still support Trump’s moves to regain control of the border, majorities now consistently disapprove of his handling of immigration overall and believe he is going too far in removing undocumented immigrants.

Last week’s killing by an ICE officer of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three in Minneapolis, underscored how frequently the agency’s operations are now escalating into violence — not only against undocumented immigrants, but against U.S. citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. Mayors and local law enforcement have decried the lack of coordination and cooperation from federal immigration agents.

Despite the crackdown, Trump’s efforts have produced surprisingly modest results. Using ICE figures, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, calculates that the agency so far has arrested about 360,000–370,000 people (very few of whom have been convicted or arrested for violent crimes). The best estimate, from the non-partisan Pew Research Center, is that by the end of President Joe Biden’s administration about 14 million undocumented immigrants lived in the U.S. As ICE accelerates its efforts to reduce that population — aided by an extra 10,000 agents and $75 billion in funding provided by Republicans in Congress — how much more tension and violence loom ahead?

“Every American needs to be asking themselves: Can we tolerate, can communities withstand, three more years of what we have been seeing under the Donald Trump/Stephen Miller approach to immigration?” Democratic Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas, told me, referring to the president’s unusually powerful deputy chief of staff.

Escobar is the lead Democratic co-sponsor, with Florida Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, a Republican, of legislation that offers an off-ramp from Trump’s inflammatory course. The bill, known as the Dignity Act, has attracted about a dozen co-sponsors in each party, the most bipartisan support for a comprehensive immigration plan in years.

The bill would strengthen immigration enforcement in multiple ways. It would mandate that employers nationwide verify the immigration status of employees. And it would significantly restrict the process of applying for asylum. But it would also create a long-term legal status that would allow most undocumented immigrants without a criminal record to remain in the U.S. (a position that a preponderance of Americans consistently support in polls).

By coupling tougher enforcement to deter future illegal immigration with legal status for much of the existing undocumented population, the Dignity Act recreates the basic tradeoff in the bipartisan immigration reform bills that passed the Senate with substantial GOP support in 2006 and 2013. (Each of those bills died in the Republican-controlled House.) But in two important ways, the new legislation bends further toward conservative concerns.

First, it excludes from eligibility all the undocumented immigrants who entered the country under Biden (about 3.5 million people, Pew estimates). Even more important, the bill only provides undocumented immigrants with a legal status that would allow them to work, study and travel — and not a pathway to citizenship. That’s a big change from previous bills. (Only the so-called Dreamers brought to the U.S. illegally as children by their parents would be eligible for eventual citizenship under the new bill.)

Escobar told me “I had to do a lot of soul searching” before agreeing to drop a pathway to citizenship from the legislation. But she said she concluded both that it was necessary to secure meaningful Republican support and that citizenship mattered less to the undocumented than security and predictability — especially amid Trump’s enforcement offensive. “I would much rather move forward in a positive direction than wait for someday … when we might be able to get everything we want,” Escobar said.

Despite abandoning the pathway to citizenship, the bill has received a respectful response from immigrant advocacy groups. Vanessa Cardenas, executive director of America’s Voice, a leading immigrant rights group, told me that while she believes Democrats should still pursue eventual citizenship, she detects “more willingness to talk about” legal status short of that among advocates and the undocumented themselves.

There’s virtually no chance Congress will advance serious immigration reform while Trump (and even more so, Miller) is in the White House. But, just as Biden’s failures at the border increased public support for tougher enforcement, Trump and Miller may inadvertently prove that it is implausible to address the problem of undocumented immigration through enforcement alone.

The tolerance among the public and even among Republican members of Congress for ICE agents killing middle-class, middle-aged White people on the streets of American cities is probably much lower than Miller would predict or prefer. “This is an eye-opening moment for the people who maybe [thought] mass deportation was a good slogan, but now they are seeing in real life what it looks like,” Cardenas says.

After Good’s death, the immediate priority for Congress, the media and the public should be closer scrutiny of ICE’s tactics and culture. But demonstrating the political viability of an alternative strategy is an important way to expand the audience for reconsidering the current one. The Dignity Act may provide the foundation for a more durable approach to the undocumented population once Trump’s ICE storm blows past.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Ronald Brownstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He is a CNN analyst and the author or editor of seven books.