Democrats can run, but they can't hide: An immigration reckoning is next in 2028

The Reckoning That Awaits Democrats in 2028

How Democrats’ fear of enforcing the law led us to this point.

At 5:00 a.m. on a cold January morning, pounding on the front door jolted Johana Gutierrez and Salvador Alfaro awake as flashlights cut through their windows and voices shouted from outside. Inside, their children and relatives were asleep. Minutes later, armed men were standing in their living room.

The children, still in their pajamas, were crying and shaking as agents searched the home room by room — the bedrooms, the kitchen, the laundry room, even the garage. When Gutierrez reached for her phone, she was told not to move. When she offered to get identification, an agent rested his hand on his gun. She was threatened with arrest.

There was no judicial warrant. No emergency. The agents had entered by deception.

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By the time they left, a mother and her 10-year-old son were gone — taken away in unmarked cars to a detention center.

This was not Donald Trump’s America. It was Barack Obama’s.

The raid was part of a 2016 ICE operation that apprehended 121 people — mostly mothers and children — with final deportation orders. The ACLU called it "a mockery of due process." Inside the Democratic Party, scenes like this left a lasting scar.

They also left behind a political myth: that Obama-era immigration enforcement was gentle, restrained, or fundamentally different from what came before or after.

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It wasn’t.

Obama never pretended enforcement was painless. "As long as the current laws are on the books," he said in a 2011 speech in El Paso, "it’s not just hardened felons who are subject to removal, but sometimes families… or decent people with the best of intentions. We don’t relish the pain that it causes."

He didn’t capitulate to interest groups or activists in the face of their criticism. He doubled down and enforced the law anyway.

Tom Homan — now Trump’s border czar — ran deportation operations under Obama. He was awarded one of the highest civil service honors by Obama’s DHS for removals that were described as "impressive and wide-reaching in scope." Obama didn’t just inherit ICE’s machinery. He modernized it, expanded it and made it more effective.

Trump didn’t invent aggressive interior enforcement. Trump 1.0 exploited it — and weaponized it — adding cruelty, chaos and family separation to a system that already existed.

Inside the Democratic Party, however, Obama’s record became radioactive. "Deporter-in-Chief" wasn’t just a nickname. It was a warning label for anyone running for president in 2020.

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And Joe Biden paid the price for it.

I saw it up close. Our campaign was hyper-sensitive — sometimes paralyzed — around immigration. Whenever the issue came up, Biden and Dr. Jill Biden emphasized humanity, restraint and decency. The message was clear: Biden would not be Trump. And he would not be Obama either.

In 1988, when George H.W. Bush promised a "kinder and gentler America," Nancy Reagan famously turned to the person next to her and asked, "Kinder than who?" In 2020, our campaign answered that question preemptively.

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But in the White House, the rhetoric became policy. And policy became a catastrophe.

Biden’s hyper-correction away from both Trump’s and Obama’s enforcement models produced one of the gravest political and governing failures of his presidency. By dismantling deterrence, narrowing enforcement, and signaling retreat, our administration helped create the conditions for system-wide collapse, and ultimately, Trump’s return to power.

Biden didn’t cause global instability, regional violence, or economic desperation. But he did choose to govern in a way that prioritized intraparty accommodation and reassurance over systemic credibility. And once credibility is gone, it is brutally hard to recover.

For nearly two decades now, Democrats have been stuck in a civil war over enforcement. We pretend the argument is about compassion versus cruelty. It isn’t. It’s about whether a governing party can say, out loud, that enforcement is not a moral failure — it is a prerequisite for a functioning system.

Both Obama and Biden knew the truth: there is no executive solution to America’s immigration challenge. We are still operating under a 1986 law for a reason. Fixing it requires legislation. Legislation requires cooperation and compromise. And compromise is hard.

Instead, Democrats have turned ICE into a moral proxy war.

Not "How should it be reformed?" Not "What should its mission be?" But a loyalty test: Are you for abolishing it? Or are you willing to fund it?

Every appropriations cycle now becomes a ritual of self-flagellation. Funding ICE is treated as moral surrender. Defunding it is treated as virtue. The result is a party that often cannot say, clearly and honestly, whether it believes its own laws should be enforced at all.

So every Democratic president ends up trapped in the same vise.

Enforce the law, and you risk revolt inside your own coalition. Fail to enforce it, and the system collapses — and voters punish you.

Obama chose enforcement and paid a reputational price inside the party.

Biden chose accommodation and paid a governing and political price.

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Bad policy is bad politics.

The truth — uncomfortable but unavoidable — is that a country cannot function without credible enforcement. Not theatrical enforcement. Not indiscriminate enforcement. But visible, consistent, legitimate enforcement.

Borders without it are not compassionate. They are fictitious.

"Abolish ICE," like "Defund the Police," was never a serious governing proposal. It was a signal — a marker of moral identity. And like "Defund the Police," it produced exactly what moral posturing so often does: confusion, backlash, and political self-harm.

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Obama understood something our party still struggles to say plainly: America is a nation of immigrants, and it is also a nation of laws. Those two ideas are not in tension. They depend on each other.

Until Democrats stop treating enforcement as a moral sin and start treating it as a governing responsibility, we will keep oscillating between virtue signaling and damage control. And future candidates — the 2028 Democrats — will keep paying the price for a debate the party is still too afraid to finish.

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