For decades, Democratic leaders sounded almost indistinguishable from today’s Republicans on illegal immigration. In his 1995 State of the Union address, Bill Clinton declared, “All Americans… are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country… We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws.” He signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act the following year, which expanded border enforcement and made deportation easier. In 2009, Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor, “Illegal immigration is wrong, plain and simple,” and co-sponsored legislation to make unlawful presence in the U.S. a felony.
Something changed dramatically in the 2010s and 2020s. The phrase “secure the border” vanished from the party’s rhetoric and eventually from its official platform. The 2016 Democratic platform mentioned “comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship” but still called for “strong and effective enforcement of our immigration laws.” By 2024, every reference to securing the border or enforcing immigration laws had been scrubbed. The new line became that “the border is secure” (Kamala Harris, 2022) even as Customs and Border Protection recorded more than ten million encounters with migrants during the Biden-Harris administration—more than the previous twelve years combined. Cities thousands of miles from the border were suddenly housing tens of thousands of new arrivals, sanctuary policies were expanded, and any state-level attempt to enforce federal law (Texas’s Operation Lone Star, Florida’s flights to Martha’s Vineyard) was met with lawsuits from the Department of Justice.
The shift wasn’t accidental. Progressive activists reframed enforcement itself as xenophobic, abolition of ICE became a mainstream campaign position for several 2020 presidential candidates, and the party’s donor class—tech companies needing engineers, agribusiness needing farm labor, and service industries needing low-wage workers—quietly welcomed the new status quo. What was once a bipartisan consensus that America could have generous legal immigration alongside controlled, lawful borders has, in the span of fifteen years, become a purely partisan issue. Today’s Democratic Party is no longer the party of Bill Clinton’s border wall funding or Hillary Clinton’s 2008 promise to “bring about comprehensive immigration reform… with a secure border.” It is now the party that removed the word “secure” from its vocabulary entirely.
