A year of disruptive and sometimes deadly deployments of ICE and other federal agents to cities around the country, paired with relatively indiscriminate and clearly racist detentions of people with and without legal status (even including U.S. citizens), has managed to turn public opinion on its head: Once the strongest issue for Donald Trump and the Republicans writ large, immigration is politically up for grabs. Voters now loathe ICE and have a newfound appreciation for immigration. The Democrats have attempted to capitalize on this shift in public opinion by holding up funding for the Department of Homeland Security over demands for some basic constraints on ICE and Customs and Border Protection. But some political operators see a greater opportunity here for the party to stake out a position on immigration that’s entirely distinct from MAGA’s poisonous vision. In truth, the moment for that was years ago, but the next best time is now. The problem is, these folks are still—even after everything that’s happened this past year—overcorrecting for Donald Trump’s electoral success. The new would-be populist Democratic think tank Searchlight—founded by Adam Jentleson, the former chief of staff to Senator John Fetterman—recently released an immigration policy brief that is not a departure so much as a return to what hasn’t worked. Titled “No More Back Doors” and written by Blas Nuñez-Neto, a former assistant secretary of homeland security under President Biden, the paper urges Democrats to seize the moment by “recapturing the public’s trust on immigration.” It gestures at centrist orthodoxy like limited paths to citizenship for Dreamers and other limited groups, while ticking off right-wing wish-list items like building more border wall, deploying surveillance technology, sending migrants to third countries, and “no interior release for those waiting—even for families.”Searchlight’s basic premise is that a posture of heavy enforcement is the new normal and Democrats should do the sane version of it. If the Democrats follow these recommendations, they will have failed yet again to understand that public opinion on this issue is mutable. They will also squander what is—and here I agree with Searchlight—a golden opportunity to stake out a new path. I just happen to believe in a path that’s both humane and popular. A month before the 2024 election, I wrote at TNR that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and other party leaders were making a significant political error in responding to the Trump campaign’s anti-immigrant depravations by insisting that they would be just as effective at restricting immigration flows. She lost, of course, but to this day it’s a broadly accepted narrative that her loss was in part because the Biden administration was hounded by the left wing into backing open borders—something Biden did not actually do but that is accepted as fact not only by Republicans but by moderate Democratic policymakers and centrist pundits like The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf.One of Biden’s first big immigration decisions was leaving in place Stephen Miller’s most wide-ranging border restriction, Title 42, which for years was used to shut down asylum claims at the border using the pretext of the Covid pandemic (despite the fact that by the time the restrictions were issued, the United States was already the global epicenter). When that policy was finally wound down, the administration turned to another Miller-devised restriction: refusing to consider asylum claims from immigrants unless they’d already sought asylum in another country they’d passed through on their way to the U.S. The fiction that Biden did away with border enforcement was driven in large part by a real growth in border encounters at the start of his term, but this had more to do with the lifting of many Covid restrictions and social instability in Central and Latin America than it did with Biden’s border policies. (Title 42 itself also incentivized repeat crossing attempts that were counted each as a new encounter.) Near the end of Biden’s term, just prior to the 2024 election, border encounters had fallen back to levels lower than at the end of Trump’s first term. Yet ask any given voter, and they’re liable to tell you that Biden rolled out the welcome mat to undocumented immigrants. This public narrative solidified because it’s much easier to fill an empty cup. Democrats, lacking any cohesive alternate vision on immigration, limited themselves to saying they’d simply be better at enforcement than Trump. Voters, unsurprisingly, did not find that to be a credible message. Of course, they turned out to hate Trump’s immigration policies—they either didn’t pay attention to his campaign platform or didn’t believe him—but this stove touching now gives Democrats the chance to put forward a contrasting approach.The Democrats cannot define themselves merely in opposition to Trump, though.