Editor’s note: This column was coauthored by Olivia Hodge, a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation.

What happens when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement rescues 14 children from labor exploitation and exposure to sex offenders in marijuana fields? Surely, this would be a moment for mental clarity and political cohesion, where federal law enforcement officials are recognized for their good work.

That was not what happened. Instead, Democrat leaders rushed to their soapboxes to condemn the agents. They decried the raid as “militarized,” “traumatizing,” and “disproportionate” and framed ICE’s enforcement effort as the problem.

What ICE found when it raided two marijuana farms in Ventura County, California, on July 10 was not a peaceful agricultural operation; it was a crime scene where they were met with hostility and violence.

Fourteen children were found working in the fields (the youngest was 14), along with more than 360 illegal alien workers, including multiple felons convicted of crimes involving kidnapping, rape, and child molestation.

Protesters at the scene responded by throwing rocks and asphalt at ICE vehicles. A masked demonstrator even fired a gun at agents before fleeing.

Yet Democrats focused not on the horrible working conditions and threats to children but rather on condemning the ICE raid.

Rep. Salud Carbajal, California Democrat, deemed it “unacceptable” and falsely claimed the use of “disproportionate force.” His priority is the optics of federal enforcement and its effect on what amounts to the modern equivalent of slave labor with low pay and no benefits.

Just listen to Hunter Biden justifying his father’s allowing millions of illegal aliens into the country. In a recent podcast, he admitted it was to provide that repressive labor: “How do you think you got food on your f——- table? Who do you think washes your dishes? Who do you think does your f——- garden?”

This is not a new political instinct. From antebellum planters to modern liberals, the rhetoric of resistance is recycled. Their goal is to obtain the cheap labor needed to support their lifestyles, without having to pay higher wages and provide good benefits to U.S. citizens.

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, Democrat leaders in the South responded similarly when federal enforcement threatened their most protected institution: slave labor. When the Northern states enacted “personal liberty laws” to obstruct the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Southern Democrats branded the efforts as lawless and insubordinate.

Yet when federal enforcement failed to preserve slavery, they justified their own defiance just as fiercely. To them, federal authority was legitimate only when it aligned with their worldview. When it didn’t, it was tyranny.

Sound familiar?

The individuals being exploited may have changed, but the Democratic Party hasn’t. Slavery has not disappeared; it has evolved. Today, Democrats opposing immigration enforcement are, in essence, supporting, or at least tolerating, child labor, human trafficking, and abusive labor practices, all cloaked in political rhetoric about the federal government’s supposed “tyranny” and “Gestapo” tactics.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, criticized the federal agents. He described the scenario as children being “rip[ped] from their parents” and “running from tear gas.” Nowhere did he clarify that 10 of the 14 minors found were unaccompanied minors or acknowledge that it is illegal for anyone younger than 21 to work at a marijuana farm in the state of California. Tear gas was deployed only after 500 protesters obstructed ICE operations and attacked federal officers.

Maybe Newsom was too high on his own supply, or just too deep in campaign donations from the owners of this drug “farm,” to bother fact-checking his statement on X.

Newsom’s response echoes William Yancey, the antebellum Alabama politician who urged Southern cities to enlarge their jails—not to combat injustice but to prepare room for Northern enforcers threatening Southern sovereignty. Like Yancey, Newsom redirects public outrage away from exploitation and toward enforcement, dehumanizing victims through omission and portraying resistance as righteousness.

Rep. Jimmy Gomez, California Democrat, mocked the raid as a heartless assault on “the immigrant workers who feed America,” but these weren’t his imaginary, innocent strawberry pickers. Among those arrested were convicted rapists, child molesters, and kidnappers working alongside exploited minors in what Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin describes as criminal conditions.

Gomez ignores this reality to preserve the comforting narrative of the doe-eyed refugee laborer. His deflection mirrors that of James Mason of Virginia, the architect of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.

Mason once described enslaved people as mere property, “as much as the bullock or the ox,” and demanded harsh punishment for those who disrupted their return. Gomez spins a romanticized yarn about innocent laborers engaging in noble toil, while Mason dehumanized the enslaved. Both distort the truth to protect abusive labor practices, and neither reckons with the human cost of refusing to enforce the law.

What makes these two eras alike isn’t just the people Democrats want to misuse. It’s the evil they’re too politically afraid to denounce. In both cases, federal enforcement uncovered undeniable abuse, and in both cases, Democrats responded not with outrage at the injustice but with fury at those who exposed it.

Back then, Northern abolitionists and federal agents were vilified for threatening the institution of slavery. Today, ICE agents are told to show their faces so they can be targeted, doxed, harassed, and threatened. The goal is not just to resist the law but also to ruin those who uphold it.

This is the legacy of selective outrage: When enforcement is ideologically and financially inconvenient, it must be discredited, its agents publicly shamed and its targets reimagined as victims. The pattern is old, the language is updated, and the cost is still human.

Republished from The Daily Signal.