When Whips Moved the Window

5 min readNov 9, 2021

*This is part of a newsletter series that I write about immigration. Find out more about all that at the bottom.

The Overton Window. If you are like me, you have heard this phrase or, if you are even more like me, you have sprinkled it into conversation in a bid to sound smart without fully understanding what it means. The term is used to describe the “window of political possibility”, with policies inside the Overton Window being politically viable and policies outside of it being too radical for a politician to touch. As the window slides on the spectrum between extremes in policies, ideas that previously seemed radical can suddenly be mainstream. If none of this is making sense, I found this 2 minute clip on youtube really helpful to visualizing and understanding the concept. One idea from this video that was super interesting to me is that the public, not politicians, are the ones who maneuver the window.

The Overton Window has been mentioned a lot lately because our society is coping with ideas that may have once seemed fringe but are now in play like, say, medicare for all, defunding the police, supporting the overthrow of the Capitol, or canceling Big Bird for getting a fake vaccine. While these ideas may not be 100 percent politically viable, public opinion has shifted enough over the last decade that they are part of mainstream political discussion. In my own work, I think the shift of support for the Dreamers is a good illustration of this. When DACA was first announced in 2012 it felt to many like an extreme idea — not deporting people who violated US immigration norms. Yet now, in 2021, there is broad political support for a permanent pathway to immigration status for people with DACA. What once was unthinkable is downright boring ten years later.

A classic example of the public reacting poorly when a policy fell outside the Overton Window was Trump’s family separation policy. Ripping children from their parents arms on the border turned out to be beyond the pale and the backlash was swift. It was one of Trump’s only immigration policies that the administration walked back in 4 years. At the time I thought to myself, dumb move, Trump, but these days I am not so sure. They pushed their attacks on migrant families beyond what was imaginable and that may have been a genius move. It basically shifted the window of what was politically acceptable out towards the extreme and just up to the point of separating children from their parents. Everything that wasn’t that then became ok. After 2018 we saw slightly less horrific policies be implemented — the Remain in Mexico policy, Title 42, detention of migrants in COVID-19 — with very little public backlash. They were, one might argue, acceptable to the public as long as kids were not being ripped from their parents arms.

This has all been on my brain for the last several weeks because I have been working with a huge group of Haitian migrants detained in New Mexico and, man, things could not be shittier. My access to the detention facility has been so terrible we had to threaten to sue. The water is giving my clients rashes. They are facing disproportionately rapid deportations without lawyers. One of my clients collapsed from a medical issue and laid on his cell floor for thirty minutes before anyone found him. I have been on the phone with these gentlemen for the last week collecting overwhelming reports of suffering and desperation. I have settled into a familiar feeling of heartbreak I know so well from working in detention.

6 weeks ago, these men were among the Haitians who were being whipped back from the border by mounted border patrol agents. It was truly horrible and at the time I thought to myself, how dumb is DHS to do this? The backlash was indeed swift. Public apologies were issued along with intense promises to investigate that apparently have gone nowhere. Now 6 weeks later I am wondering if this moment wasn’t also a little bit brilliant. The public decided quickly that Border Patrol wielding whips from horses was too much to stomach and the window of political possibility shifted, just like it did under family separation — just up to the point where you wield whips. Expelling ten thousand Haitians back into certain peril or detaining them in black sites is bad — but because it isn’t whipping these things have become, somehow, acceptable to the public. There are happening and there isn’t yet a sincere movement to stop them

It all feels a little bit hopeless but then I remember that nice gentleman from youtube telling me that the Overton Window is maneuvered by the public, not politicians, which means this is all in our hands. I have had some pretty epic sessions of yelling at reporters over the last couple days and one of the points I kept trying to make is that we don’t have to accept torturous detention centers in New Mexico or any other state, for that matter. Not only are they completely optional, they are also horrible public policy. It’s hard to blame politicians, though, when there is very little public outcry.

But what if there were? What if we shifted public opinion about immigration detention and made it so toxic that ten years from now it would be unthinkable for a politician to endorse it, even passively? I suppose the question of how to do this has been my project since the first time I ever stepped in an immigration detention center in 2014 and will be for the foreseeable future. For the moment, I challenge you to consider your own window of what is acceptable to you and what is out of bounds whether with immigration or any other policy area dear to your heart. This exercise hopefully won’t make us feel like jerks, but rather give us a deeper understanding of how these policies are structured and where our power lies to change them.

I write newsletter that provides insight and commentary about immigration policy, what is going on at the border, and inside our country’s detention centers. Anyone can sign up here.

If you missed other newsletters here. I like them all but I particularly liked #17.

When Whips Moved the Window

Written by allegralove1