Two Good Reasons Democrats Should Fight for Kilmar Abrego Garcia
This is cowardly and amoral. It’s also politically birdbrained. Trump’s refusal to follow a ruling from the Supreme Court isn’t just flagrantly unconstitutional: It’s a gift to a Democratic Party struggling to articulate its own immigration policy. In the case of Garcia and others who have been wrongly sent to a notoriously violent Central American prison, Democrats can channel righteous outrage that people are feeling everywhere—even in deep red places like Fort Madison, Iowa.
The lily-livered Democratic case for backing down on Garcia is relatively straightforward: Speaking anonymously to Axios, one Democratic member of Congress dismissed the issue as a “soup du jour”—a flashpoint that the public and the media will quickly move on from. Trump is “setting a trap for the Democrats, and like usual we’re falling for it,” the member of Congress said. “Rather than talking about the tariff policy and the economy … the thing where his numbers are tanking, we’re going to go take the bait for one hairdresser,” they said—referring, incredibly, to a different outrageous deportation of an innocent person. This lawmaker is essentially arguing that Democrats should hold their fire for now and only spring into action when Trump deports an American citizen to El Salvador.
Chris Cillizza, who recently went from being the wrongest man on cable news to the wrongest man on Substack, made the same case at greater length, arguing that people really only focus on one story at a time, so any distraction from Trump’s tariffs is bad for Democrats. The Dow Jones, Cillizza noted, had dropped nearly two points on Wednesday—but “you probably didn’t hear much about” it because Democrats and the media were talking about Garcia instead.