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u.s. immigration and customs enforcement
How the Left Can Flip Crime From a Political Liability to a Political Advantage
Democrats can go on offense by defining what it actually means to be serious about safety: not by stoking fear, but by advancing a clear, consistent, solutions-driven agenda that both prevents crime and breaks its cycle.
May 17, 2026
As the economy falters, prices surge, and yet another Middle East conflict grinds on with no clear endgame, Donald Trump’s presidency appears to be slipping into free fall. His support has eroded among the very voters who once powered his return to office, and Americans are losing confidence in the issues that once defined his appeal—especially the economy and immigration. With the midterms looming, Republicans are flailing.
But Trump and the Republicans always have a tried-and-true political playbook: fearmongering about crime. And unless Democrats go on the offensive, it just may work.
Trump has already signaled that crime will once again be a centerpiece of the midterms. In support of that aim, he has repeatedly urged Congress to pass “a tough new crime bill,” falsely taken credit for bringing down crime rates, and exploited crime victims to cast Democrats as cold and uncaring in the face of tragedy. But crime is not the strength it once was for Trump.
Thanks to his unpopular federal troop deployments and violent mass deportation tactics, voters are losing confidence in his approach to public safety.
As ICE, the National Guard, and other federal forces expand their footprint in communities across the country, voters are getting a clearer picture of what “tough-on-crime” governance looks like in practice—and most don’t like what they see.
To be clear, Republicans still hold an overwhelming advantage on crime in public opinion. But that edge is driven less by outcomes than by emphasis: They talk about crime relentlessly—even when rates are near historic lows—amplifying and exploiting understandable fears. Democrats, by contrast, too often cede the narrative—either by pivoting to safer ground or by trying to one-up Republicans with “tough-on-crime” rhetoric that voters don’t find convincing.
Today, Democrats of all stripes are talking loudly and often about affordability—the right tactic after being perceived as out of touch in the wake of the 2024 election. But they have yet to find a unified message around public safety, leaving them vulnerable to the inevitable barrage of GOP attack ads stoking fears of crime and immigration.
My team and I have briefed dozens of candidates and elected leaders over the past several months, and the message we are so often left with is one of hesitation and uncertainty around public safety. From our work with Hill offices to mayoral candidates, the reality is that the party is not prepared to truly address crime. Unless Democrats define the issue on their own terms, they’ll once again be forced to play defense on one of the most politically potent issues in American life.
Democrats cannot afford to go silent on crime, nor can they afford the “tough-on-crime” approach that some in the party are advocating—a familiar playbook that echoes the advice many received last year on immigration enforcement. But those who followed that guidance are now finding themselves under attack for it. Votes once seen as smart politics—backing measures like the Trump-backed Laken Riley Act, resolutions praising US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, or increased funding for the Department of Homeland Security—are quickly becoming political liabilities. As ICE, the National Guard, and other federal forces expand their footprint in communities across the country, voters are getting a clearer picture of what “tough-on-crime” governance looks like in practice—and most don’t like what they see.
This moment presents an opportunity. Democrats can go on offense by defining what it actually means to be serious about safety: not by stoking fear, but by advancing a clear, consistent, solutions-driven agenda that both prevents crime and breaks its cycle. In a country where nearly half of all people have had a family member incarcerated and about 3 in 10 people say they or a member of their household have been a victim of a crime, we must chart a new path forward. Democrats don’t have to look far to see which solutions truly deliver on safety.
Democratic mayors are working to drive historic declines in crime—through sustained investments in youth programs, community violence intervention, crisis response, targeted gun enforcement, and rebuilding trust between police and the communities they serve. Leading cities of all sizes, they’ve seen firsthand how violence shatters families and makes everyday life feel unsafe. They’ve also seen the damage of blunt “law and order” approaches that destabilize neighborhoods, limit opportunity, and erode cooperation with law enforcement.
These leaders are channeling a broader political reality: Most Democratic and independent voters want leaders who are serious about safety, not a return to reflexive “tough-on-crime” politics. That means a comprehensive approach that responds swiftly to stop violence, solve crime, and prevent it in the first place. It pairs accountability with fairness—holding everyone to the same standard, including police and elected officials. And it reflects a continued belief that public safety is strengthened not just through enforcement, but by giving people a real chance to break cycles of incarceration and build stable lives. Importantly, as we head toward the midterms, polling shows that when Democrats demonstrate to voters that they are truly serious about safety, this approach consistently outperforms “tough-on-crime” rhetoric.
Notably, these local leaders come from across the Democratic spectrum. Regardless of whether they consider themselves progressives, moderates, or something in between, they share an approach that works to deliver safety and win elections. They know that safety isn’t about scoring political points; it’s about building credibility and delivering what works. It’s time Democrats learned that lesson as well.
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Americans Are Fed Up With Reckless Federal Agents; Congress Must Act
A simple law could ensure that no federal agent is above the law.
May 16, 2026
The American public's patience with reckless federal agents has run out—but Congress has yet to act. While members of Congress debate funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, communities across the country remain at risk of further harm from lawless policing.
