Politico
By CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO
June 28, 2018
Last week immigration was emerging as Donald Trump’s Hurricane Katrina.
But just seven days after the president backtracked over his administration’s divisive family separation policy — as images of children caged in warehouses by immigration officials played over a cable news loop — he’s back to bludgeoning Democrats over the left’s calls to welcome undocumented immigrants.
Trump told reporters at the White House on Wednesday that immigration would be “a great election point” for Republicans. “I think ‘strong borders and no crime’ that’s us,” he said. “I think that’s going to be a great election point for us.”
Democrats were stunned by the shocking primary upset in New York of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old former Bernie Sanders organizer who vanquished Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley on a platform of abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, pushing Medicare for all and unseating a party hierarchy she views as out of touch with constituents.
Ocasio-Cortez said Wednesday that she also would support the impeachment of Trump if she is elected in November — another issue House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi and leaders are downplaying out of fear that it will only drive turnout among Republicans who view the president as under siege.
Trump’s political advisers inside and outside the White House said they viewed Tuesday’s primary as a turning point, arming them with fresh examples to fill out their sketch of a Democratic Party that has “lurched too far left,” as one put it.
Democrats have for years made Republicans answer for the far right of the party as their ranks in Congress swelled with anti-tax, debt-weary conservatives who repeatedly pushed their leaders toward government shutdowns. Outside Washington, GOP activists and cable news pundits cut down immigration reform efforts, for example — from George W. Bush’s ill-fated push in 2007 to more recent attempts by moderate Republicans — with a single word: amnesty.
Now, Trump and his allies are using unbridled enthusiasm and divisions in the Democratic Party to hold its leaders and emerging candidates hostage to their progressive base. Ocasio-Cortez’s win came a day after Pelosi, who considered Crowley a possible successor to her in the House, admonished fellow California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters for urging Trump critics to confront members of his Cabinet in public places like malls or restaurants.
As Democrats rushed to the border border with Mexico for photo-ops at immigrant detention facilities, seeing the family separation issue as a righteous policy imperative as well as a political opportunity, Trump and Republicans were already framing them as too extreme.
Conservatives on social media have seized on images of Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), marching at a May rally wearing a shirt that read “yo no creo en fronteras,” which translates to “I don’t believe in borders.”
Trump has fixated in recent days on Waters and Pelosi, presenting them as the face of a Democratic Party that’s more accommodating to criminal immigrant gang members than American crime victims.
But Ocasio-Cortez’s primary victory in a district that spans the Bronx and Queens breathed energy into the burgeoning “abolish ICE” motif being taken up by the likes of former actress Cynthia Nixon, an insurgent progressive challenging New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, appearing Wednesday on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends,” jabbed at adversaries by noting Ocasio-Cortez is a “proud Socialist.”
“Every Democratic candidate could be asked now, maybe, ‘Do you agree or disagree with the new face of the Democratic Party that we should abolish Immigration and Customs and Enforcement?’” Conway said, pushing a new litmus test to filet opponents. “The brave men and women who are trying to process the claims and in many ways protect children who may be smuggled by people who are not related to them, may be in danger when they try to come here.”
Ocasio-Cortez said in a May interview with The Intercept that she views ICE as a product of the post-Sept. 11 crackdown on terrorism. “Abolishing ICE doesn’t mean get rid of our immigration policy, but what it does mean is to get rid of the draconian enforcement that has happened since 2003 that routinely violates our civil rights, because, frankly, it was designed with that structure in mind,” she said.
While Trump’s gambit could backfire on Republicans, particularly if Democrats can impel young people and people of color to turn out in November, his team is betting it will help gin up the GOP base while forcing the Democratic field of 2020 presidential challengers too far left of mainstream America.
On Wednesday, Donald Trump Jr. issued a tongue-in-cheek congratulatory note to Democrats, who he said after the New York primary “are now officially the party of impeachment, open borders, abolishing ICE, banning the 2nd Amendment and unbridled socialism.”
“The Democrat Party of John F. Kennedy is dead,” Trump Jr. wrote on Twitter. “RIP.”
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