The Laken Riley Act, which requires the Department of Homeland Security to detain undocumented immigrants charged with even nonviolent crimes, was the first bill that President Donald Trump signed into law in his second term. Every Republican senator voted for the bill. A dozen Democrats, mostly from swing states, joined them, including the new Arizona senator, Ruben Gallego, who was a co-sponsor. Progressives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York; Alex Padilla, of California; and Chuy García, of Illinois, opposed the Laken Riley Act because it requires the detention of people who’ve only been accused of crimes. Additionally, as Ocasio-Cortez argued in Congress, the bill will bring profits to private-prison corporations. But, for Gallego, his support for the act was one of the reasons that Arizonans sent him to Washington. He made immigration and border security a centerpiece of his campaign, and he was simply doing the job his constituents expected him to do.
I first met Gallego late last year in Washington, D.C., not long after his election as Arizona’s first Latino senator. He was also one of only four Democrats to win Senate races in states carried by Trump. He told me then that his positions on the border came from “listening to the nonpolitical Latinos” around him. Many had opposed previous restrictions on immigration but were now saying, “No, I don’t like what’s going on at the border. That’s chaos.” When Gallego and I talked again, in late February, I asked him about the progressives who were mad at him for supporting the act. He said, “I mean, look, these people are good-natured. They’re not trying to be harmful or anything like that. But I think they are very much out of touch with people’s understanding of the border situation.” Gallego also believes they are wrong to assume that there will be widespread racial profiling or other abuses of the law, such as wanton arrests. “There’s a certain level of misinformation that’s going both ways on this issue,” he told me. Progressives are “spreading fear saying that kids are going to be arrested and detained for shoplifting candy bars.” In practice, he said, “that’s just not how the law works. And, instead of rationally talking about this, I think a lot of people just decided to do a knee-jerk ‘Let’s just stand up against Trump’s first thing.’ ”
Gallego is of the opinion that Democrats do not have much to gain from simply opposing Trump. He brought up the example of Trump and Elon Musk’s attack on U.S.A.I.D. In Arizona, he said, voters would care about mass layoffs of National Park Service employees because of the Grand Canyon, firefighters because of the threat of forest fires, and U.S.D.A. workers who are trying to stop the spread of avian flu. But “no one’s talking about the firings at U.S.A.I.D.,” he told me, because they “think we spend too much money on foreign aid.” Instead, they’re asking, “ ‘How does this actually relate to me?’ ” He added, “The best way you can save U.S.A.I.D. and programs like that is to make the Republican position and Donald Trump’s position unpopular by other means.”
Gallego noted that, after Trump’s first month in office, public-opinion surveys found that people were “happy with what the President was doing but wished he would focus more on the cost of living.” That’s where Gallego is concentrating his criticism. “For me,” he said, “resistance is making sure that people understand this Administration isn’t doing anything to bring down the cost of living. Instead, they’re doing basically everything to cut services to everyday Americans, gutting the poor so they can give tax cuts to the rich. That’s the resistance I’m doing right now. And the more I do that, the more messages I can get out there, the weaker I can make this Administration, and the easier it is for us to protect a lot of these core services.” Gallego has been arguing that the Administration’s economic plans will result in cuts to Medicaid, Social Security, and veterans’ benefits. His pragmatic approach to the Trump Administration is the one most Democrats seem to be taking, at least for now: collaborate when possible, and resist when necessary, if at all.
For most of his political career—three years in the Arizona state legislature, followed by a decade in the House of Representatives—Gallego was known as a progressive. The son of immigrants, his mother from Colombia, and his father from Mexico, Gallego graduated from Harvard, and then deployed to Iraq. He won his first election, in 2010, as part of a groundswell of opposition to Arizona’s S.B. 1070, which required police to verify the immigration status of anyone they suspected of being in the country illegally. (It was signed into law but was partially struck down by the Supreme Court, in 2012.) “Gallego was an important part of that movement. He got elected because of that movement,” Héctor Sánchez Barba, the president and C.E.O. of Mi Familia Vota, a national Latino advocacy organization with headquarters in Arizona, told me. But in recent years, as Gallego performed on bigger stages, he began to critique certain positions held by progressive Democrats.
