Note(s) on the 2024 U.S. Election
Difficult Truths We Must Face Together as Americans
I’ve collected and expanded upon the discussions I have had with friends, family, clients, colleagues, peers, and even strangers online over the last year or so into a series of notes that capture the difficult place we are at in this country due to the existence of two completely different realities for our citizens based on class. As a lifelong Democrat who still believes reform is possible for the party if we can remove the corrupt politicians, I hope classical liberals can hear the voices of the powerless crying out to us—and respond by actually committing to do better, rather than continue to call the most marginalized people in our country “stupid” and “racist.”
Note I: Immigration and Why Democrats Lost Hispanics
I suppose that I’m less upset about the result of this election because, as immigration attorneys in Southern California, my husband and I saw this coming over a year ago. Therefore, we had a long time to mentally prepare ourselves and were not caught off-guard by it. The reason we saw this coming isn’t because we’re particularly skilled at political projections, it’s because we listened to the people who talked to us about it. We kept hearing the same stories again and again from our clients—who are literally the poorest and most marginalized people in the country—and none of them are white. We knew that if Democrats had lost the immigrant poor & working class, they’d definitely lost the U.S.-born poor & working class.
Yet, since the Tuesday night of the election, I have seen horrible take after horrible take from political pundits, the legacy media, and Harris voters. They seem to be pretending that they do not understand what happened, and that the only possible explanation is that 15M people who voted for Biden-Harris in 2020 suddenly became white supremacists and misogynists who decided to sit the election out, vote third party, or vote for Donald Trump. Let’s forget the exceedingly anomalous numbers of the 2020 election that attribute Joe Biden with 15M more votes than Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 through mail-in ballots. Even if you accept those numbers, that leaves that exact same number of people who are missing from this election—meaning they didn’t switch to Trump or a third party candidate, they just didn’t vote this election. That’s the only explanation if you don’t want to go down the road of re-examining the 2020 numbers.
I’ve come up with a series of thought experiments and scenarios that I think best capture what every person who has told us they were voting for Trump or a third-party candidate has said. Here’s the first one, based on what our immigration clients and their U.S. citizen friends and relatives have communicated to us during the course of their representation:
Imagine you fled your home country due to cartel and gang violence making it unsafe for you and your children to even walk outside. You’ve had friends and family members killed and kidnapped, and you live in fear that it’s just a matter of time for you and your kids. You come to the conclusion that you must flee, and contact any friends or relatives you have in the U.S., begging them to help you save your children. They agree to help you, you painstakingly plan your escape, and you flee in the dead of night with nothing but the clothes on your back and a bag of food and bottled water for your children. Your U.S. citizen friend or relative looked into the asylum process for you because they want to help you do everything right so you can win your case, so you immediately turn yourself in at border patrol to legally claim asylum.
You move in with the U.S. citizen friend or relative, who is also helping you pay for an immigration attorney. They help you get a terrible, under the table job that pays practically nothing, but you’re still grateful to them because it’s the best you can do for now. You’re busting your ass making pennies on the dollar, working 12 and 18 hour shifts until your work permit is approved so that you can contribute in any small way to the groceries and the rent to thank your friend or relative for what they’re doing for you. You believe with all your heart that it’s just temporary, and it’s going to get better once you have your work permit. Your immigration attorney has told you that it might be a battle to win asylum for yourself, but that they can get your children something called “Special Immigrant Juvenile Status” or SIJS, which will give them a path to legal citizenship even if you ultimately lose your asylum case.
Over the course of the next 3-4 years, you still have not had your very first asylum hearing because first hearings are being scheduled 3-5 years in the future due to the extreme backlog and abuse of the system by people who do not have a viable asylum claims, but you’re still on a $350 monthly payment plan for your immigration lawyer because that’s the most important thing, you must stay on top of the paperwork and hearings in order to win your case. You are somehow even poorer than when you got here, you can’t afford rent anywhere so you still live with the kind friend or relative who you first moved in with when you thought it would be temporary until you could save up to afford your own apartment. You can’t afford gas and groceries, you and your kids live together in one bedroom with no privacy, you cook every meal on a double hot plate in your room, and every meal is some combination of hot dogs, eggs, tortillas, and rice. You live in a border town that has been overrun by the same type of gang and cartel crime & violence you fled. You feel unsafe, fearful, and hopeless.
