With Trump taking office, some Democrats and pro-immigration groups ponder new ideas

As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office and carry out what he has promised will be the “largest deportation effort in U.S. history,” momentum is gaining among immigration rights groups and some Democrats for policies that would move the party to the right on immigration. The shift some are advocating would push to cut the overall number of people coming into the country while at the same time advocating for revamping pathways for immigrants to come into the country legally based on the needs of the economy and humanitarian relief. 

Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar, who represents El Paso, Texas, presented similar ideas in a 2023 bill, the Dignity Act, with a Republican colleague, Rep. Maria Salazar of Florida. The bill would have mandated that all employers of a certain size participate in the E-Verify program to check that employees are authorized to work in the U.S. and provided $25 billion to border security, while also allowing a path to citizenship for Dreamers and improved visa programs to fill key sectors of the U.S. economy, such as farming and health care. 

The bill was never brought for a vote in the House, but Escobar says she has reasons to hope some of those ideas may see the light of day in this Congress, even with Trump promising crackdowns on immigrants. 

Escobar noted Trump will likely need legislative action on immigration to carry out his campaign promises. 

“If they want to change the law, they will very likely need to work with Democrats,” she told NBC News. “That’s especially true in the House, where the margin is so slim.”

“The reality is we still need immigration reform and we need immigrants in this country, and no amount of demonizing them will change that fact,” Escobar said. “We have an aging population. Families are not as large as they used to be. We need immigrants of all skill sets.”

Still, some Democrats in both the House and Senate are reluctant to step into the debate until they can see what Trump has in store regarding deportations. Several declined to be interviewed for this article for that reason.

In the first Trump administration, Democrats offered a foil to Trump’s hard-line immigration measures, including separating children from their parents, forcing asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico, and deporting immigrants back to countries that were not their own. They were more likely to advocate for the protection of asylum-seekers than to talk about ramping up border security to limit those who could claim asylum at the southern border. 

But with Trump’s second victory, some Democrats have changed their strategy. 

To some extent the shift began during the campaign, as Trump criticized President Joe Biden’s border policies. In a bipartisan immigration package ultimately squelched when pro-Trump members refused to bring it to a vote in the House, Democrats largely agreed to measures that would have increased border security. Now, as Trump prepares to take office, some are hopeful some of the ideas from that bipartisan package as well as Escobar and Salazar’s Dignity Act could have a second life. 

Many of the ideas from the Dignity Act are included and taken a step further in a plan released Wednesday by FWD.us, a prominent pro-immigration organization chaired by David Plouffe, the 2008 Obama-Biden campaign manager who most recently served as a senior adviser to the Harris-Walz campaign.

The plan was written by Andrea Flores, a former administration official under Biden and President Barack Obama.

“We must widen the aperture of the current policy debate, learn from the past decade of policies that failed to manage mass migration, and build political support for a more effective set of solutions,” wrote Flores, who is now the vice president of immigration policy and campaigns at FWD.us. 

The plan attempts to solve the problem of overwhelming border numbers that plagued the Biden administration, a problem Flores traces back to the Obama administration, when there was a sharp increase in the number of migrants claiming asylum at the border in 2014. Flores also points to an over-reliance by multiple administrations, including the first Trump administration, on Mexico and other Western Hemisphere countries to stop the flow of migrants to the southern border. 

One of the most developed proposals in the paper builds on a Biden administration policy that allowed 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to apply to live and work in the United States for up to two years with the help of a U.S.-based sponsor. 

The program has brought in over 800,000 migrants but has had problems with possible sponsor fraud, as NBC News previously reported. 

In the policy proposal, Flores said a better legal pathways plan would allow the United States to better select migrants who qualify for asylum or who may fill a specific need in the economy, similar to Escobar’s bill. She also argued the program should allow migrants to stay longer than two years.  

The “temporary nature” of the Biden policy “ensures that the majority of beneficiaries will still ultimately apply for asylum and enter the years-long asylum backlog,” she wrote. 

In an interview with NBC News, Flores said Trump’s plan for mass deportations does not solve problems related to border security, but she believes new policies that reduce migration to the border should be pushed by Democrats now.

She added that it’s important for Democrats to have an answer on the border security debate rather than to focus solely on immigrants, like Dreamers, who are already living in the United States, and their possible pathway to citizenship. 

“It is totally disconnected and not evidence-based to say that removing what will have to be largely Mexican nationals will have any deterrent effect on Mexican numbers, which are not the actual issue at the border,” Flores said. “Our immigration policies are all about the border right now, which is why it’s really important for Democrats to have a coherent answer on that piece.”