As Democratic outrage has grown in response to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has begun referring to the masked, well-armed federal agents as the president’s “secret police.”
On Tuesday, Fox News asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt for her reaction to the label.
The president’s chief spokesperson responded with the usual criticisms, though she also directed her attention toward Trump’s first Democratic predecessor.
“I didn’t hear Chuck Schumer or Democrats speaking that way of ICE agents under President Barack Obama, who deported hundreds of thousands of criminal illegal aliens from our country. That’s all President Trump, Secretary Noem and this entire administration are seeking to do,” Leavitt said.
Fox’s John Roberts quickly endorsed the guest’s point. “Barack Obama actually deported millions of illegal aliens,” the co-host said. “I was covering that back in 2013, 2014, and I do not remember, to the best of my knowledge, protests erupting across America on the streets denouncing what he was doing.”
Republicans have brought this argument up with increasing frequency lately, but I’m not sure if they’ve fully thought this through.
Let’s take a stroll down memory lane.
Early in Obama’s presidency, the Democrat saw an opportunity to build on the plan embraced by George W. Bush: A bipartisan agreement could combine a Republican priority — increased border security — and the Democratic goal of creating a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already living in the United States.
At the time, GOP lawmakers balked, but they said they were open to reaching a deal down the road: If the Democratic administration agreed to focus on deportations and security measures first, Republicans said, that would generate trust that could serve as a foundation for a comprehensive solution.
As many Republicans conceded, Obama held up his side of the bargain. In fact, in August 2016, a GOP presidential candidate named Donald Trump appeared on Fox News, praised Obama-era immigration laws as “very strong,” and acknowledged that the Obama administration had already deported “tremendous numbers” of criminals.
A decade later, Republicans are looking back at these developments and effectively saying, “See? Trump is simply doing what Obama did.”
Except, the truth isn’t nearly that straightforward. Yes, the Obama administration focused on deportations in the hopes of striking a bipartisan deal — an agreement that never happened because Republicans refused to hold up their end of the bargain — but the Democratic White House never deployed masked, well-armed agents to terrorize American communities.
Leavitt and her allies want to focus on the superficial similarities instead of the substantive details that make all the difference.
As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer noted last week, Obama’s record on deportations “just shows that if you wanted to have a conservative immigration policy without partisan militias occupying cities and gunning people down in the streets, you could do it and a lot of Americans would be fine with it.”
Leavitt and Roberts proved largely the opposite of their intended point: If Trump wants to pursue a deportation policy without sparking a national backlash, he and his team should stop talking about Obama’s policy and start emulating Obama’s policy.