Yet, as a person of deep faith (in spite of every reason to lose it), you continue to pray to God every day and tell yourself that it will all be worth it for your kids if you can just get them U.S. citizenship. You wake up at 5am on Sundays to attend 6am Spanish-language Mass at the closest Catholic Church, where you light a candle for the friends and family you lost in your home country and you pray for protection and mercy for your children, before working a 12-hour service industry shift. During the pandemic, your church—the only place you had where you still felt hope and community—was shut down, even though you were following social distancing requirements and masking. You saw that people were still gathering in every other place, while you still had to go to work and be in close proximity to people because you’re an ‘essential worker’ in food service, and it seemed that every type of public gathering from concerts to dinners to protests were somehow safe, but they wouldn’t let you worship at your church.
Your U.S. citizen friend or relative sees all this, lives through it with you, can’t believe you still haven’t had your first asylum hearing, and can’t believe you are waiting 4 years while the border is wide open and the gangs and traffickers have no issues—they’re all getting rich committing crime, not being prosecuted or deported. You were forced to take the Covid-19 vaccine by USCIS as a condition of your asylum application, which you complied with even though you had reservations about how fast it was developed and your priest (who you now see remotely via Zoom on your phone) told you aborted fetuses were used to develop it. You comply because you must, it is made clear to you that you have no choice if you want your asylum case to proceed. But you see that everyone crossing the boarder illegally without claiming asylum is just being allowed in, they are not being checked for illnesses or required to be vaccinated.
When you or your friend/relative find the courage to be vulnerable and voice your struggle to a white, liberal co-worker who keeps saying there’s nothing wrong with the immigration system and you tell them that the open border is actually harming you and your community, that it doesn’t seem right or fair for the deserving asylum seekers and legal immigrants—you are told that’s just your internalized self-loathing and subconscious white supremacy.
When you try to tell anyone that your community has been destroyed by crime and violence that the police do nothing about, that it’s gotten worse since you first arrived, and it’s not what you thought you would experience in America when you fled gang violence at home—you’re told by Democrats that, “Actually crime is down! We know it doesn’t feel that way where you are because, well, you’re in a terrible neighborhood. But, we redefined a bunch of crimes so that they’re not crimes anymore and stopped prosecuting theft, so statistically crime is actually at an all-time low!” When either of you tell someone you can’t afford groceries and it’s gotten worse, you’re living on less, your nutrition has suffered because you can’t afford protein or fresh produce anymore—you’re told “Actually, it’s the greatest economy ever! We know it doesn’t feel that way for you because, well, you’re abjectly poor. But, we redefined a bunch of employment and economic markers to not count people like you, so technically the economy is amazing!”
At the same time, Republicans are the only ones acknowledging that the border has become a humanitarian disaster, that inflation has become untenable, that the working class can’t feed their families, and that crime has skyrocketed.
Who do you think that U.S. citizen friend or relative is voting for? And why?
Do you think they suddenly became racist & misogynistic, or do you think they decided their quality of life and safety tangibly suffered under Biden-Harris so dramatically that they decided they’d risk giving the people saying they were going to fix the immigration system and economy a chance, over risking another 4 years of the policies that got them here?
Democrats need to have a reconciling of realities (a term that I am coining right here and now) if they ever want to win an election again. We can’t keep looking at these poor, ‘people of color’ (to use their terminology) with a straight face and telling them they’re racist for telling us that their lived experience was unbearable under this administration. That’s actually racist. We must commit to bipartisanship and fixing the disaster that is our border and broken immigration system, which is intricately linked to the economy, employment opportunities, and paying people a living wage.
Every single time Kamala Harris was asked about the border, she gave a canned response in which she acknowledged the immigration system was broken, but offered no solutions to fix it or explanation for why it got so bad under her administration. Without fail, every time (and we were listening very closely hoping to hear she had been advised on viable legal & legislative solutions) she would start off by saying something like “Well first of all, I know about law & order because I was a prosecutor, and yes, let’s admit that our immigration system is broken.” Then, she would say, “We sponsored a bill to help, but Donald Trump called his friends and stopped it from passing.”
