January 27, 2026 | Yuval Levin

The Trump administration is facing a serious and justified political backlash to the brutal excesses evident in its immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota. But even more than that, President Trump and his team are beginning to pay a price for their willful blindness to both the dynamics of American public opinion and the logic of the American constitutional system.

The White House appears to have misread the public’s attitudes toward immigration from the start. Americans do want to see illegal immigration curbed, especially at the border. And the public does appear to have a fair amount of patience for a deportation effort aimed at illegal immigrants who commit other crimes in America. But how this is done has always mattered.

Americans do not generally share the dark, bitter, vindictive hostility toward immigrants and immigration that characterizes the views of some of Trump’s senior aides. And so most voters are not encouraged but alarmed by the thuggish and fascistic tone of much of the administration’s rhetoric on the subject. The militant ICE recruitment ads, the nativist DHS tweets, the mendacious White House press statements, and the callous reactions of senior officials to the killings of protesters in the course of immigration enforcement operations all convey a hunger for confrontation (if not a lust for blood) that is not only grossly unbecoming of the government of a free society but also extremely unappealing as a way of talking to the country.

The result has been evident in measures of public opinion. About 20 percent of the voters who approved of Trump’s immigration policy a year ago now disapprove of it. Immigration remains among Trump’s strongest issues, because the public trusts him even less to manage the economy, but he is at roughly 40 percent approval now, and falling, regarding immigration. That fall did not begin with the killings in Minneapolis, but it has been exacerbated by them and is probably not over.

This matters because we do live in a democracy. The administration and some of its harshest critics sometimes seem to forget that. Trump’s unusual freedom of action is a function in large part of the perception among other elected officials that his popularity with their voters means they would pay a price for resisting him. The less true that becomes over time, the less free Trump will be to act.

But even now, the constraints of the constitutional system already matter a great deal. Those constraints have not been as sturdy as they ought to be for many years. And they also don’t work at the speed of the news cycle, while the Trump administration often does. But those constraints do define the requirements of durable policy change.

This means that in the (many) arenas where the administration has tried to circumvent those constraints through dealmaking or executive unilateralism, its policy moves are unlikely to endure. But it also means that in the (fewer) arenas, like immigration, where the administration has used more traditional powers in more familiar ways, its excesses are amenable to restraint by the functioning of the separation of powers.

We are seeing both of those dynamics play out now in the congressional appropriations process. The spending bills that have already cleared the House — which were negotiated in a bicameral and bipartisan process — reverse some prominent instances of the administration’s unilateralism, involving some of what DOGE did to scientific research funding, for example, and the Department of Education.

And in the wake of the killing of Alex Pretti, Democrats are using their limited leverage over appropriations in the Senate to press for policy change at the Department of Homeland Security. On immigration, the administration has generally proceeded by deploying the existing bureaucracy, using traditional rulemaking and guidance, and even seeking new legislative authority and funds through last year’s reconciliation bill. Those more normal methods can make for more durable policymaking, and much of what the administration is doing at the border will surely last. But they also create more room for Congress to intervene and negotiate the administration’s overreach back some.

The Democrats’ leverage is a function of the fact that both parties concluded that last year’s shutdown harmed them and they would prefer not to repeat it, or at least not for long. That means that the appropriations process now checks the two boxes required to compel negotiation in the modern Congress: it is unavoidable and requires some modest bipartisanship. This is of course a function of the filibuster. The value of the filibuster is not (as some of its defenders sometimes suggest) that it prevents pure party-line action by preventing all congressional action, but rather that it actually compels the parties to bargain with each other now and then and so nudges policy toward the views of the median voter even though neither party wants to go there. Its importance has never been more clear than in the Biden and Trump years, and it may be working right now to enable Congress to restrain the administration’s worst instincts.

It’s not yet clear what the Democrats will try to gain with that limited leverage, but they’ve talked about requiring ICE and Border Patrol to follow standard federal law enforcement warrant procedures, wear body cameras, stop wearing masks, and adopt new use-of-force rules. They should also look at prohibiting numerical enforcement quotas, which seem to have badly deformed the administration of ICE in recent months, undermining its ability carry out its important work responsibly. A fair number of Republicans want many of these steps to be taken too, though they’re happy to let the Democrats make the push. If the Democrats stick to such practical and achievable changes and avoid dismissing the importance of ICE’s broader work, they could succeed.

It’s not yet clear how much the appropriations process will actually allow Congress to achieve on this front, but some of this will likely be enacted. It also seems likely that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem will be out of that job fairly soon, along with a few other DHS officials who have been most responsible for the excesses we’ve seen.

That’s because both Congress and the public matter decisively, even if their influence doesn’t always show itself at the same pace as the administration’s manic flexing. Some in Trump’s circle still seem to be in denial about this and will surely treat any congressional action as a shocking affront. They imagine that they live in a political reality in which the systemic constraints are gone. And some of Trump’s opponents affirm them in this view, by pronouncing the republic undone. But the fact that some of the president’s most devoted fans and harshest critics inhabit the same post-constitutional fantasies does not make those fantasies true. They are false.

And they seem likely to grow even more obviously false in the coming months, if the president’s popularity stays relatively low and if the midterm elections yield a Congress even less capable of avoiding cross-partisan budget bargaining.

None of that has to mean that the administration can’t advance the president’s priorities. It just means they’d have to be more realistic about the limits of their power, and so work through the constitutional system rather than around it, and negotiate rather than dictate. Whether they are capable of that will determine whether this presidency will leave behind much more than some bad habits.