A moderate Democratic think tank on Thursday unveiled a new road map for how its party should handle immigration enforcement policy, including calls for a new review board to investigate potential wrongdoing under the Trump administration and a deportation policy that focuses on criminals and recent arrivals to the country.

Third Way officials say the group’s multipronged proposal is an attempt to find a politically durable approach to immigration enforcement that eschews both the hard-line efforts of Donald Trump’s administration and the more lax agenda of Joe Biden’s presidency, both of which they say were deeply unpopular with voters.

“Democrats need more than criticism of Trump’s excesses — they need a governing plan that shows they can make immigration enforcement work for the country,” according to the group’s memo, shared first with NOTUS. “The failing credibility of the federal immigration enforcement apparatus will eventually become a Democratic problem — whether the next time a Democrat takes the White House, the next time Democrats govern Congress, or both.”

The road map from the center-left Third Way — founded in the 2000s to urge Democrats to adopt a more moderate and politically popular agenda — is another attempt from a leading Democratic group to shape the party’s future after its second defeat to Trump in 2024, as Democrats try to find a way to both return to power in Washington and satisfy its restless liberal base.

The group calls for an “overhaul” of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — not “abolishing” the government entity as some Democrats have demanded. It says that enforcement agents need training on how to treat the public with dignity and avoid bias.

And it urges the party to continue deporting some immigrants, including those who “pose genuine public safety risks, individuals who have recently entered unlawfully, and other categories tied to clear national interests,” according to the memo. That’s similar to the approach used in the last years of former President Barack Obama’s presidency, which Third Way considers a model for Democrats.

But the group’s most notable recommendation might be the establishment of an independent review board to investigate the actions of ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents under the Trump administration, a step Third Way officials say is necessary to restore public trust in the two government entities. Approval ratings for both agencies have dropped after a series of aggressive enforcement actions in cities like Chicago and Minneapolis, where two American citizens were killed earlier this year.

“Democrats, moving forward, are going to have a real answer for how to address those abuses,” Sarah Pierce, Third Way’s director of social policy and the memo’s author, told NOTUS in an interview. “And having a more independent body seems like the smartest and easiest way to go and do that.”

Third Way’s memo says the review board would not have to be permanent and that the agencies’ own internal disciplinary processes could eventually regain authority. It also says the process needs to be transparent to help ensure the agents at ICE and CBP buy into the process.

But trust in the entities has collapsed to such a degree that an independent investigatory board would be necessary to convince the public of a fair process, Third Way says.

The group’s plan comes amid Trump’s own falling approval ratings on the immigration issue, which once was seen as a political strength for the president and one of the reasons voters sent him back to the White House.

“We’re trying to get ahead of that here and encourage Democrats to keep pushing on immigration, keep being confident on immigration, and lay out a vision for what smart immigration enforcement should look like,” Pierce said.

But she added that even as Trump’s immigration agenda becomes less popular, Democrats have not seen a corresponding rise in support because “there’s this lingering hangover from everything that happened in the Biden administration.”