“The Border Is Invading America”: Jean Guerrero on the Bipartisan Failures of Immigration Policy
STEVEN ROBINSON
“The Border Is Invading America”: Jean Guerrero on the Bipartisan Failures of Immigration Policy
Democracy Now!/September 03, 2025
We speak to journalist Jean Guerrero about the Trump administration’s ongoing anti-immigrant crackdown and the bipartisan roots of “anti-immigrant cruelty” in the United States. Guerrero’s latest opinion piece in The New York Times is titled “The Border Is Invading America” and traces the development of U.S. border policies since the Clinton administration. “The brute force that the border once unleashed out of sight, in the desert or behind the locked doors of detention centers, is now erupting on our streets,” says Guerrero. “We desperately need a reckoning with the structural abuses embedded in our immigration system and with how both parties have played a role in sustaining them, because, otherwise, the border is going to continue to coil inward and to destroy our collective rights.”
[snip]
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jean, in your piece, you basically also charge that Democratic leaders have been complicit now for decades in the stoking of anti-immigrant xenophobia in the U.S. You write at one point, quote, “I have repeatedly asked Trump voters about his immigration policies, such as his first term’s family separation. They tend to reply by shrugging their shoulders and pointing at similar actions by Democratic leaders, saying, 'Obama put kids in cages' or 'Obama separated families, too.'” Could you talk about that?
JEAN GUERRERO: Yeah, I think it’s important to talk about that, because what happened is that the Democratic Party normalized anti-immigrant cruelty alongside Republican administrations. And until we reckon with that bipartisan nature of our racialized immigration system, then we’re not going to be able to restrain it, because we need to hold our elected officials accountable in both parties for what they have created together.
So, as I wrote in my piece, it was the Clinton administration that oversaw the initial militarization of the border in the 1990s, after which we have seen as many as 80,000 people who have died trying to cross the border. That’s a stadium of human beings who have died of dehydration in the desert, who have died of broken backs falling off of the border barriers, or even from Border Patrol agents’ bullets.
And after Clinton’s border militarization, we saw President Obama deport 3 million people, more than any previous president. Oftentimes these are individuals who were deported to their deaths. And the Obama administration also oversaw — or, decided against removing exceptions for racial profiling in immigration enforcement. This is a decision that the Biden administration made, as well, and so both of these administrations affirmed a two-tiered system of justice, one in which immigrants and people who merely look like immigrants have fewer rights.
However, when Trump came along, many Democrats treated his cruel policies as if they were shocking new horrors unique to Republicans. And this is a moral inconsistency and hypocrisy that Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller knew to exploit, which I can talk about in a moment. But the point is that Democratic leaders’ selective outrage on the immigration issue helped fuel the crisis that we’re living today, and we need to reckon with that, because right now too many Democratic Party leaders wrongly believe that we are where we are today because they were too nice to immigrants.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, and I wanted to ask you particularly, again, about the role of Stephen Miller. There’s been really no one quite like him at the high echelons of federal government in terms of the emphasis on naked mass deportations. Can you talk about him, as well, as the architect of the Trump policies?
JEAN GUERRERO: Yes, yeah, the architect of Trump’s immigration policies. So, as I wrote in my book Hatemonger, Stephen Miller is a student of liberal hypocrisy. He grew up in Santa Monica, California, where he saw the performative nature of many Democratic leaders’ compassion for immigrants. Santa Monica is a place where many working-class immigrant residents have been pushed into overcrowded apartments or out of the city altogether because of rising rents. So, as Trump’s speechwriter, it was not hard for Stephen Miller to make the case that Democratic Party leaders defend immigrants only as a source of cheap labor or because they want their votes, even though immigrants don’t vote, unless they’re citizens. But essentially, Miller knew that, in practice, if not in proclamation, Democratic Party leaders had normalized indifference and cruelty toward immigrants. And this long-standing indifference toward immigrants that the Democratic Party has, except when they’re wielding this issue as a cudgel against Trump, is something that has worked symbiotically with the racism of Republican leaders to enable the border’s violent encroachment on our lives, which we are now seeing.
[snip]
Full at: