The ICE storm cometh. In a dramatic post over the weekend, Donald Trump instructed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to expand deportation raids in the nation’s largest cities, such as Los Angeles and New York. The President called out “Radical Left Democrats”, and, for this new mobilization of ICE, the escalation is the point.

Immigration remains one of Trump’s strongest issues in the polls. A new NBC survey has him underwater on every issue except the border. The administration’s plan to expand high-profile immigration raids is obviously a way to keep that issue in the headlines and set the terms of the national political conversation.

The fact that this next wave of deportation arrests will specifically focus on large cities dominated by the Democratic Party suggests that this escalation might in part be a calculated effort to heighten the contradictions on immigration. These efforts would be a challenge to progressive urban activists: either fall silent or respond with coordinated street action. So far, activists have often taken the bait. Protests have erupted in Los Angeles this month in response to immigration arrests; in Portland at the weekend, black-clad anti-Trump and anti-border activists clashed with law enforcement officers. Trump has already called in the National Guard to manage the unrest in Los Angeles, and he has also issued a memorandum saying that he will mobilize troops to any place where civic unrest threatens the ability of federal officials to enforce immigration law.

This escalatory spiral — where federal states of emergency respond to mayhem from anti-enforcement activists — risks making progressives look even more out of touch on immigration. What’s more, those turbocharged battles between federal law enforcement and the Left-wing activist class likely weaken the leverage of Democrats who want their party to moderate. Democrats remain unpopular on immigration, but the party has struggled to move to the middle on this issue. A high-profile clash between the Trump administration and grassroots Left-wing activists in effect strengthens the hand of open-borders voices within the Democratic power-elite — and gives Republicans a potential political opening.

But this widening-gyre gamble also holds considerable risks for proponents of border controls as well as Republicans. Voters in part turned on the progressive agenda for immigration because they tied it to escalating dysfunction: if the electorate believes that enforcement is primarily being used as a weapon in scorched-earth political battles, border hawks could lose the polling edge they currently enjoy.

And escalation is expensive. The White House’s plans for at least 3,000 deportation arrests a day will likely compound the cash crunch facing ICE. The agency is reportedly already over budget, and it risks running out of funds. Those fiscal realities indicate the benefits of broadening an immigration-enforcement regimen beyond high-intensity raids. For instance, universal E-Verify to check the legal status of employees might not be as flashy as an armored ICE raid, but it casts a broader and more affordable net.

Republicans might see a political advantage in tilting against the progressive coalition’s most radical forces, but a sustainable immigration agenda will have to reach past the hyper-polarization of the current moment.

---

Fred Bauer is a writer from New England.

fredbauerblog

---