Change seems impossible until it doesn't

The killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis yesterday feels like a significant turning point in what was already an awful and authoritarian situation. In some sense, the questions about abolishing ICE seem somewhat beside the larger point that the federal government has declared war on its citizens. ICE is just the mechanism. But sweeping political change actually happens at a granular, institutional and even mundane level. Questions about how major institutional change can be possible, even when it seems politically impossible, are still relevant even in this terrifying and emotional moment.

Democrats, at least a segment of them, are extremely cautious on this issue. There’s a widespread perception that immigration made the difference in the 2024 presidential election, with voters expressing more trust in Trump on the issue. In addition, there was a perception that the slogan “defund the police” hurt Democrats in 2020 – though the evidence on this is mixed. Reaching further back into history, Democrats have often been receptive to the explanation that they lost elections because they were too radical, too close to minority interests, too soft on crime, too invested in identity politics. Perceived backlash from 2020, in particular, seems to be driving centrist Democrats away from anything that sounds like a radical slogan. Such slogans, they’ve argued, are political poison, impractical.

American history is not short on political institutions and arrangements that seemed permanent until they weren’t. The cases I keep coming back to (because I just wrote a book about them) are slavery and Jim Crow/civil rights. When Lincoln and others were founding the Republican Party with the express purpose of limiting the expansion of slavery, actually ending the institution seemed like a remote possibility. While opposing the expansion of slavery, Lincoln conceded that the Constitution limited the ability to eliminate it where it existed. This is a difficult example, because it wasn’t until a bloody and bitter civil war that the 13^th amendment ended slavery. But the underlying politics did shift: by threatening the integrity of the union, the slave states overplayed their hand. And over the course of the war, it became clear that the cause of the union had to be fused with the cause of ending slavery. Political meanings could shift, and political actors could use their power in new ways.

A less bloody – though not without significant sacrifice – example is the passage of Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s. The Congressional politics of this issue had seemed nearly intractable for decades. The Jim Crow South was a violent system, with violence primarily aimed at a minority community. As the movement to protect the political, civil, and human rights of African Americans grew, the violence spilled over to white Americans who were active in the movement. (Starting to sound familiar?) Then, as now, policy change depended on the ability to put together an effective coalition in Congress. By the 1960s, this had been tried for decades – with proposed anti-lynching legislation dating back to the 1920s and 1930s. The 1957 Civil Rights Act was the first such bill passed by Congress since 1875, and its passage required multiple concessions that weakened the bill. Several factors built up to a breaking point in the 1960s: more pressure from the movement, more violence against peaceful protesters, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, whose legacy was invoked by his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, as he pushed for the final passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

One of the lessons of civil rights – that images of violence and injustice can shift public opinion – seems highly relevant as we watch public support for eliminating ICE grow. And in some ways, the literal charge to zero out the budget for ICE and/or CBP, or even eliminate them from the government altogether, is a less complicated lift than ending slavery or establishing a federal civil rights apparatus. Both past cases required growing the capacity of the federal government. Current demands are for the opposite. Our current immigration enforcement institutions date back only a few decades, to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. They don’t inform major parts of our economic and social life the way that these previous racial orders did.

For today’s highly risk-averse Democrats, taking serious action to eliminate ICE and seriously rethink immigration policy will require a shift in thinking. They won’t ever be completely safe from someone saying that they are weak on terror or soft on crime, but they have to be more afraid that a human being will be summarily executed at the hands of the state, in the name of border enforcement, on their watch. This feels like a long way from the politics of the 2024 election, in which both parties scrambled to show their border toughness credentials.

But the horrifying things that we’ve seen in the past year and the past month may have altered those politics, reshaping the risks and opportunities for serious change in the long run.

A lot will have to happen between now and then – significant change, perhaps in both parties, with regard to attitudes about immigration enforcement, and a change in the balance of power. I don’t have any way of knowing what threats the administration might pose to the 2026 elections, but I imagine they will try. None of us know what 2028 will bring, either. There are really no precedents for the amount of power this administration has tried to consolidate, and the decline of the institutions that would normally check these efforts. At the same time, this moment won’t last forever.

And when the opportunity for real change happens, there’s one more important lesson from the major, impossible transformations of the past. Policy change needs to be accompanied – and followed by – imagination about alternatives. After the end of slavery and Jim Crow, backlash forces defined the next period of politics, in part because the politicians who pushed for change didn’t have a blueprint for how to link political and social change, or a clearly articulated vision for what society should look like going forward.

Democrats have already been caught in this problem once, bungling the politics of the Biden years by focusing too much on a return to the old ways and rules, and not enough on imagining new alternatives to Trump and Trumpism. Eliminating ICE and CBP will be the easy part; shaping a new conversation about immigration, state power, and rule of law – in a fearful and divided nation – will be much more difficult. But if we’ve learned anything in the past month, from the suffering in Minnesota, it’s that this is not sustainable and there’s no going back to a pre-MAGA politics. And if we’ve learned anything from our own history, it’s that the risky and impossible path has more promise than it initially seems.