“Simply, Trump has been a terrible, terrible leader and people are pissed”
For months now, the polling has been unequivocal: Americans have only been growing more and more outraged at Donald Trump’s disastrous agenda, including on immigration. Last week’s blowout elections only confirmed this dissatisfaction and sent a message that should be impossible to ignore: this agenda is backfiring spectacularly.
Not only did key allies of the administration lose top races in New Jersey and Virginia, Americans rebuked his party in “local races – school board, city council, mayor, county – across the country,” Simon Rosenberg noted in his Hopium Chronicles newsletter. “Simply, Trump has been a terrible, terrible leader and people are pissed. He has done clear material harm to the American people and our country, on purpose, by design.” Just listen to them in their own words.
“I’m very sad for this,” a New Jersey voter who shared that he supported Trump in the past said about his mass deportation agenda, noting that many targeted immigrants are hard workers. Family, he said, is “the most important thing in life.”
Q: Why did you vote for Mikie Sherrill?NJ voter: I voted for Trump before, but now I look at Trump different. The economy does not look good. And immigration, I'm very sad, because the family is the most important thing in life.
— FactPost (@factpostnews.bsky.social) 2025-11-04T22:34:18.16997089Z
In Virginia, another voter said she was also motivated by Trump’s mass deportation agenda, which is resulting in a new family separation crisis that has left some children – including American citizens – stranded without their parents. “How I see how things are going, like with families being separated, as a human being, as a mother, separating families, especially children from their mothers or fathers, I don’t believe in that,” said the voter.
VA voter on why she is supporting Spanberger:"I became a citizen 20 years ago. I see how things are going on like with families being separated. As a human being, as a mother, separating families, I don't believe in that. So that made me come out and vote."
— FactPost (@factpostnews.bsky.social) 2025-11-04T22:28:48.237138028Z
The kidnappings of immigrant community members were “a big factor” for one New Jersey voter who didn’t participate in last year’s elections but felt the need to get out and cast a ballot this year. “My mom was an immigrant,” the voter said through tears. “My grandparents are immigrants. I’m first-generation and honestly like everything … it’s just not right.”
Q: We're seeing something unprecedented in the US with these mass deportations. Is that a factor at all in your vote for Mikie Sherrill?Voter: Of course, it's a big factor. We're people. My mom was an immigrant, my grandparents are immigrants. It's just not right.
— FactPost (@factpostnews.bsky.social) 2025-11-04T21:57:36.945518044Z
Other voters expressed the need for “hope” during “dark” times. Even some Republican elected officials seemed to be sounding the alarm, including about Latino voters trending sharply toward Democrats due in no small part to immigration. But rather than adjusting course, the administration only doubled down. Just hours after the administration was rebuked in major part due to its mass deportation policy, ICE stormed a Spanish immersion day care in Chicago “to detain a child care worker, a scene that before this year would have been unheard of in the United States,” The 19th reported. The outlet said that the worker pleaded to agents that she had papers. It didn’t matter to them (nor is this an isolated instance of agents not caring about legal status).
“Rep. Mike Quigley, a Democrat representing Illinois, said ICE agents followed the teacher into the school ‘without a warrant and abducted her in front of her students,’” The 19th said.
Mother speaks out after ICE raids #Chicago day care center.“They are coming for all our children!”#immigration
“Child care centers were previously protected under a ‘sensitive locations’ directive that advised ICE to not conduct enforcement in places like schools and day cares,” The 19th continued. “But President Donald Trump removed that protection on his first day in office. Arrests near centers have increased across the country, but rarely have reports surfaced of an arrest inside a facility in front of children.” For other families, the fear has been palpable enough that they’re keeping their kids away from school, period. “Some students stopped coming to school entirely or transferred to different schools in other parts of the country,” one teacher in Michigan told NEA Today.