The day after the 2020 Presidential election, when many were surprised by Trump’s relative strength among Latinos, Gallego railed on Twitter about the term “Latinx,” saying it should be abandoned. He caught heat from progressives but still repeated the argument in many different venues. On “Real Time with Bill Maher,” he explained that it offended him as a native Spanish speaker to be told that “my thinking about my language is wrong.” To great applause, he added, “I don’t need to hear that. I love my culture. My language is part of my culture, and I’m not gonna have someone change that.” For Gallego, this episode still contains an important lesson. “I hate to harp on this,” he told me, “but years ago when I tried to take down ‘Latinx,’ everyone was like, ‘What?’ I’m, like, ‘Why aren’t you guys listening to people?’ ”
In January, 2023, after Senator Kyrsten Sinema left the Democratic Party and registered as an Independent, Gallego announced that he would run against her. Then, earlier than many other Democrats, he began calling the situation at the border a “crisis.” In May, 2023, he supported President Joe Biden’s decision to deploy more troops to the border and criticized the Biden Administration for being unprepared to manage the surge of border crossings that was expected after the end of Title 42, which had restricted the flow of migrants. That October, following a sharp rise in the number of apprehensions, he chastised the Administration for not taking the needs of his constituents seriously enough. “Arizona’s border communities have been on the front line of this border crisis,” he told Fox News. “We’ve worked, again and again, to get the Administration to listen to their concerns.”
By the time Sinema dropped out of the race, in March, 2024, Gallego had left the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Publicly, he said that he let his membership lapse because dues had gone up significantly. But he also stopped calling himself progressive. When NBC News asked him if he still embraced the label, he said, “I consider myself an Arizona member of Congress who works across the aisle with everybody.” Last summer, he was the only Democrat who co-sponsored a bill intended to expedite the hiring of Customs and Border Protection officers.
In Gallego’s view, he defeated his Republican opponent, the right-wing former television anchor Kari Lake, by talking about immigration as Arizonans do, not as Fox News hosts do. In one of her campaign ads, she said, “We’re not safe because of our open borders. We must finish the wall and stop the invasion.” Gallego told me that, in reality, “Arizonans are, like, ‘We want border security, we want immigration reform, we want border trade.’ ” He spoke about the Arizonans who “go to Los Algodones to fix their teeth.” (The town, a short drive from Yuma, Arizona, is home to hundreds of dental clinics.) He also asked, “How many parents send their teen-age kids driving alone to Rocky Point?” That’s the small Sonoran beach city known in Mexico as Puerto Peñasco, about a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Yuma, Phoenix, and Tucson. Gallego mentioned how Arizona border cities benefit from the constant flow of Mexican shoppers buying food, clothing, and electronics. Thousands of Mexican nationals cross the San Luis port of entry near Yuma every day, to tend to Arizona’s winter vegetables, and many students cross from Sonora to Arizona to attend school.
The mayors of several border communities endorsed Gallego rather than Lake. What he’s hearing most from those mayors now, he said, is panic about the prospect of tariffs on goods from Mexico. “If the President continues to say, ‘I’m going to raise tariffs, I’m not going to raise tariffs,’ what’s going to happen is Mexican businesses are just going to cut up their contracts with American businesses,” he said. (Since I spoke with Gallego, Trump announced that the tariffs were on again, then, two days later, said they were off again—sort of. About half of all goods entering the United States from Mexico—those that comply with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement—will be exempt from tariffs until early April, when the issue will be revisited.)
For decades, Democrats have relied on moral arguments—the human right to mobility, the political turmoil that causes migrants to flee their home countries, and the many contributions that undocumented immigrants make to the United States—to defend the rights of immigrants. Gallego has also made them, and he still supports comprehensive immigration reform and permanent legal status for DACA recipients and noncitizen veterans. But Democrats have become more reluctant to articulate a positive case for immigrants, and quicker to call out progressives for what sounds like unconditional support for all immigrants, all the time. In January, Trump suspended the asylum system at the southern border. Long before that, Gallego had argued that the asylum system was “being abused”: that asylum seekers had learned how to exploit the system’s loopholes and knew what to say in order to meet its criteria for admission. He told me, “To deny that it’s being abused, first of all, you’re setting up the whole asylum system to fall, but also you’re losing trust with anybody who can think of you as an even arbiter.”
