Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) says he agrees with Republicans that there shouldn’t be any illegal immigrants in the U.S., but his solution is to grant them all legal status rather than deport them.
“To my Republican colleagues who say I don’t want any undocumented people in this country, I actually agree with you,” the 28-year-old progressive lawmaker told reporters in a clip that was widely circulated on Wednesday. “So let’s document every single one of them with a speedy path to citizenship.”
Frost is offering what might be the most straightforward amnesty proposal in over a decade. Most comprehensive immigration reform proposals in the Bush and Obama administrations attached more conditions to legal status, would have applied to closer to 85% of illegal immigrants already in the country, and included a more gradual path to citizenship, though details varied depending on the specific plan or legislation.
The failure of the last major bill along these lines, the 2013 Gang of Eight proposal, led Democrats to suggest more narrowly targeted amnesties. When these couldn’t get through Congress either, then-President Barack Obama instituted the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals program. While there was widespread support for the underlying policy, DACA, as it is called, has always been controversial because it was not created legislatively.
It remains to be seen whether Democrats will embrace Frost’s return to large-scale amnesty. But they are increasingly turning to his approach to fighting President Donald Trump’s second-term immigration enforcement agenda: framing it as an authoritarian administration disappearing people, especially immigrants.
“Donald Trump and ICE are running a government-funded kidnapping program,” Frost said in an April statement. “Showing up in unmarked vans, with plain clothes officers, they are kidnapping people off the streets and jailing them inside of detention centers without due process and with little cause.”
Some of these Democrats are getting into confrontations with officials involved in the deportations and immigration enforcement, which they say illustrate the Trump administration’s police state tactics. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) was roughly escorted out of Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem‘s press conference and briefly detained in handcuffs afterward.
Officials noted Padilla approached Noem, attempted to interrupt while she was still speaking before opening the floor to questions, was dressed in plain clothes, and did not identify himself until he was already in the grasp of security. There has been a spate of political violence in recent years, including two assassination attempts against Trump in 2024 and the assassination of a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband over the weekend, necessitating precautions.
New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander was arrested at an immigration court and detained for several hours after interfering in the arrest of illegal migrants. The scuffle was caught on camera. “I will let go when you show me the judicial warrant,” Lander told ICE agents. Lander is one of nearly a dozen Democrats hoping to replace incumbent New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
“You don’t have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens!” Lander shouted as he was placed in handcuffs. “I’m not obstructing. I’m standing right here in the hallway! I asked to see the judicial warrant.”
“It is wrong that politicians seeking higher office undermine law enforcement safety to get a viral moment,” Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said, according to Reuters. “No one is above the law, and if you lay a hand on a law enforcement officer, you will face consequences.”
Whether these are examples of politicians seeking publicity or law enforcement overreach, not everyone likes the optics. “This rough treatment is uncalled for and unbecoming of a free society,” conservative writer and former New York Post editor Sohrab Ahmari posted on X, referring to Lander’s arrest.
Congressional Democrats also embraced Kilmar Abrego Garcia despite serious allegations against him and the fact that he was under a 2019 deportation order. But Abrego Garcia was not supposed to be deported to his home country of El Salvador. He has since returned to the U.S. to face criminal charges, but polls — with questions worded in a way that emphasized mistaken deportation and whether Trump was obeying court orders rather than accusations of gang membership and human trafficking — showed support for the Democratic position.
Echelon Insights, a Republican firm, also found Trump slightly underwater on immigration for the first time in its June poll. Those results also show respondents make a distinction between peaceful anti-ICE protesters, which they support, and anti-ICE rioters, which they overwhelmingly oppose.
At the same time, Democrats are moving back to advocating previously unpopular positions on immigration: amnesty, without even the pretense of enforcement, opposition to ICE, and the type of leniency that made the border a political liability for nearly all of former President Joe Biden’s term.
LOS ANGELES SEALS THE DEMOCRATS’ LEFTWARD LURCH ON IMMIGRATION
This isn’t true just of left-wing Democrats like Frost, but also Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), who used the anti-ICE disorder in Los Angeles as an opportunity to take a stand against Trump after months of posing as an introspective Democrat who would lead the party back to the center.
Time will tell which political strategy works.