The termination of this “sensitive locations” policy was a key demand from Project 2025, and additionally makes hospitals and houses of worship vulnerable to the kinds of reprehensible raids like the one witnessed by terrified children in Chicago. Not only are these kids poorer for losing a trusted adult, our nation is growing poorer, weaker and more dangerous due to the callous cruelty and chaos of these policies:
- In the Chicago area, the epicenter of the administration’s immigration cruelty and harms, masked immigration agents disrupted an area Girl Scout troop food drive; harmed a 1-year old child when a federal agent lobbed pepper spray into a family’s car at a local Sam’s Club parking lot; and brandished their guns at a local official.
- In the Boston area, a video showed mass deportation agents violently detaining a young mother in Fitchburg as her husband—holding their toddler—appeared to have a seizure after agents struck and pinned him. Department of Homeland Security officials later accused the man of actually faking the medical emergency.
- An industry that was a key voting bloc for Trump in 2024 is growing increasingly worried that mass deportation will destroy its workforce. “Without these immigrants, we would struggle,” Wisconsin dairy farmer John Rosenow told Iowa Public Radio. “We wouldn’t exist basically, and we wouldn’t want to exist either.” And there’s a reason for them to be nervous. Just last month, Trump’s own Agriculture Department admitted that mass deportation is hurting farms and our wallets.
You’d think last Tuesday’s results would at least force a pause in the administration’s strategy (if you can even call it that). But, after raiding a day care center, the administration also issued pardons to top allies who sought to help Trump overturn the rightful results of the 2020 presidential election. This came as the need to protect democracy was also a priority for other voters on Tuesday.
“The ‘full, complete, and unconditional’ pardon applies only to federal crimes, and none of the dozens of Trump allies named in the proclamation were ever charged federally over the bid to subvert the election won by Democrat Joe Biden. It doesn’t impact state charges, though state prosecutions stemming from the 2020 election have hit a dead end or are just limping along,” CNBC reports. “The move, however, underscores Trump’s continued efforts to promote the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from him even though courts around the country and U.S. officials found no evidence of fraud that could have affected the outcome.”
Meanwhile, a Jan. 6 insurrectionist who also sought to subvert democracy in service of Trump and was later rewarded with presidential clemency now faces kidnapping and sexual assault charges. The defendant’s Jan. 6 case “was unique among the tonnage of Capitol riot prosecutions, because he was the only defendant accused of pulling and firing a gun while on Capitol grounds,” CBS News noted.
John Banuelos, previously knowns as #Cowpoke, "climbed a scaffolding outside the U.S. Capitol building, pulled a gun out of his waistband and fired two shots into the sky."
— Teddy Wilson (@reportbywilson.bsky.social) 2024-03-28T00:22:54.369Z
But the fact is that we’re all now less safe under this administration. Nationally, Trump has reassigned federal agents who were formerly tasked with combatting drug trafficking, child sex predators, and other security risks, ordering them to instead aid in his mass deportation obsessions. The Homeland Security Investigation (HSI) division alone, which focuses on combating terrorism, child exploitation, and human trafficking, has lost its entire unit – all 6,000 special agents – to his mass deportation agenda, USA Today reported in February.
His other priorities include demolishing an entire wing of the People’s House in order to construct an ostentatious, $300 million golden ballroom funded in part by major corporations and individuals seeking to curry favor with him. But hungry children, seniors, and veterans? Too bad. Working parents sitting around the kitchen table worried about how they’ll pay for their bills? Too bad. Day care workers in Chicago – and all across the country – worried that today could be their last day at work? Too bad.
The American people, however, continue to make their disapproval unequivocable, notably in last month’s historic “No Kings” protests, and now in Tuesday’s elections. Their message has been clear: we’re going to keep fighting, we’re going to keep standing up for our neighbors, and we’re going to keep standing firm in the values we hold dear.
Trump “is pardoning actual criminals and conspiracy theorists while devastating families, terrorizing entire cities and destroying key industries,” commented America’s Voice Chief of Programs Joanna Kuebler. “Last week’s elections could not have been more clear: the presidential pardons, lavish parties and economic and anti-immigrant chaos have reached their limit for the American people.”
