Almost five months into Donald Trump's second presidency, the United States is experiencing what Never Trump conservative David French describes as a period of dangerous instability.
Trump has responded to ongoing protests in Downtown Los Angeles by federalizing California National Guard Troops and sending in U.S. Marines — despite strong objections from Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass — and Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) was physically removed from a June 12 press briefing by Homeland Security Kristi Noem, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed. These events come before Trump's Saturday, June 14 military/birthday parade in Washington, DC and large No Kings protests being held all over the United States in opposition to it.
But The New Republic's Greg Sargent and progressive strategist Tory Gavito see a hopeful sign during all this chaos: an admission by Trump that, Sargent and Gavito argue, Democrats could successfully use against his immigration policies.
During an appearance on The New Republic's podcast posted on June 13, Gavito noted that Trump admitted that his mass deportations are hurting businesses.
On his Truth Social platform, Trump posted, "Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long-time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace. In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs. This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!"
Sargent told Gavito, "Tory, that's really something. It's a straight up admission that his own policy of mass deportations is targeting hardworking people — not criminals, hardworking people — whose jobs cannot be replaced when they are removed."
Gavito responded, "Where to start? Where to start? The immigrant rights community has long made an argument that it is immigrants who are the backbone of the U.S. economy. Whether that argument was salient or not last cycle, I think we learned it wasn't because the people really were telling us.... What voters told us were things are tough, and Trump had a villain for why things were tough."
Gavito continued, "Trump said it's because of immigrants, it's because of crime. There was some bit of acceptance, I think, that U.S. voters had for Trump to take a tougher stand on immigration. But now that it’s being enforced in the way he’s enforcing it and the real-life consequences are hitting American businesses, his regime was not meeting the quotas of finding and rounding up the criminals. So he pushed them to go further and deeper into the beating heartbeat of American communities — churches, schools, workplaces — and this is the consequence. He’s rounding up not just immigrants that may not be here with documents, but he's also rounding up people with mixed status, people who are trying to do their best just to follow a process to get in the right lines and get their papers."
Listen to Greg Sargent's interview with Tory Gavito for The New Republic's podcast at this link or read the transcript here.
