“If Trump goes way too aggressively, way too fast, and you start seeing families separate, and kids torn from their mother’s arms, I think he runs the risk of losing in the court of public opinion,” said GOP consultant Mike Madrid, an expert on immigration issues. “It’s really hard to know who the winner is going to be because we don’t know what the policy is going to be, but I can tell you that the loser will be the one that overreaches first.”
Republicans acknowledge that photos and video of sobbing children in makeshift cells turned the public against Trump's hardline policies in his first presidency and would likely prove just as powerful again, but his base voters could turn against the GOP if those promises aren't carried out.
Also read: 'Bring it on': Defiant Raskin responds to GOP threats of retaliation for J6 investigation
“It’s a very risky issue to separate yourself from Trump on, if you’re a Republican up on Capitol Hill. It’s probably his strongest issue, and the public really wants to see him deliver on it,” said political consultant Matt Mackowiak. “We’ll have to see what the public response is to the policy as it gets announced and as it starts getting carried out. What do the pictures look like? What are the consequences?”
Texas Republicans are in an especially tight bind on the issue, especially those whose districts are along the border, like Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX), who has said deportations should focus on more serious criminals instead of undocumented workers.
“I do think that the Tony Gonzaleses of the world, in Congress, are going to find themselves in a peculiar situation,” Victor Avila, a former ICE special agent who ran against Gonzales in the primary but didn’t qualify for the runoff, said. “They will be singled out. There will be a spotlight on them if they don’t quote, unquote, vote in the way that people want them to vote.”
Gonzales' district, which stretches from San Antonio to El Paso, could prove to be a leading indicator for the political reaction to Trump's immigration policies.
“That district really represents sort of the emergent Republican base in that it has a mix of people who are border security hawks because of where it’s geographically located, but the shift that’s happening is largely economic,” Madrid said. “He’s a bellwether beyond himself. That district really is going to be a good gauge of what’s going to work and what doesn’t.”
But some conservatives say the recent flap over H-1B visas shows that Trump's base isn't willing to compromise on immigration.
“Even Trump is no longer in control of what the base wants,” said Rick Wilson, a Florida-based consultant and Lincoln Project co-founder. “Trump is siding with Elon Musk on the H-1B visa issue, and the base hates that. You end up with a scenario where … the Republican base gets angry because you’re not sufficiently aggressive enough on immigration.”
