Jamelle Bouie writes:

The goal of [Senator Chris] Van Hollen’s journey to El Salvador — during which he was stopped by Salvadoran soldiers and turned away from the prison itself — was to bring attention to Abrego Garcia and invite greater scrutiny of the administration’s removal program and its disregard for due process. It was a success. And that success has inspired other Democrats to make the same trip, in hopes of turning more attention to the administration’s removal program and putting more pressure on the White House to obey the law.

Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey is reportedly organizing a trip to El Salvador, and a group of House Democrats led by Representative Robert Garcia of California arrived on Monday. “While Donald Trump continues to defy the Supreme Court, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is being held illegally in El Salvador after being wrongfully deported,” Representative Garcia said in a statement. “That is why we’re here, to remind the American people that kidnapping immigrants and deporting them without due process is not how we do things in America.”

“We are demanding the Trump administration abide by the Supreme Court decision and give Kilmar and the other migrants mistakenly sent to El Salvador due process in the United States,” Garcia added.

All of this negative attention has had an effect. It’s not just that the president’s overall approval rating has dipped into the low 40s — although it has — but that he’s losing his strong advantage on immigration as well. Fifty percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration, according to a recent poll from Quinnipiac University, and a new Reuters poll shows Trump slightly underwater on the issue with a 45 percent approval to 46 percent disapproval.

Americans are even negative on the specifics of the president’s handling of immigration. Most Americans, 82 percent, say the president should follow federal court rulings even when he disagrees with them. A smaller but still significant majority says the president should stop deporting people in defiance of court orders. And Americans are broadly opposed to the deportation of undocumented immigrants who have lived in America for long periods of time, or who have children who are U.S. citizens, or who are law-abiding except for breaking immigration law.

Americans may have liked to hear the president talk tough on immigration, but when it came to real actions affecting real people, they are much less supportive. And in traveling to El Salvador, dramatizing the plight of Abrego Garcia and attacking Trump on the most unpopular aspect of his immigration policies, Democrats like Van Hollen are creating the kinds of negative attention for Trump that could turn more Americans against the president’s immigration policies.

These Democrats are also highlighting the vital importance of political leadership after months during which it seemed to have vanished from liberal politics in the United States. [Continue reading…]