It continued to astound us that Harris and her team had not prepared a better answer, and kept giving this one almost verbatim. It was as though they truly did not understand what was so problematic about it. First, it assumes that your base is very stupid and uninformed, in that they do not know what the proposed legislation actually said or why anyone opposed it. In addition to being coupled with billions of dollars more in military aid to Ukraine, it had many loopholes, expanded parole authority, and continued the so-called “catch & release” practice. Second, this answer gives away so much power to Donald Trump—who was not in office at the time and was being prosecuted in multiple criminal and civil suits. It is basically admitting that the guy who Democrats are saying is/was the worst president in the history of the country and a criminal on top of that, somehow wielded more power over the U.S. Congress while he was out of office than the sitting President and every Democratic senator and representative. It’s such a position of weakness and a tacit acknowledgment that even if she won, everything she was promising could be thwarted by Donald Trump, even from outside the government.
The one thing Harris kept repeating that we are all in agreement on is that the immigration system as it currently exists is broken. The work for Democrats now is to show the communities most affected by this broken system that it wasn’t just a talking point for them, and that they will work with Republicans in a bipartisan way to do what it takes to restore faith in our ability to govern and protect them.
What does that look like? Well, to start with, deportations will have to happen—there is no getting around that. While Democrats have tried to fear-monger that deportations will look like rounding up every person of Latin-American ancestry and putting them in camps resembling WWII Japanese internment camps; the fact is that there are at least 1.2 million undocumented immigrants with existing deportation orders.1 These individuals have been deported by an immigration judge after being legally placed in deportation proceedings, given an opportunity to defend themselves, and losing or no-showing on their hearings and trials. Another 660,000+ have criminal convictions either in the U.S. or their home country, of which over 103,000 are violent crimes including assault, homicide, kidnapping, robbery, and sexual assault.2 This is who we must focus deportation efforts on.
There should be no deportations of hard-working people with no criminal history, no arrests, who are contributing to their communities, and have not been placed in deportation proceedings. For those individuals, there needs to be a legal and fair path to achieving legal status in this country. This can be accomplished in a number of ways, such as improving the employment-based visa programs so that people who have been living and working here for years can qualify through a process with their employer. I also strongly believe that DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, should be re-instated or reworked to allow people who were brought here as young children by their parents a path to legal status. These people have lived here, gone to school here, and worked here their entire lives—they are Americans for whom the American dream has been deferred due the actions of their parents. This is fundamentally un-American, and we must solve this issue once and for all instead of continuing to punt it to the next administration while leaving these people in a horrible legal limbo where they are second-class citizens.
That’s more than enough for where to start with fixing our broken immigration system in a fair, just, and compassionate way. My husband and I are working on actual draft legislation that would accomplish these goals that we hope to get into the hands of likeminded Congresspeople who want to work together to find real solutions to the problem at hand. Reach out to me if you’d like to help that happen!
My next 2024 Election Note will focus on the staggering chronic illness, infertility, and obesity health crisis America now faces, along with the role Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his “Make America Healthy Again” mission & rhetoric played in President-elect Donald Trump’s sweeping victory across every battleground state.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Homeland Security Statistics. Immigration Enforcement Actions Yearbook. Available at: https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Annual Report: ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations. Available at: https://www.ice.gov; U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). Immigration Enforcement: Actions Needed to Address Gaps in ICE’s Data and Reporting. Available at: https://www.gao.gov; U.S. Department of Justice, Executive Office for Immigration Review. Statistics Yearbook: Immigration Court Actions. Available at: https://www.justice.gov/eoir/statistics
As of July 2024, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reported that there are 662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories on their national docket. This includes individuals convicted of or charged with various offenses, both in the United States and their home countries. Specifically, among these noncitizens:
• Assault Convictions: 62,231 individuals
• Homicide Convictions: 13,099 individuals
• Kidnapping Convictions: 2,521 individuals
• Robbery Convictions: 10,031 individuals
• Sexual Assault Convictions: 15,811 individuals
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). National Criminal Docket Statistics, July 2024. Available at: https://www.ice.gov ; U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Homeland Security Statistics. Immigration Enforcement Actions Yearbook. Available at: https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook; U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). Immigration Enforcement: Actions Needed to Address Gaps in ICE’s Data and Reporting. Available at: https://www.gao.gov; New York Post. “Shocking Data Shows 15K Illegal Immigrants Accused of Murder as Kamala Harris Visits Border.” September 27, 2024. Available at: https://nypost.com