Democrats will never defeat authoritarianism by helping it decide which people democracy may abandon.
Donald Trump signed the first law of his second presidency on January 29, 2025, beneath the chandeliers of the East Room, where Senator John Fetterman listened as the president thanked Democrats for helping him expand the deportation state. The law bore the name of Laken Riley, a twenty two year old nursing student whose murder had become politically useful because her killer was Venezuelan and his nationality allowed Republicans to assign responsibility for one man’s crime to millions of immigrants. Her killer had already been sentenced to life, leaving Congress to decide whom else her death should punish. The Laken Riley Act required the detention of undocumented immigrants arrested or charged with certain offenses, including shoplifting, allowing an accusation which leaves a citizen awaiting trial to place a migrant in federal custody and begin their removal. Forty six House Democrats and twelve Democratic senators voted for it. Their votes accepted that immigration status could justify imprisonment before guilt and that noncitizens could receive less due process because voters had been taught to fear them. A right that disappears when its holder becomes unpopular is only a permission, and permissions belong to the government that grants them.
Democrats had just lost an election in which immigration was said to have cost them dearly, and their explanation was that the party needed to prove it could enforce the border before voters would trust it with immigration. Chuck Schumer joined most of his caucus in advancing the bill while Democrats chose which parts of Trump’s program merited resistance, and detention based on accusation was apparently excluded. By the summer of 2026, Third Way had turned the concession into a doctrine called “Order Is the Price of Admission.” Its bargain was straightforward. Democrats would defend legal immigration after demonstrating that the government could detain and remove people quickly enough to satisfy voters, while immigrants already here would supply that demonstration.
The argument treats public opinion as something politicians encounter rather than something they help produce. Immigration becomes salient when campaigns repeatedly connect isolated crimes to a defendant’s nationality, when news coverage identifies immigration status as an explanation for violence, and when elected officials describe the arrival of asylum seekers as evidence that the country has lost control. Democrats reinforce those connections each time they answer Republicans in the same language, promising that they too will be tough, only more orderly and humane. A party cannot spend an election telling voters that the border is a national emergency and then expect those voters to reject the candidates who have spent years promising the harshest response.
This strategy also narrows the disagreement between the parties to the amount of punishment each considers acceptable. When centrist parties repeat the far right’s description of migrants as a threat to national order, they make that description bipartisan and leave the far right as its most credible defender. Poland’s centrist government restricted asylum and echoed the anti migrant nationalists it had defeated, only to watch those forces recover because voters who accept the premise will usually prefer the party willing to carry it furthest. Authoritarianism wins its first concession when the opposition accepts the ruler’s chosen enemies as legitimate targets of state coercion.
The powers Trump is using were accumulated by both parties. Bill Clinton signed the 1996 laws that enlarged mandatory detention, restricted judicial review, and allowed local police to perform immigration enforcement. Barack Obama had deported more than two million people by the end of 2013, when his administration removed a record 438,421 in one year. Joe Biden promised a different approach, then restricted asylum and recorded 271,000 deportations during his final fiscal year. Trump inherited federal detention contracts, immigration databases, agreements with local police, and statutes authorizing expedited removal. His contribution has been to use those powers more openly and against a wider group of people.
In July 2026, ICE arrested 49,571 people, while more than half had no criminal conviction or pending charge. Many arrests occurred during traffic stops or required immigration appointments, which means enforcement no longer depends on encountering someone at the national boundary. Immigration status allows federal agents and deputized police to turn routine contact with the government into detention, so the border now operates wherever an officer can demand identification and search a database.
The demand for control is applied far more aggressively to people than to the forces that shape why they move. Corporations can abandon a town for cheaper labor and return their profits without being accused of disloyalty, while a farmworker may wait years for permission to visit his children. American weapons enter countries whose refugees will later be asked why they did not remain home, and money extracted through privatization or debt returns to American banks without an asylum interview. Governments that treated Iraq, Libya, and parts of Latin America as places available for intervention invoke sovereignty when people displaced by war or economic collapse reach their shores. Empire reserves movement for armies and capital, while border control confines the people forced to live with their consequences.
The rules are different again for the wealthy. Governments that make poor migrants endure years of applications and uncertainty create accelerated residence programs for people able to transfer enough money. While the White House circulated images of migrants in chains, Trump announced a multimillion dollar route to residence for wealthy applicants. The distinction is based less on attachment to the country than on whether the applicant arrives needing legal protection or offering capital.
Restricting migration also gives employers more power over workers. A person whose supervisor can threaten to report them to immigration authorities is less able to challenge stolen wages, leave a dangerous job, or organize with coworkers. That vulnerability lowers the employer’s cost of violating labor law and weakens organizing across the workplace. Citizens encouraged to blame migrants for declining wages are therefore supporting the legal insecurity that makes wage theft and union retaliation easier. When Democrats promise harsher enforcement in the name of domestic workers, they preserve a system that allows employers to use immigration status to divide workers who would otherwise bargain together.
Citizenship determines who can vote against the officials governing them, who can be removed from the country, and who may invoke legal protections without risking detention. Millions of people work under American law, pay taxes, raise children, and remain subject to police power while having no vote over the officials who design the system controlling their lives. Restricting citizenship therefore does more than protect membership. It enlarges the population governed without representation and gives elected officials constituents whose labor they can regulate but whose opposition they never have to face. The border is where liberal democracy learns to govern people it refuses to represent.
Authoritarianism begins when power divides the public into those owed an explanation and those from whom obedience is enough. Immigration enforcement gives the executive powers that can be redirected beyond immigrants because federal agents detain people outside the ordinary criminal process, conceal their identities, collect location data, and operate through agreements that blur the division between local policing and federal authority. Once these practices are accepted because the initial targets lack citizenship, the government possesses personnel and systems that can be deployed around protests and elections. A former presidential adviser has already threatened to surround polling places with ICE. An authoritarian state survives without universal agreement so long as enough people accept that its victims fall outside their concern.
The electoral defense for accommodation has weakened as enforcement has expanded. By February 2026, 65 percent of Americans believed ICE had gone too far, including more than seven in ten independents. That shift disproves the assumption that voters possess a fixed demand for ever harsher enforcement. Democratic leaders continue moving toward the position voters are leaving because their strategy measures opinion after years of right wing persuasion while refusing to engage in persuasion of its own.
Defeating authoritarianism requires withdrawing the permissions on which it depends, beginning with the permission to suspend rights for people rendered politically unwanted. A serious alternative would reduce the executive’s ability to detain people without an individualized hearing, create an accessible path to legal status, and ensure that labor protections apply regardless of immigration status so employers cannot use deportation as a workplace threat. It would also require the United States to account for how its wars and economic policies contribute to displacement rather than treating migration as an event that begins when a person reaches the border. These policies belong together because political rights at home mean little when the government can create insecurity abroad and use the resulting displacement to expand coercive power within the country.
Trump thanked Democrats in the East Room because their votes accomplished two things for him. They expanded his legal authority and confirmed that immigrants were an acceptable population on whom to test it. Democracy cannot be defended by reducing the number of people to whom it applies, because every exception gives the state a method it can later generalize. An opposition that makes due process contingent on citizenship has already accepted that the government may choose who receives the protections democracy is supposed to place beyond its discretion.
