Ruben Gallego gets worked up when he talks about his party’s immigration platform. Democrats, he says, have been too “afraid” of taking a more assertive approach to the border—and, in so doing, opened the door for Donald Trump to move on his draconian, unconstitutional agenda. “It just drives me nuts,” he told me.
This week, the Arizona senator released his own plan to improve the nation’s immigration system—one the Arizona Democrat says would strengthen border security, while also protecting immigrant rights, ensuring pathways to citizenship, and establishing more avenues to come to the United States legally. “We don’t have to choose between border security and immigration reform,” he said, announcing his proposal Monday. “We can and should do both.”
In an interview, which has been lightly edited for clarity and length, the swing-state senator discussed his border plan, criticized Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship, and explained the lessons he wants his party to take from the successful 2024 campaign he ran in an otherwise dismal year for the Democrats: “Denying reality does not change reality,” Gallego told me. “You can be a very good Democrat and be for strong border security.”
Vanity Fair: The Supreme Court recently heard arguments related to Trump’s effort to restrict birthright citizenship. Trump beforehand said that allowing birthright citizenship makes the US a “stupid country.” What do you make of all that?
Senator Ruben Gallego: You know, in my campaign, where I won some of the same voters that Donald Trump won, I traveled the whole state, and not one person ever asked me to end birthright citizenship. Number one, the Constitution protects it. Number two, it really is what makes this country great. The fact that people who are born here are US citizens is what makes us that melting pot, right? You see other countries that don’t have birthright citizenship, you have problems with assimilation there. We don’t, I think, because this country automatically loves these kids—and these kids, in return, automatically love the country. If you break that and you start creating second-class citizens, you’re going to have bigger problems in the future that don’t exist right now.
Trump won in November, proposing this hardline approach we’ve seen. What do you think your party has been missing on immigration and the border, and how do you think your proposal addresses them?
The proposal is really what I heard on the campaign trail. Look, the voters who cared about immigration in Arizona? We won their vote. We were more trusted than Kari Lake on the border.
There were voters who went into the voting booth saying, I trust Trump, and I trust Ruben Gallego on border issues. And the reason we are still losing—and I say the royal we—to Trump is because we’re just saying what we’re against and not what we’re for. And we need to make it very clear that we are for border security. That’s what this plan talks about. We are for stopping the abuse of the asylum system. That’s what this plan is about. We’re about getting people out of the shadows. And we recognize we can’t make all 12 million people legal US citizens—but we do recognize that Americans understand the special place in their hearts for Dreamers, and for the spouses of US citizens. They should have a pathway, and everyone else should at least be able to stay in this country without fear of deportation if they haven’t done any serious crimes. And so the fact that Democrats can’t even start with a point A and saying like, Yes, having a secure border is good and we should continue to figure out how to do that, and then you can move on to talk about point B—I think that’s what makes it very hard for a lot of people to take us seriously on the overall conversation of immigration reform.
I’ve seen at least a couple of House Democrats express support for the plan this week. What kind of reaction have you heard from other colleagues? Have you gotten a sense that there’s more of an appetite for these kinds of proposals now?
Certainly, on the Senate side, a lot of Democrats have been starting to read it. And my position to them is like, you don’t even have to agree with everything here. You could even add stuff to it. But you have to be able to point to something. It is important to at least have some of the core elements. Like, why don’t we agree that the goal of the Democratic Party should be to have as near zero illegal border crossings as possible, right? It doesn’t mean we have to be assholes about it, either. You could have well-trained border control, you could have asylum judges—all these things. But it should be a functional goal for us to reduce illegal border crossings, and it doesn’t mean that that attitude somehow transfers over to how we deal with Dreamers, how we deal with all the other different situations. It just means that, like, this is a functional aspect of governance, and if we can’t show that we can govern there, the American voters are not going to trust us when we say we need to do something about these poor people that have been in the shadows for generations.
I also saw a White House reaction to your proposal—Kush Desai told Fox News, “We don’t need a new bill to secure our southern border…We just needed President Trump back in office.” I wonder what you make of that. It seems to me that it points not only to an opportunity for the Democrats politically, but also to advance serious policy.
The thing that points out the most is how scared [Republicans] are about this common sense approach. Like, they classify this as “amnesty.” This is a very moderate approach. We’re not trying to make 12 million people US citizens. We’re saying, Hey, we understand where the American public is. We’re actually backing up some of the president’s positions. He says Dreamers should be US citizens. He’s also said if you’re in this country illegally, but you’re working a job, you should also be able to stay here. He said I’m for legal immigration. But the problem is, [Republicans] are so scared of losing the one thing that they’re actually polling okay at. They need Democrats to be looked at as being soft on the border. Because if that doesn’t continue, then they start losing elections like the one they lost in Arizona, right?
