President Donald Trump has a simple message on immigration: His administration is deporting criminals. As immigrant rights advocates sound the alarm about civil rights and due process violations, they’re finding that message difficult to counter.
The White House’s “back pocket strategy is, ‘Yeah, we dare you to get into a fight about supporting criminals,’” said Beatriz Lopez, co-executive director of Immigration Hub. “It deploys a distraction when really they’re using the issue of immigration as a vehicle to undermine our democracy.”
This week’s messaging was a prime example. Trump invoked a wartime power to deport Venezuelan migrants to an El Salvador prison without deportation orders or, in most cases, criminal charges. He and his allies repeatedly said they were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, without providing evidence publicly.
Lawyers and family members have said some of the deported Venezuelans were wrongly accused of being gang members. Legal experts have warned that the White House’s use of wartime authority could lead to further abuses. Meanwhile, high-profile arrests of legal immigrants have raised alarm within parts of the public.
Advocates are desperately hoping that broader outrage is coming.
“When we went through the first Trump administration, when family separations were happening, when people were aware that actual children were victims of this cruelty changed the whole game,” Lopez said. “It’s only the beginning. I’m hoping that we can really create a narrative intervention that makes a lasting impact on this issue.”
Polling suggests that Americans have become more open to ideas around mass deportation, though the public still seems to support paths to citizenship for groups that haven’t committed violent crimes and who have been in the country for years. The country is split about half-and-half on whether Trump’s policies so far have been just right or too much, according to Pew Research, though most still support some form of deportations.
Immigration activists “were fully expecting, as I have been, that Trump would have overplayed his hand by now. He hasn’t,” said Mike Madrid, a GOP consultant who has worked with advocacy groups. “When the Trump administration releases a video of these guys being carted off of a plane saying they’re gang members from Venezuela going to El Salvador, that’s popular. People are going to like that, even without due process, unfortunately.”
Trump isn’t the first president to frame his deportation efforts around issues of crime; he’s just doing it more successfully, said Oscar Chacón, co-founder of the group Alianza Americas.
That means advocates must find ways to improve their message.
“It is leading a lot of groups to rethink the way we have been doing, for example, public education,” Chacón said. “We are realizing that what we have done up until recently clearly has not allowed us to really change the way people are experiencing life in the U.S.”
Advocates acknowledged that so far, Trump’s messaging about the deported Venezuelans was overpowering the counternarratives.
“Unfortunately, the general public probably still hasn’t caught up with some of the reporting now that is revealing who these people actually are,” said Robyn Barnard, senior director of refugee advocacy at Human Rights First.
But other immigration stories have drawn more outrage against the president, including the detention of activist Mahmoud Khalil, the deportation of a Rhode Island doctor and the arrest of a Georgetown University researcher.
“I do think it’s an inflection point. I think again, we are all waiting to see what happens next,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice. “This would confirm what we have been saying all along, that Trump is using immigration as the tip of the spear in broader attacks to our civil liberties, and that this is a test case of how far they’re willing to go, and I think more people are paying attention.”
The volume of Trump’s messaging has been a challenge.
“Trump is banking on their incessant affirmation that immigrants in the U.S. are criminals,” Chacón said. “When you condition people that way so relentlessly, of course, people will likely react without any opposition to actions undertaken that supposedly are helping us neutralize that form of threat.”
While advocates said they’re working to update their message and try new things, Madrid said far more needs to be done if activists want to counter Trump.
“There’s gonna have to be a real sobering moment about what their core mission and identity is in the midst of this crazy deportation maelstrom. That’s hard to do,” he said. “The sad reality is a lot of people are being hurt by their inability to meet the moment.”
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Casey Murray is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.