For Sánchez Barba, of Mi Familia Vota, the real problem isn’t blind support for immigrants by progressives but that “MAGA extremism kidnapped the issue of immigration.” He continued, “The reality is that this is a nation that is addicted to cheap, exploitable, and disposable labor. That’s it. Democrats keep falling into the trap that Republicans laid on immigration and need to take a stronger stand to be the party of a rational approach to immigration. It’s unacceptable that we haven’t had a real conversation about legalization, even for the Dreamers.” Gallego is “going to be in the Senate for the next six years,” Sánchez Barba told me, “and this is a great opportunity for him to be the kind of leader our nation needs, to oppose an anti-immigrant agenda that doesn’t make sense.”
Representative Delia Ramirez, from Illinois, also wants Democrats to be more assertive against Trump. “Our constituents have asked Democrats to stand up and do more—to stop being the minority party and become the opposition party. Right now, we have to use EVERY tool at our disposal—from withholding votes to supporting organizations litigating in courts,” she told me over e-mail. “Waiting for the Trump Administration to continue harming our communities before we act fails our constituents and erodes trust in their elected officials.”
When Gallego and I spoke last year about Trump’s mass-deportation plans, he told me that, in his view, “targeting criminals” will be “universally popular.” Yet, he added, “if the net gets cast very wide, I think that’s when you get problems. You start deporting Dreamers, you start separating kids from families—there’s not a humanitarian approach to this. I think there’s not going to be as much popular sentiment for that as they think.” When we talked recently, he predicted that the Trump Administration would soon exceed its mandate on deportations: “I think, at some point, the President is so obsessed with quotas and numbers and not actual effectiveness, they’re going to end up going after some real mass-deportation numbers.” In that case, he said, “I think you’re going to see the popularity of his immigration policies really slide.”
Gallego also believes that the popularity of Trump’s immigration policies will wane once Americans realize how much they cost. “ICE is running out of money,” he told me. “They just borrowed another five hundred million dollars from appropriations—so they’re actually literally doing catch and release now of people they have caught.” As of last month, the agency’s detention centers were nearly ten per cent over capacity, and it will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to open enough facilities to meet the Administration's goals. And the military flights to Panama, or Guantánamo, or perhaps to El Salvador—President Nayib Bukele offered up his country’s biggest prison to house deportees from the United States—are much more expensive than the charter flights used during the Biden Administration. Trump has said that there will be “no price tag” on his deportation efforts; in practice, the endeavor could over time prove to be less popular than he believes.
Gallego said that he will resist Trump if his policies harm Arizona. He returned to the case of Yuma, which has a four-billion-dollar-per-year agricultural industry. So far, Trump has not impeded the flow of Mexican workers to the area, but, if he does, Gallego told me that he will blame the President and the Administration for costing Arizona jobs, hampering the state’s ability to recruit companies to import their goods through Arizona, and creating such a choke point at the border that growers “lose a lot of product in the summer, because it’s so damn hot.” He also argued that closing the border entirely would undermine Trump’s America First agenda, because “we as a government had said, ‘Stop doing shit in Asia. Come back to the United States, or come near shore.’ ” Tariffs could have a similar effect as border closings, if they decrease the flow of goods crossing the border in both directions.
Gallego’s vision for the Democratic Party is more pragmatic than progressive. He would hold Trump accountable when his policies do not improve the lives of working-class voters, but also stand back and watch him implement them, at which point, he predicts, there will be backlash and political consequences. “With birthright citizenship, he did it right away and has been quiet about it since,” Gallego told me. “He knows that it’s not a very popular position.” He sees similar consequences for foreign policy. “They absolutely have destroyed our relationship with our North Atlantic partners, our European allies,” he said. And, unlike Bill Clinton, who, Gallego said, reduced the size of the federal government in a “very orderly manner,” the Trump Administration is “taking a meat cleaver to the federal workforce without actually looking at programs. They wanted to move so fast, but they moved in a dumb, dumb way—and ended up hurting a lot of their base, by the way.” It could get to the point, Gallego argues, that it becomes “politically unsustainable, going into an election year next year, to be supportive of policies that Donald Trump and the Republican Party are doing.” The risk, of course, is that it doesn’t—and that Democrats’ passivity harms their credibility, too. Defining Democratic success as Republican failure isn’t the same thing as charting a positive path forward for the country. ♦
