ICE arrests three kids at petting zoo.

Yesterday, residents of Sackets Harbor, a small town in deep-red, rural New York, held a protest after ICE agents arrested three kids and their mother. According local reports around 1,000 people showed up.

ICE arrested the children and their mother at “Old McDonald’s Dairy Farm and Zoo.” (Let me repeat that sentence: "ICE arrested the children and their mother at “Old McDonald’s Dairy Farm and Zoo”). The family had worked there for 15 years. The children are in the 3rd, 10th and 11th grades. So, around 17, 16 and … 8. They handcuffed them, put them in a van, and sent them to jail in Texas.

The Nazi Tom Honan, who lives in the area—the protesters went to his house— defended the raid. “It wasn’t a raid. It was a search warrant execution at a house where a family was found in the country illegally. ICE is doing everything by the book. Once the investigation gets to the point where we don’t have an interest in this family, then a decision will be made on release,” Honan said.

Their school principal wrote a public letter. “When I think of my third-grader’s experience my stomach twists and it is hard to breathe.”

“Please, think about how long every hour feels to a third grader in a detention center.”

What’s there to say? As I noted yesterday it’s hard to write anything anymore. How many times can you write something where the conclusion is, “These people are shameless vermin, nothing makes sense anymore, and the world is going to Hell?”

OK fine I’ll say something. This. This is what Democrats should be rallying around. Not just the perfidy of Trump and Honan, which they’re doing already. But the fact that actually, chances are, you like your immigrant neighbors and their kids, no matter how they got here and their current immigration status.

Large swaths of Americans view “illegal” immigration as a problem. Many don’t like immigration period. But when the issue hits home, they rally around the immigrants in their communities. The people that might be going to school with their kids. You saw it with the “Haitians eating cats” thing. The townspeople, even local law enforcement, rallied around the Haitian immigrants, even though they hadn’t been there very long. I forget what JD Vance said about a town in Pennsylvania that drew right-wing douchebags there with their iPhones to document immigrant villainy, but the footage they generated was mostly townspeople telling them to fuck off. To sum up: people view immigration as a problem in the abstract, but in their everyday lives it has either no impact or a positive impact. Immigration is a made-up problem.

The reason they worry about immigration in the abstract is that Republicans frame the issue by tapping into primal fears about chaos and change. Conflate immigration with crime. Conjure war metaphors like invasion. And then Democrats just kind of agree with them.

Yes, I know there’s a leftist critique that they depress wages. But point that critique at businesses—like the industrial titan Old McDonald. Seriously I’ve never been a fan of this critique. Why is an American worker more important than a non-American worker? Aren’t the proletariat of the world supposed to be uniting or whatever? Plus Trump officials have admitted that all the new factories that will spring from the earth thanks to Trump’s tariffs will be staffed by robots.

Anyway, going back to Democrats. Change the fucking narrative on immigration by trumpeting, endlessly, stories like the Haitian cat thing and the protest at Sackets Harbor. But not in the usual ways like, “Lol Trump said a crazy thing!” or “Poor children snatched away by Trump!”

Everyone already knows Trump says crazy things. Already, normal people at least, don’t delight in the suffering of children. These tactics alone won’t change the narrative. No. Promote really really promote the idea that immigration of all kinds is good, not bad, and certainly not dangerous. Promote the business owners who were like, “The Haitian immigrants never come to work late.” Draft campaigns around guys like that. I bet the school principal in a quaint, small town who wrote that letter is sympathetic as fuck. Put her on TV. Have politicians descend on the town like it’s an unfortunate Iowa diner.

Democrats can shed “immigration” from the trifecta of albatross issues (the others are crime and “wokeness”) that sink the party no matter how hard they try to copy Republicans. It’s happened before. It used to be that important elections swung on gay rights: Republicans would fearmonger about LGBTQ people and Democrats would fold, ceding the narrative to Republicans.

Republicans invented and exploit the specter of the immigrant criminal rapist. Every other phrase that comes out of JD Vance’s mouth is some version of “immigrant criminal rapists.” In much the same way, for years, Republicans profited from the specter of men marrying 10 wives and a tree or whatever if we legalized gay marriage. The narrative and public opinion can change! Democrats just have to do something to change it. It’ll be hard. But that’s their job, not abetting Israel’s genocide, so the should work and push and shove the Overton Window on immigration until it creaks back to the time when fucking Ronald Reagan granted mass amnesty.