For months, polling has shown cratering support for ICE and the agency’s aggressive tactics, including a 30 point collapse in a single year. Recent YouGov and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) polling shows that Americans don’t think federal law enforcement should be above the law: 93% of voters—including 89% of Trump voters—believe that agents who violate people's rights must be held accountable. Former MAGA influencers have criticized ICE and compared the agency’s tactics to the Gestapo. Even current Department of Homeland Security agents have told reporters that they’re troubled by the agency’s tactics. And in cities across the country, the response has been unmistakable: massive demonstrations in response to violent raids and multiple fatal shootings by federal agents.
Americans have been demanding accountability because when agents can violently attack and kill community members without consequence, everyone is less safe.
Consider what happened to one ACLU client in Maine earlier this year.
When federal agents face no consequences, that impunity invites more wrongdoing, turns our freedoms into empty promises, and leaves us all unprotected.
On the morning of January 22, Juan Sebastián Carvajal-Muñoz was abducted in broad daylight by federal agents. A civil engineer, Mr. Carvajal-Muñoz was driving to his job when a dark SUV cut in front of his car, forcing it to stop. Three people approached his window and demanded to see his papers. He showed his driver’s license through the window, and the agents ordered him to get out of his car. When he reached for his phone to call for help and to record the interaction, agents violently smashed his car window, forced his car open, and dragged him out. Mr. Carvajal-Muñoz’s car was left running with the door open, and his phone was left lying on the street.
Mr. Carvajal-Muñoz was racially profiled and targeted as part of an immigration crackdown in Maine callously called “Operation Catch of the Day.” Mr. Carvajal-Munoz was caught, but for what? He was legally working in the United States on an H1-B visa, was not breaking a single law, and was simply driving as a Latino man. Mr. Carvajal-Munoz was able to sue for these constitutional violations under Maine’s Civil Rights Act, but people in most states cannot.
That’s because there’s an alarming accountability gap between federal and state officers. For example, after Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in 2020, Mr. Floyd’s family sued the City of Minneapolis and police officers for violating his constitutional rights, ultimately securing a $27 million settlement. Federal law, however, does not allow the families of Alex Pretti and Renee Good to file that type of lawsuit against the federal agents who shot and killed them just miles from where Mr. Floyd was murdered.
This illogical gap stems from a historical omission. After the Civil War, in response to pro-Confederate state and local officials’ widespread violations of the rights of Black people and Union sympathizers, the Reconstruction Congress passed a law allowing people to sue state and local officers for damages or other relief when their rights were violated. Unfortunately, that law, commonly known as Section 1983, did not cover federal officers.
In 1971, the Supreme Court filled that accountability gap, ruling in Bivens v. Six Unknown Federal Narcotics Agents that the logic of the Constitution demanded that federal officers could be sued for constitutional violations, too. For decades afterward, people sued federal agents over constitutional violations in what were known as Bivens actions. But in 2017, the Supreme Court severely limited when people can bring Bivens actions, and now it’s nearly impossible to sue federal officers for violating people’s rights. For example, in 2021, a federal court rejected Bivens claims against federal officers who were sued for attacking peaceful civil rights demonstrators with tear gas, rubber bullets, and a baton charge at Lafayette Square Park across the street from the White House. At the same time, the same court ruled that local officers could be sued for those same constitutional violations, which the court held “would have been clear to every reasonable officer.”
When federal agents face no consequences, that impunity invites more wrongdoing, turns our freedoms into empty promises, and leaves us all unprotected. US courts have long recognized the fundamental legal principle that where there is a right, there must be a remedy. In other words, a right that you can’t enforce is just a suggestion that government actors can ignore when it suits them. We are now seeing the very real results that follow when a right lacks remedies: Officers can terrorize and abuse people without repercussions.
Congress has the power to close this dangerous accountability gap and restore a basic promise: If a federal officer violates your rights, you can seek justice, just like you can when a state officer crosses the line. All Congress has to do is pass the Bivens Act, which would fix the historical omission by explicitly stating that, like state and local officials, federal officers can be sued when they violate our constitutional rights. As the Supreme Court pointed out in a 1980 case applying Bivens, “The ‘constitutional design’ would be stood on its head if federal officials did not face at least the same liability as state officials guilty of the same constitutional transgression.”
The weight of our constitutional rights is becoming clearer every day: None of us is safe when federal agents can harm people at will. Congress can and must pass the Bivens Act, a simple law that would restore accountability, compensate victims and their families, and deter the unchecked government violence that has become a hallmark of this administration.
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Trump’s New 'Counterterrorism' Strategy Is a Sweeping Attack on Domestic Dissent
The administration is using national security as a pretext to target protesters, civil rights groups, and vulnerable communities. Here is how we fight back.
