Nine months before Rosa Parks became an American heroine over her refusal to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus, another black woman was arrested for the exact same defiance.
Claudette Colvin was far from the first black American to be arrested under the tyranny of Jim Crow. But by 1955, the NAACP was ready to wage legal warfare against the clearly unconstitutional regime. E.D. Nixon, the president of the local NAACP, had been searching for a model “test case” to use to challenge racial segregation laws in court and seriously considered Colvin as his champion. But Colvin was an unmarried 15-year-old who was grossly sexualized by law enforcement and soon after impregnated by an older man. Nixon decided against making Colvin the mascot of his campaign, instead choosing the married, middle-aged, and mild-mannered secretary of the Montgomery NAACP.
“My mother told me to be quiet about what I did,” Colvin would later reveal. “She told me, ‘Let Rosa be the one. White people aren’t going to bother Rosa; her skin is lighter than yours and they like her.”
This cynical calculation turned out to be the obviously correct one. The ultimate Supreme Court challenge that would go on to overturn segregation on public transit would include Colvin, not Parks, as a winning plaintiff. But it was Parks who would win over the court of public opinion. When Parks was arrested, only 1-in-4 white Southerners opposed segregation on public transportation. By the 1963 March on Washington, the majority of white Southerners had turned against bus segregation.
All of this is to say that when you want to turn the tide of public opinion in favor of a class of people you want to portray as oppressed, respectability politics are important. It’s the reason why the most monumental statistical shift in the public’s favor of LGBT equality came as a result of the tonally conservative marriage equality campaign and the subsequent backlash emerged as a consequence over the transanity.
So if the Left wants to turn the tide against the global tidal wave of public opinion unilaterally fed up with open borders, activists better start choosing boy scouts as their mascots, not accused gang members and criminals.
Hence, it’s grossly ironic that while actual American citizens are still being held hostage by Hamas terrorists or as political prisoners in Russia and China, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) has decided to rescue a Salvadoran citizen from El Salvador and bring him to America, making him the Democratic Party’s champion of the open borders cause.
The legal merits of the case of whether President Donald Trump wrongfully deported Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to El Salvador are not really in dispute — the White House is barely pretending otherwise. Although the judiciary has correctly denied Abrego Garcia’s belated asylum request and maintained that Abrego Garcia is indeed an illegal immigrant with no right to be in America, the Trump administration erroneously ignored a still-standing “withholding of removal” order that forbade Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador. Legally speaking, the Trump administration had the right (or the duty as polls continue to indicate) to deport Abrego Garcia to literally any other country on Earth other than El Salvador, where he is currently in the country’s crown jewel of maximum security prisons. The Supreme Court has indeed confirmed that Trump must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from El Salvador, but not “effectuate” his return to the United States. (Trump can and should encourage El Salvador to ship Abrego Garcia to any other country that doesn’t want to be slapped with another 10% worth of tariffs, and I hear that Rwanda is lovely this time of year.)
An illegal alien might have finally won the narrowest of legal victories against Trump’s sweeping crackdown on illegal immigration. But that’s not the same as winning over the public. In the court of public opinion, the open borders opposition to Trump is a political loser, and Abrego Garcia is no hero.
Although Trump’s overall approval numbers have taken a beating since “Liberation Day” (a 9% freefall in the Nasdaq in just one month will do that to a president), Trump retains rock-solid support for his immigration agenda. At the end of March, a CBS poll found that 58% of people approved of Trump’s deportations, while Harvard-Harris found that immigration is the single most popular piece of his presidency. An astounding 80% of voters support “deporting immigrants who are here illegally and have committed crimes,” and 74% support “closing the border with added security and policies that discourage illegal crossings.” The latter is supported by 3-in-5 Democrats.
Even as the Democratic Party and its media consiglieres have narrowed in their focus on the issue in recent weeks, the public remains unperturbed. In a national poll conducted Monday, the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that in a thousand-person sample where a majority disapprove of Trump’s overall job performance, the majority still approves of his handling of immigration, including 59% of seniors, 54% of non-college-educated voters, 46% of independents, 41% of Latinos, and 36% of black voters. (Recall that Trump only won 14% of black voters last November, and that was still the single strongest Republican presidential candidate performance among the demographic since Ronald Reagan in 1980.)
Half of the reason Trump’s broad bench of support for his immigration crackdown isn’t budging is because the White House is indeed targeting the least sympathetic of immigrants. The other half is because Democrats are racing to defend these characters.
