Hillary Clinton stood before a packed audience at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday and said what few prominent Democrats have been opting to say out loud: immigration in the West has "gone too far."

The former secretary of state made the remarks during a panel titled "The West-West Divide: What Remains of Common Values," where she called for secure borders and acknowledged that mass migration has destabilized communities on both sides of the Atlantic.

"There is a legitimate reason to have a debate about things like migration," Clinton said. "It went too far, it's been disruptive and destabilizing, and it needs to be fixed in a humane way with secure borders that don't torture and kill people, and how we're going to have a strong family structure because it is at the base of civilization."

The language was striking coming from Clinton, who spent much of the past decade attacking the Trump administration's approach to border enforcement. It also placed her squarely outside the current Democratic mainstream, where most of the party's energy on immigration has gone toward opposing ICE operations rather than confronting the scale of migration itself.

A record that has moved with the times

Clinton's positions on immigration have shifted more than once over the course of her career, and her critics have taken notice each time.

In 1993, during a congressional hearing on health care, she argued against extending benefits to undocumented immigrants, warning that doing so would "encourage more illegal immigration." By 2016, her presidential platform had moved in the opposite direction — she backed DACA, opposed large-scale border wall construction, called for an end to family detention, and proposed expanding Affordable Care Act coverage to all families regardless of immigration status.

Two years later, she ripped into the Trump administration for separating migrant families at the border. "It is now the official policy of the U.S. government — a nation of immigrants — to separate children from their families," she wrote on social media. "That is an absolute disgrace."

As recently as last year, she was touting the economic upside of immigration at a public event in Manhattan, crediting both legal and undocumented immigrants with helping the U.S. outperform other advanced economies.

Saturday's comments in Munich represented a clear change in tone.

Clinton draws comparisons to earlier administrations

Clinton used part of her time on the panel to push back on the idea that aggressive enforcement is necessary to carry out large-scale deportations, pointing to the track records of her husband and former President Barack Obama.

"More people were deported under my husband and Barack Obama, without killing American citizens and without putting children into detention camps, than were in the first Trump term or this first year of Trump's second term," she said.

Federal data supports the broad strokes of that argument. During Bill Clinton's two terms from 1993 to 2001, more than 12 million deportations were carried out. Under Obama, roughly 5 million people were deported across eight years. The Department of Homeland Security has claimed that nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants have left the country since the start of Trump's second term, but that figure includes an estimated 2.2 million "self-deportations" and only about 675,000 formal removals.

Meanwhile, encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border have dropped to their lowest level in over 50 years, falling below the numbers recorded during the Clinton, Obama, and first Trump administrations, according to Customs and Border Protection data.

Domestic tensions over enforcement

Clinton's comments arrive against a tense domestic backdrop. Protests over federal immigration operations have swept through multiple cities, fueled by the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis last month. Clinton herself called Good's death a "murder" in January.

A recent AP-NORC poll found that roughly three in five American adults believe the administration has "gone too far" with its enforcement campaign.

The White House's border czar, Tom Homan, said Thursday that Operation Metro Surge — the expanded deployment of federal agents in Minnesota — would be winding down after delivering what he called "successful results." Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey put a different figure on the operation's legacy: more than $47 million in lost wages and over 8,700 children left in need of mental health services.

Former President Obama, in a podcast interview released Saturday, called ICE operations in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area "unprecedented" and voiced support for demonstrators in the state.

Not the first time Clinton has warned Europe

Clinton's willingness to name migration as a destabilizing force is not entirely new. In 2018, she urged European leaders to tighten their approach, saying the continent needed to "get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame" of right-wing populism. She praised Angela Merkel's compassion at the time but added bluntly that "Europe has done its part."

Her remarks in Munich extended that line of thinking to the present — framing unchecked migration as a governance problem with real political consequences, not simply a humanitarian talking point.

She also left the door open to physical barriers at certain points along the border, a position that puts daylight between her current stance and the one she ran on in 2016.