ICE tyranny is what democracy looks like

ICE has now announced the end to its recent immigration enforcement “surge” in Minnesota, after its tactics resulted in the death of two people. As ICE tactics continue to undermine due process rights, the New York Times editorial board and kindred others have reflected on the role ICE plays in a broader challenge the Trump administration poses to democracy.

Trump’s immigration policies are dramatically unjust. But meaningful reflection on what’s wrong  with them means recognizing an uncomfortable fact: they are not “undemocratic” but all too much a product of democracy.

It’s an uncomfortable fact that Donald Trump won the 2024 election, not just in the electoral college but by 2 million in the popular vote. And he did it by loudly campaigning for his immigration policy. He promised to carry out “the largest deportation effort in American history,” and his running mate suggested starting with deporting 1 million people.

Remorseful Trump voters have no excuse for thinking they voted for something else.

The signs of Trump’s democratic roots are often hidden behind critics’ evasive relabeling: his “populism.” His immigration policy aims to scandalize a broad class of voting citizens by demonizing the non-citizen minority. “Populism” is just another name for the democracy that certain elites don’t happen to like. They go back to calling it “democracy” when the majority targets the rights of minorities they happen to despise, like businessmen.

In its basic, original meaning, “democracy” just means majority rule unconstrained by checks and balances designed to protect individual rights.

Remember: the Athenian democracy voted to put Socrates to death. The governments of southern U.S. states — and of the Confederacy — elected politicians and passed popular laws that enslaved millions of African Americans. Even abolition didn’t stop Southern majorities from restricting their rights and tolerating lynch mobs under Jim Crow. Majority rule unconstrained by the rights of individuals is majority tyranny. 

Many have characterized Trump’s policies and ICE’s tactics as autocratic or even fascistic. They have a point. But democratic fascism is no contradiction. Remember, the Nazi party first rose to power in Germany after being freely elected in 1932.

Trump is not the only one to blame for the rise of fascistic immigration policies. The laws that classify 10 to 15 million people in the U.S. as “illegal” have been on the books for decades. They were passed by duly elected representatives — including the Democrats. It’s these laws that mandate treating immigrants as having no right to travel, work, or live peacefully among us. 

The current labyrinthine set of foreign worker quotas that dispenses jobs by permission of the government was first adopted in 1952 by a Democratically controlled Congress and finalized in 1965 during the heyday of LBJ’s Great Society. Even when “progressive” Democrats controlled both Congress and the White House in 2009 and 2021, they didn’t prioritize changing the laws.

Democrats have evaded their responsibility for these laws by choosing not to enforce them, as in Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. But lax enforcement only played into the hands of “law and order” politicians. When Republicans decided to enforce the laws on the books, of course it required massive fascistic intrusion into and destruction of the lives of immigrants and citizens alike.

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we should recall that the Founders themselves warned us against unconstrained majority rule (see Madison’s Federalist #10). They gave us a system in which our elected officials are constrained by law with checks and balances designed to limit their ability to violate individual rights. 

This is sometimes what people mean by our “democracy,” but that’s a misnomer. The Founders gave us not a democracy, but a constitutional republic, a system premised on limiting government’s function solely to protecting the individual’s rights. 

The laws Trump is enforcing are not “undemocratic.” But they do violate constitutional rights. Even non-citizens have a right to liberty. Laws restricting immigrant labor violate the freedom to work and engage in trade. But these are freedoms Democrats long ago sold down the river when they sought ever-increasing regulations on the freedom of businessmen. 

If Trump’s ICE now assaults procedural rights like due process, it’s because he like so many other Presidents have habituated action by executive order. This is enabled by a Congress that has delegated so much power to the executive through laws (like the immigration laws) aimed at achieving collectivist policy goals that ignore individual rights. Such laws require the oversight of a massive and intrusive administrative state. And the Supreme Court tolerates it all because it is unwilling to apply “strict scrutiny” to any but the most blatantly anti-liberty laws. It recently described the concept of “liberty” as too “capacious” to define clearly, treating with deference any laws adopted through . . . the “democratic process.”

When a president enforces popular laws passed by Congress, and is unconstrained by a docile Supreme Court — the chaotic, tyrannical presence of ICE thugs on our streets “is what democracy looks like.”

Voters made this possible. They need to reflect on the consequences of their past decisions and try to reverse course. Paradoxically, they need to vote for politicians and policies who commit to protect individual rights as sacrosanct — even in the face of what voters demand. 

Ben Bayer, Ph.D. in philosophy, is a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute.