This is a guest post by David Leopold, America’s Voice Legal Advisor and former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
On Tuesday, Nov. 3, the American people spoke loud and clear with one voice: Enough. Enough violence. Enough cruelty. Enough chaos. Mass deportation must end.
Voters handed Democrats the House and the Senate in an election where Trump’s war on immigrants was on the ballot. For nearly two years, this administration promised to go after dangerous criminals. Instead, it turned its fury on the very immigrants who embody America’s core values: family, community, and hard work. Trump didn’t send ICE after “the worst of the worst.” He sent masked agents in military gear to seize parents and children at immigration court, disappear longtime neighbors into a maze of prisons, banish people to foreign gulags, and terrorize immigrants and U.S. citizens all over the country.
Americans saw the violence first-hand in their communities or beamed into their home night after night. They watched children torn from parents, neighbors dragged from their cars, U.S. citizens murdered in the streets, and a government at war with its own people. The rights under our Constitution were ripped apart. The American people did not need a lawyer to tell them this was wrong, lawless and unjust. Their intuition and conscience told them. And when they voted they answered with a thunderous “No!”
This election was a demand to restore due process, fairness, and humanity. And Americans reset the table. From deep-red Texas to blue-state Maine, Republicans lost their seats because voters refused to keep feeding a vicious, out-of-control machine. Voters saw the Trump administration’s bad governance. The message could not have been louder or clearer.
So now that the country has spoken, will Trump’s assault on immigration finally end?
Not by itself. Ballots alone do not unlock a single ICE prison cell. Families are still behind bars tonight. The voters have done their part; now the Democratic Congress must do its part. It must act boldly and without apology, knowing it carries a clear mandate to hold Trump accountable, not to enable his lawlessness.
On day one, it should take three steps.
First, wield the power of the purse. It is Congress’s strongest weapon. Republicans have already poured roughly $145 billion into ICE, much of it to cage human beings. But the annual spending bills that fund most of Homeland Security are now in Democratic hands. Not one more dollar should flow without basic guardrails the public already supports: visible identification of ICE agents, body cameras, and judicial warrants.
Second, use subpoena power to drag the truth into the light. Americans deserve to know where ICE is holding people; more than 16,000 have vanished from its online locator, as if they never existed. The American people deserve answers for millions of immigration status revocations and a collapse in citizenship approvals. And Congress must hold accountable everyone responsible, including the ICE and Border Patrol agents who carried out unlawful, cruel, and deadly actions across America. The people have demanded that it stop.
Third, reclaim Congress’s Article I authority as a co-equal branch of government. For too long, Congress looked away and let Trump rule by executive order and social media posts. Those days must end. Trump may keep abusing executive power. But if he does, he will do so in open defiance of the clear will of the American people who have demanded that Congress end Trump’s chaos and restore the rule of law.
Due process is not a Democratic value or a Republican value. It is an American value: the promise that no government stands above the law and no person falls beneath its protection. Everyone facing arrest, detention, or deportation deserves a fair hearing before a judge and a real chance of getting a lawyer. Without that, no one should be locked away or banished to a country they barely remember or have never seen.
On Tuesday, the American people threw out the enablers of a vicious out of control anti-immigrant ICE machine. Congress’s job now is simple and urgent: end Trump’s lawlessness and restore accountability, order, and, above all, human decency; make sure the Constitution still means something for everyone within our borders, and that cruelty ends now.
The American people have spoken.
