Democrats have been working from a broken playbook: they treat border security and legalization as competing political choices. Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former assistant director of the Office of Immigration Program Evaluation at ICE, told me, “Enforcement and legalization are not opposites; they are prerequisites for each other.” Now, they have a chance to take the opening that Mr. Trump’s enforcement overreach has created and offer a new vision of the immigration system.
There are glimmers of hope that Democrats can get it right. In Texas, where the Democrat James Talarico is running for Senate, he appears to be making gains within the Latino community on the issue of immigration. He is advocating both a secure border and more pathways to legalization for undocumented immigrants who are longtime residents to earn residency and citizenship. “Our border should be like a front porch — it should have a welcome mat out front and a lock on the door,” reads one of his campaign slogans.
That message seems to be resonating. In a survey of Hispanic business owners in Texas, 20 percent reported losing an employee to deportation this year; according to the same survey, Mr. Talarico leads among these business owners by 7 percent. One day after he condemned the death of Mr. Araujo in Houston, he launched his plan to secure the border. It’s clear he is listening to Latinos who don’t see the two policies as contradictory.
Mr. Araujo was a man with only a civil immigration violation, who worked for over three decades, paid taxes and raised three U.S. citizen children, and was killed by federal agents seeking to meet arbitrary arrest targets. He had been undocumented for 35 years, with no clear path to legal status, just like millions of others who are still waiting. After this summer’s Supreme Court decisions, another 1.3 million immigrants with temporary status could join their ranks. Every undocumented Latino left to languish in legal uncertainty puts a target on our entire community. As long as the promise of legalization remains unfulfilled, all Latinos are at risk of what happened to Mr. Araujo.
If Democrats want to offer a real alternative to mass deportation, and win back voters who don’t believe the party will fight for them, they should start by making sure no one spends another thirty years waiting for the opportunity Lorenzo Salgado Araujo never had.
Andrea Flores, a lawyer, has advised on immigration policy in Congress, the Department of Homeland Security, and for both the Obama and Biden administrations.
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