The Democratic Party has lost important voters with its immigration stance, Congressman Stephen Lynch said on Monday as he reckoned with the results of a national election that saw Republicans win the White House, the US House of Representatives and the US Senate.

“It just blows my mind that Trump won handily, overwhelming support for him. It troubles me that I’ve also felt that sometimes the American people vote for the party that they fear the least,” Lynch said at a Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce event Monday. “It causes some introspection, like, ‘Where are we, if they choose Donald Trump with all his faults over the Democratic Party. We have work to do.’”

He went on to say that the Democrats’ policy at the southern border “has caused people to be afraid.”

President Biden spent the early years of his administration reversing many of the stricter immigration policies of President Donald Trump’s first administration -- such as construction of the Mexican border wall, a travel ban on certain Middle Eastern countries, and efforts to phase out Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals – before later in his term looking to impose greater restrictions on illegal crossings into the country.

Trump made immigration a key piece of this year’s reelection campaign against Vice President Kamala Harris, of whom Donald Trump said in July of this year, “Under border czar Harris, illegal aliens are pouring in by the millions and millions and millions.”

Lynch said Monday that Democrats had lost some Americans’ trust on the issue of immigration. “Our task is to know who’s coming into this country, to have an orderly process that does not scare the bejesus out of the people of Arizona and New Mexico and California,” Lynch said.

He went on to say that immigrants need to understand the “social contract of what makes us all American. Right now, God bless them, but there are some groups who, from the deepest and best parts of their hearts, are trying to assist people to come into the United States. But the first thing they’re teaching them is how to get benefits they may not be legally entitled to or how to avoid the law.”

He continued, “Many of these people are coming from tough, tough situations where the rule of law is not robust, to say the least, and they’re coming into a new environment where we are wedded to the rule of law. So, are we teaching them how to circumvent the law, or receive benefits they may not be legally entitled to?”

Progressive Democrats and Republicans jointly rejected a bipartisan immigration reform bill last spring that Democrats on Beacon Hill were clamoring for. It would have marked the first comprehensive set of changes in decades, giving the president more power to stop unlawful entrances into the country, and overhauling the asylum process.

Lynch said immigration is important for the US’s success, but that Americans are currently afraid of many of the new arrivals.

“I think we could turn the hearts of many of the people who now are fearful of immigration and see it as a threat. We could turn that around and demonstrate that there’s a huge upside to immigration if we create that process that is trustworthy, that we know who’s coming in and we have a mutual understanding of what is expected of those individuals coming into our country,” he said.

Trump confirmed in a social media post Monday that his administration plans to declare a national emergency and use the US military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

The president-elect responded “TRUE!!!” on social media Monday morning to a post by Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, who wrote that the next administration “will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.”

A reporter asked Gov. Healey after an unrelated event Monday if she was working with other governors to respond to Trump’s plans for “a mass deportation program.”

“You know, all of us governors continue to work and talk together about the work we’ve got to do in our states,” she said, “and the work we want to do just generally on behalf of the betterment of residents, citizens, in our states and this country.”