Take the case of Mahmoud Khalil. The 30-year-old was born in Syria, lived in Lebanon, and has Algerian citizenship. He came to the U.S. on a student visa in January 2023 to attend Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. It took him nine months of enjoying America’s hospitality before he rewarded our largesse with his lunacy. Five days after Hamas conducted their Oct. 7 massacre of more than 1,000 Israelis, Khalil was filmed screaming “Free Palestine!” into a bullhorn while sitting on another agitator’s shoulders. Khalil would go on to become the lead “negotiator” or spokesman to the anti-Israel Columbia United Apartheid Divest, including the illegal April 2024 encampments that repeatedly resulted in mass arrests. Although Columbia briefly suspended Khalil, he was unchastened. He secured an American bride and a forthcoming anchor baby and technically completed his master’s degree in December, right on time to get his green card courtesy of his marriage. On March 5, Khalil was back at it, agitating a mob with a megaphone in the middle of a library. On camera, Khalil seems to be defending Hamas, claiming that “armed resistance” to Israel is “legitimate under international law.”
On the merits here, the Trump administration is eminently correct for revoking his privilege of a green card. The law clearly qualifies a noncitizen for deportation if he “endorses or espouses terrorist activity,” something this married father spent time at a college campus doing even when he wasn’t actually a student there.
Naturally, the Democrats made this buffoon, a Syrian-born Algerian who spent most of his two years in America trying to shut down a college campus in support of a terrorist organization, their avatar of the #Resistance. And predictably, the public isn’t buying it.
Nearly two-thirds of people in that Harvard-Harris poll support the deportation of Khalil and other foreign students who support Hamas. That includes three-in-five independents and nearly half of all Democrats.
Democrats have now pivoted to Abrego Garcia. While slightly less of a comic book villain than Khalil — we don’t have video evidence of Abrego Garcia’s ties to MS-13, as we did have for Khalil’s praise for Hamas — multiple immigration courts still found in 2019 that the evidence tying Abrego Garcia to the Venezuelan gang was credible enough to deny his release on bond. The incredibly early polling continues to bear out the hunch that the public doesn’t exactly have an appetite for the media’s new favorite illegal. A majority of voters told Harvard/Harris that the president should “be able to deport suspected members of the Venezuelan criminal gangs based on the executive branch’s own processes and determinations,” with 47% of independents agreeing.
Plus, it’s clear the Left didn’t properly vet this latest “test case.” Reporter Andy Ngo unearthed multiple domestic violence restraining orders Abrego Garcia’s wife obtained against him. The first was issued in 2020. The second temporary protective order (that is, the preliminary restraining order that is drawn up before it is subsequently finalized in court) reported on May 13, 2021, that Abrego Garcia “punched and scratched” and “grabbed and bruised” his wife, ripping off her shirt. A final protective order was issued on June 17.
So this wasn’t some lover’s quarrel that the police were called to calm down, nor was it a case of a lying wife who rapidly retracted her statement in a fit of regret. To obtain a final protective order for a domestic violence case between spouses under Maryland law, an alleged victim must meet the preponderance of evidence standard of proving their case is more likely than not true. At least twice, Abrego Garcia’s wife alleged he violently assaulted her in a civil court and won.
The worst case for Democrats is that they’re championing the return of a criminal illegal gang member from El Salvador to American soil. The best case for Democrats is that Abrego Garcia is only a wife-beater.
There’s a reason why the height of the West’s support for immigrants came while Obama was championing the DREAMers who, as he keenly made sure to repeat, “came here through no fault of their own” and the Eurosocialists were flooding social media with photos of wide-eyed Syrian children. The mask, of course, came off in the last four years. Democrats pivoted from protecting military veterans already brought here as children to the country to allowing monthly legions of hundreds of thousands of single young men from Sharia-ridden hellholes into taxpayer-funded stays in Manhattan. Across the Atlantic, the crisis is so dire that migrants comprise more than three-quarters of all rapists in France and nearly half of all spouse murderers and domestic violence perpetrators against children in Norway.
So Democrats already face the uphill battle of the fact that the backlash to open borders is global and that Trump’s fight against the phenomenon is already a categorical success. In the past year, monthly Southern border crossings have collapsed from 137,473 to 7,181, the lowest in recorded history.
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But Democrats don’t make it any easier on themselves by jumping at every accused gang member and terrorist sympathizer that Trump ships to El Salvador. Maybe wait until you can secure your photo op of a crying child or distraught pregnant woman.
It’s hard enough to challenge the unanimity of public opinion when a cause is as righteous as the Civil Rights Movement was. America may be, mercifully and thankfully, much more tolerant today of unwed mothers and outright appreciative of eager young activists like Claudette Colvin. But the average American doesn’t suddenly sympathize with avowed Hamas supporters or wife beaters. Kilmar Abrego Garcia is no Claudette Colvin, and Mahmoud Khalil is no Rosa Parks. Dems must go back to the drawing board and try again.