SACRAMENTO, California — Democrats have largely sidestepped or toughened their stances on immigration since Donald Trump rode his signature issue back to the White House.
But with polling shifting against the president on immigration, Gavin Newsom is doing the opposite.
As California’s governor and likely presidential candidate urges voters to counter Trump by passing a House map gerrymandered to boost Democrats — and tells Americans to “wake up” to what he calls an authoritarian government bent on undermining democracy — he has consistently invoked sweeping ICE raids by masked agents, bringing it up unprompted in public appearances and producing ads featuring ominous footage of ICE arrests.
His focus on immigration enforcement will test a central idea guiding Newsom's ballot campaign: that a powerful backlash to Trump's immigration blitz is transforming border politics from a Democratic liability to a strength. The governor and his allies are banking on it driving voters to the polls in defiance of Trump’s agenda — in much the same way the issue transformed California politics decades ago when Latino voters revolted against an anti-immigration ballot initiative.
Newsom sees this moment as a chance to capitalize on anger and disappointment in Trump over immigration operations that have swept up undocumented workers who have been in the country for decades — longtime contributors to the state’s economy rather than the violent criminals the president promised to deport. If successful, given how closely Democrats nationally are monitoring the race in California, the result could have broad ramifications for how the party approaches the issue in the midterms and beyond.
“We’re not talking about (Trump) targeting or prioritizing criminals,” said Juan Rodriguez, a senior campaign official. “We’re talking about actual racial discrimination, and that has united and galvanized the Democratic Party and leaders to be much clearer about what’s at stake.”
It’s a marked departure from where Democrats were after crushing losses in November — even in heavily Democratic California, where more than one in four people is foreign born. Reflecting widespread agreement that surging migration under President Joe Biden had cost the party, Democrats embraced tougher restrictions and vowed to focus on the economy. Multiple California House Democrats supported a Republican bill expanding the offenses for which immigrants must be detained as Newsom squashed a California bill to shield more immigrants convicted of crimes from deportation.
Then, more than four months into his tenure, Trump unleashed the kind of mass-deportation campaign in Southern California he had promised on the trail — in workplaces, courthouses, and other places where immigrants often gather. Its intensity, scope, and focus on major blue cities like Los Angeles made the issue impossible for Democrats to ignore.
“It’s an opportunity that a presidential candidate is going to capitalize on, as every Democrat should,” said Beatriz Lopez, a partner at Ascend Strategy Labs who has worked on immigration policy. “I wish that Democrats would really lean into this issue, as so many of us have asked them to — to see this issue as beyond immigration, to see that these are families who have been here for many years and that standing up for them means you have a spine.”
California has been a constant target for a hostile White House, forcing Newsom and other Democrats onto the defensive as they battle to preserve climate policies, university funding and vaccine access. But nothing has alarmed and rallied Democrats quite like the ICE raids and federal troop deployments that have upended cities like Los Angeles, a diverse bastion of Latino political clout that is home to a quarter of California’s electorate.
The crackdown, which began in early June, annihilated any remaining goodwill between California and the White House, fueling a war of words between Newsom and the Trump administration and driving a legal showdown over the Los Angeles-area raids to the Supreme Court. It has also produced indelible, resonant moments that have become touchstones of Democrats’ campaign to flip the House and stymie Trump by tilting California’s maps toward Democrats.
Newsom often recounts the moment Customs and Border Patrol agents appeared outside an August launch rally for the redistricting push. Within the first five minutes of a recent confab with influencers, he warned that Trump had offered “a preview of things to come” by deploying a “masked private army” to an event attended by the state’s top Democrats. He brought it up again last weekend as he signed legislation barring federal law enforcement from donning masks and curbing ICE’s presence in schools, and again in an interview with Stephen Colbert.
“That's Trump's America,” Newsom said at a recent news conference, “but it is not the America we've grown up in, and so we're pushing back.”
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that CPB regularly patrols “ALL areas of Los Angeles.”
