Cardenas: That’s right. That’s right. Going back to my point about humanizing this issue, Reverend Budde was really powerful in really making it clear: This is about people. This is about whether people that are picking our crops, that are working very hard, that they’re paying our taxes. And [she was] just really [powerful in] challenging these ideas that Trump is just presenting without really any nuance.
We have to challenge it. We cannot accept it. We cannot become complacent to it. We have to call it out because, at the end of the day, this is about people. And the point that I made earlier, it’s not just about immigrants, it is about our American families, about our communities. The more we drive home that point, the more people will understand the devastating consequences of Trump’s agenda.
Sargent: I will say one other really dispiriting difference between now and the aftermath of Trump’s first election. You may recall that in the 2016 campaign, he was calling Mexicans “rapists” and “killers” and everything like that, but he was still saying in some way, OK, we just want to go after illegal immigrants, not legal ones. In this campaign, they went straight out and said, You know all those people who are in Springfield, Ohio, legally, those Haitians who are here on temporary protected status, we’re going to make them illegal. They said straight out, We’re going after people who are here legally as well, and they won. That’s not something that gives me a whole lot of confidence that Democrats will take it on.