May 15, 2026
On May 6, 2026, the Trump administration released its latest conspiracy-laden attack on “the left,” this time in the form of a “counterterrorism strategy". While laughably lacking in evidence or regard for laws, the “strategy” will have serious, deadly consequences. It sets our country’s counterterror apparatus and racist, anti-Muslim goals against the Global South, Europe, and all those here at home who have the nerve to demand their rights and oppose full-fledged autocracy.
In this post, I will focus on the domestic implications, although the global impacts are both frightening and impossible to fully separate, as the strategy conflates everything from domestic resistance movements to people with disfavored ideologies to drug trafficking with international terrorism.
The strategy is authored by Sebastian Gorka, a known anti-Muslim bigot whom former counterterrorism officials pan as “ill-informed” and a “huckster.” It should come as no surprise, therefore, that this so-called “strategy” is basically a cocktail of fearmongering and post-9/11 playbook, but on steroids. It incorporates and expands on the president’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, which casts a sweeping set of dissenting views as (domestic) terrorism, plays up fears of a “new alliance” between leftists and “Islamists,” and completely ignores the documented threats of right-wing and white supremacist extremists.
This is all hauntingly familiar. For generations, federal agencies have surveilled, monitored, and targeted Black, immigrant, Muslim, Middle Eastern, Asian, Indigenous, and other people of color, using surveillance as a tool of intimidation and enforcement that deepens racial inequities instead of making people safer.
Communities that have historically borne the brunt of government overreach will once again suffer the greatest harm. But this sweeping attack on dissent affects everyone, threatening the foundations of our free society.
For example, the strategy promises to wield massive law enforcement, surveillance, and other counterterror powers to “map” and "neutralize" groups it describes as "anti‑American, radically pro‑transgender, and anarchist." In the post-9/11 era, the New York Police Department attempted to map all Muslims and their institutions in the Tri-State Area, for which Muslim Advocates, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Gibbons P.C. successfully sued in 2012. We have long seen our community and sacred spaces violated by informants and oppressive surveillance.
The document also states that the US government will "[i]dentify terror actors and plots before they happen,” (emphasis added) which sounds dystopian, but is the same false logic underlying the notorious Countering Violent Extremism program that targeted American Muslims in the post-9/11 era.
In Gorka's reported comments to the press, he doubled down on targeting "ideology” and preventive policing: “We see a threat… we will crush it, whether it is the cartels, the jihadists, or violent left-wing extremists like antifa and like the transgender killers, the non-binary, the left-wing radicals.”
These practices have caused lasting trauma and generational impact for Muslims, stifling our religious and political expression and wrecking intra-community trust. Now the government is wolfishly expanding while few seem to notice. Gorka himself said, “We are moving so fast, they just can’t keep up with us, which is delicious.”
A Sweeping Attack on Dissent
Indeed, the breadth of attacks on protesters, dissenters, and civil rights organizations is overwhelming. A few examples:
- This administration slandered Renee Good and Alex Pretti as domestic terrorists after its own officers shot each of them dead in broad daylight, contravening overwhelming bystander and video evidence.
- Prairieland case: Eight anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) protesters were convicted of material support for terrorism; raided; and had their flyers, zines, and use of encrypted chats cited in the indictment as evidence of their connection to terrorism.
- “Domestic terrorist” database: In January, an ICE officer told a legal observer, “[W]e have a nice little database, and now you're considered a domestic terrorist." When pressed at a congressional hearing, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons denied that a database of American “domestic terrorists” exists, but in a subsequent hearing, former Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to deny it.
- In late April, federal prosecutors indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has documented violent white supremacists for decades.
Communities that have historically borne the brunt of government overreach will once again suffer the greatest harm. But this sweeping attack on dissent affects everyone, threatening the foundations of our free society.
What can we do?
Make noise: Call attention to the harms of this counterterror “strategy.” Its release during congressional recess let it fly under the radar, although Ranking Member of House Homeland Security Committee Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) noted its lack of strategy and called again for a hearing with officials. Other elected officials should likewise take action to condemn this latest attack on dissent, demand transparency about its implementation and adherence to the Constitution, and protect our rights.
Congress also has an immediate opportunity to curb vast surveillance powers enabled by Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702. Congressional leadership has so far blocked bipartisan efforts to pass a warrant requirement for searches of people in the US, and before accessing our intimate details through data-broker purchases. Lawmakers have until June 12 to enact basic protections for people in the US. This counterterror strategy—along with the recent whispers of its potential use against right-wing dissenters from Trumpism—shows exactly why we must urgently rein in the government's massive counterterror arsenal, starting with 702’s warrantless spy power.
Demand that local governments refuse to cooperate with the federal government, divest and remove surveillance technology, and withdraw from Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF’s), which deputize local law enforcement to do the feds’ bidding and share information pursuant to its permissive interpretations of federal law.
Collectively, we must continue to demand our rights: to protest, to speak, to commune, and to live free from Big Brother—especially Big Brother with a gun. Remember: The overwhelm we feel isn’t an accident; it’s tactical. Refuse to allow the administration’s intimidation tactics to succeed. Our mass, unapologetic refusal to comply, is what’s truly “delicious.”
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