But is there anything that can be done that would prevent Republicans from accusing Democrats of being soft on the border?
Democrats have to show that they’re not. We could do that by legislation or by just saying it, right? But this doesn’t mean that we shirk our responsibilities to stop the abuses that happen. Because, again, the American public doesn’t want families separated. The American public doesn’t want chaos in our communities. They don’t want children to be deported. We can still fight for that, while also saying, You know what? I’m for a secure border.
Now, the difference between me and Donald Trump is that Donald Trump is burning through money so fast to secure the border. He’s using troops that should be in training—they’re basically border guards. I’m saying, send the Marines back and hire more border patrol, hire more trained officials, hire more asylum judges to keep this going. Because he hasn’t solved the problem. He’s going to eventually run out of money. He hasn’t solved the problem if you’re still going to have 8 million to 12 million people hiding in the shadows. And, by the way, he’s never going to hit the deportation numbers to get those people out, even in four years. And he certainly isn’t going to solve our labor problem of people that we still need coming into this country. Let’s figure out a way for them to come here legally.
Well, another difference between you and the president is your approach, in terms of constitutionality, right? A lot of what he’s doing is outside the constitutional bounds.
And also unpopular.
Immigration seems emblematic of some of the broader failings of the Democratic sales pitch last cycle. It seems like the party, broadly speaking, was too insistent that the status quo under their leadership was working, and too reliant on getting voters to reject Trump’s extremism. Now, he’s clearly been antidemocratic in all the ways the party warned about and then some. But what do you think Democrats need to do moving forward?
So number one: Denying reality does not change reality. Let’s just be clear. I think what separated us from a lot of other candidates is that we didn’t deny reality, whether it was the economy or it was the border. Just doing that helped us connect with voters, which I think, if any other candidate had run, they would probably not have been able to do, to be honest.
The Democrats ran a campaign that they wanted to run that would make them feel good, but not necessarily win. What does that mean? I think they were soft on the border. They were soft on the overall crime message. They were too Pollyannaish about the economy. And instead of showing that they are sincere about closing the border, they were afraid to piss off this imaginary voter base of Latinos that is for open borders, which doesn’t fucking exist, Eric! Sorry, it just drives me nuts.
I’m going to tell you the two prime examples that really showed me what was happening: When Kamala Harris went on camera and said to asylum seekers, “Don’t come,” she literally got shit on by left-wingers and organizations. But that was the actual message she should have been sticking to the whole time. But she basically hid after that, because she got so much crap from these groups that were wrong. Latino voters did not like hundreds of thousands of people showing up at the border, claiming asylum, and then automatically getting a work permit five months later. That actually pissed them off a lot. But because she faced such pushback, I think it stopped them from being more aggressive when it came to the campaign side.
And even, you know, Joe Biden in November of 2023—I talked to one of his closest advisers, and they had a pretty good plan about how to deal with the border. I warned them, Do not lift Title 42 unless you have a plan, but they ended up doing it. And what did we see? Chaos. And why didn’t they extend it? Because the plans that they had would have pissed off some of these very liberal immigration groups. So when the Senate came and said, Well, why don’t you let us work on it for you?—they took the easy way. Like, cool, I don’t have to be the bad guy. And they gave it to them. And then what happens? Nothing until March, when they finally dropped the plan. And what happens? The president doesn’t do anything until July of 2024, and what does he do? He does something that automatically starts moving the numbers to a very manageable level. Do we hear this blowback? There was no blowback whatsoever. That’s why we need to be realistic. Had we actually been listening to reality instead of what we wanted the reality to be, we would have run a campaign that was tailored around that.
Do you think the winds are shifting on that?
I don’t know. What I fear is that we may have a really good year, and people may take the wrong message away from it. But I’m here to spread the word and take the slings and arrows for other people to prove that you can be a very good Democrat and be for strong border security, and be very popular with the Democratic base, too.
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
-
What Scarlett Johansson Wants
-
Inside LA’s Young, Testosterone-Fueled Sperm Race
-
Live Updates From the 2025 Cannes Film Festival
-
Rita Hayworth’s Heartbreaking Vanishing Act
-
See All the Looks From the 2025 Cannes Red Carpet
-
Creator Tony Gilroy Breaks Down Andor’s Gut-Wrenching Finale
-
The Nuances of Casey Means’s Medical Exit and Antiestablishment Origins
-
Why Buckingham Palace Tried to Stop a Photo of Princess Diana and David Bowie
-
Molly Jong-Fast Reflects on Her Mother’s Dementia and the Fleeting Nature of Fame
-
From the Archive: Princess Margaret’s Not So Happily-Ever-After
The post Ruben Gallego Wants Democrats To Stop Being So “Soft” on the Border appeared first on Vanity Fair.