“To Mr. Newsom’s chagrin, DHS is focused on enforcing the law, not on him,” she said.
The campaign’s debut ad warned about Trump “following the dictator’s playbook” with warrantless immigration arrests. In another spot, starring Alex Padilla, the California senator recounts being manhandled and cuffed by federal agents when trying to question Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in Los Angeles — a viral moment that horrified and enraged Democrats in California and beyond.
“When Donald Trump’s agents threw me to the ground, they were trying to silence all of us,” the senator says in the ad, which ran in English and Spanish. “This administration’s out of control.”
Opponents of the redistricting measure predict the Democrats’ immigration gambit will fall flat. Hector Barajas, a spokesperson for the No campaign, said voters — particularly those whose families fled authoritarian regimes — would be more receptive to the message that Prop 50 represents a self-serving power grab.
“Californians, especially Latinos, see right through this scheme,” Barajas said. “We know exactly what it looks like when career politicians try to grab more control behind closed doors.”
Democratic groups outside of California are moving more cautiously on the topic of border security as they gear up for a fight for the House. Deportations will likely be a secondary focus in battleground House races around the country, where “rising prices and a faltering economy will be the defining issue,” DCCC spokesman Viet Shelton said in a statement. He added, however, that immigration is another facet of Trump’s agenda that “voters are souring on.”
Polling consistently finds jobs and the economy remain the overriding issue for voters of both major parties — including for Latino men, a suddenly up-for-grabs demographic that shifted significantly in Trump’s favor in 2024. Mike Madrid, a Republican consultant who is an expert in Latino voting patterns and working for the opposition campaign, warned Democrats are unlikely to win back Latinos by focusing on deportations, even though the raids have been far more expansive than many anticipated.
“It’s not a priority issue, like the economy and affordability is, for Latinos,” Madrid said. “The main issue by wide measure, even in this extraordinary moment, is the economy, and the Democrats do not know how to talk about that. They are speaking to their base vote, who they’re going to get anyway, on the immigration raids.”
But there are signs that Trump has overplayed his hand. A series of polls show that voters increasingly disapprove of the president’s immigration agenda and that Trump is bleeding support among Latinos. A recent survey by the Latino Community Foundation found Latino voters in the state overwhelmingly believed Trump was “breaking his promises” by deporting nonviolent immigrants.
“They didn’t really believe it would happen,” said Gary Segura, who conducted the poll. “They’re seeing this very disruptive form of rounding people up, and they see it as overreach.”
A backlash has helped activate a vital part of Newsom’s redistricting coalition: powerful labor unions, who have poured millions of dollars into the campaign and switched on their formidable turnout machine. That includes SEIU California, whose president David Huerta was knocked to the ground and arrested in June while protesting raids in Los Angeles.
Two months later, in an emotional speech at the rally where immigration agents appeared outside, Huerta told attendees in Spanish that voters would never again support a candidate because of “the price of an egg instead of the well-being of our families.”
“I think we’re at a Proposition 187 moment around the country,” Huerta said in an interview, referencing a 1994 ballot initiative that restricted public benefits for immigrants and is credited with pushing a generation of California Latinos into Democratic politics. “A lot of folks are really re-evaluating their stance on immigration.”
Similarly, California Labor Federation leader Lorena Gonzalez, a former Democratic state lawmaker, said she had spoken to numerous members who supported Trump in 2024 but are now having second thoughts. The Labor Fed is targeting ads at union households that say Trump “is going too far” by having “immigrant workers roughed up and disappeared.”
“What we’re seeing now is a total shift even among our members, among working-class voters, saying: ‘Wait a minute, he said he was going after criminals,’” Gonzalez said in an interview. “Not my neighbor, not the guy who swings a hammer next to me.”
Proponents of the California redistricting campaign know many voters may not be following a tit-for-tat gerrymander fight with Texas. Zeroing in on Trump’s raids is a simpler line of persuasion, said Segura, the pollster.
“An easy message to sell is: If you want to stop masked men going into elementary schools, vote for Prop 50,” he said.
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