Can Democrats Hold a Principled Line Against ICE Funding?

On Tuesday, the House passed a spending package that funds most of the federal government for the remainder of the fiscal year, ending the possibility of an extended government shutdown after Democrats had threatened to block funding following last week’s killing of 37-year-old Veterans Affairs nurse Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis. 

As part of the compromise brokered between Senate Democrats and President Donald Trump, funding for the Department of Homeland Security has been extended for two weeks to allow additional time for negotiations over Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol reforms.

While not a complete Democratic capitulation, the funding deal — backed by nearly half of the Senate Democratic caucus and over 20 House Democrats — sets the stage for the kind of retreat that has increasingly defined the party’s approach over the last year. With most of the government now funded through September, DHS appropriations represent Democrats’ last remaining bargaining chip. Their leverage is further weakened by the fact that the DHS, and particularly ICE, has tens of billions in multiyear funds from last year’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which will enable it to continue operating even if their its appropriations lapse later this month (other DHS agencies like the Transportation Security Administration and Federal Emergency Management Agency, on the other hand, will lose funding). 

Over the last year, the Democratic base has come to expect this kind of strategic incompetence and political cowardice from its leaders. Time and again, the elected Democrats who are meant to be leading the charge against the lawless Trump administration have abdicated their role, allowing a culture of impunity to take hold across the federal government. Nowhere has this culture been more evident than in Minneapolis, where masked and heavily armed agents have terrorized communities and trampled on the constitutional rights of both immigrants and American citizens with official sanction from those at the very top. 

The Trump administration’s insistence on “absolute immunity,” coupled with its reflexive defense of agents and falsehoods about victims, exposes a leadership convinced it operates beyond the reach of the law. As longtime reporter on police violence Radley Balko recently noted in an essay for The New York Times, the lies that officials have told about victims like Alex Pretti and Renée Nicole Good “aren’t those you deploy as part of a cover-up” but “those you use when you want to show you can get away with anything.” 

Officials and agents on the ground believe they can “get away with anything” because, up till this point, they have. A politicized Department of Justice and a Supreme Court that has declined to check the administration’s power grabs have helped enable this. Above all, however, the president and his administration have been emboldened by a feckless and divided opposition that has consistently floundered in the face of their escalating criminality. 

After the latest round of horrors, it initially looked like the Democratic Party’s leadership might finally grow a spine and use its considerable leverage over funding to demand a major overhaul of the two immigration enforcement agencies. Yet, after giving much of that leverage away in a deal with Trump, those leaders now appear poised to settle for little more than a handful of half‑measures from their Republican counterparts.

This comes at a time when the vast majority of Democratic voters have already moved on to more sweeping solutions. In multiple surveys conducted the week after the shooting of Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross, a wide majority of Americans rated ICE negatively and agreed that its operations in Minneapolis and other cities had “gone too far” and were making communities “less safe.” Yet the biggest shift has come on the question of whether ICE should even continue to exist. According to a YouGov survey taken shortly after the shooting of Good, a plurality of Americans (46%) and nearly 8 in 10 Democrats now support abolishing ICE altogether. This is up from 29% in 2018, when many progressives were last championing the proposal. Another YouGov survey conducted primarily after Pretti’s murder found that the majority of Americans back at least reducing the agency’s budget. 

The demands currently being advanced by congressional Democrats fall well short of the consensus among Democratic voters that ICE should be defunded and ultimately dismantled. Instead, the party’s leaders have kicked off negotiations by pushing for what most of the base would see as the bare minimum: prohibiting agents from wearing masks, requiring identification and body cameras, mandating warrants for arrests and ending “roving” patrols in cities like Minneapolis. 

While acknowledging the major shift in public opinion against ICE, the party’s centrists, who have consistently supported funding increases in the past, remain deeply skittish about going “too far” in the opposite direction. In a memo circulated to Democratic senators last week, the founder of the influential think tank Searchlight Institute, Adam Jentleson, urged Democrats to “play hardball” in their standoff with Republicans and the White House, citing internal polling showing that “bipartisan majorities of voters” oppose ICE’s lawless tactics. Yet he also cautioned them not to embrace efforts to defund or abolish ICE. “There is a desire for immigration enforcement that is lawful, reasonable, and effective,” he wrote, pointing again to an internal poll showing voter preference for reforming ICE rather than eliminating or defunding it. 

The problem with this triangulating logic is that ICE may no longer even be reformable at this point. Over the last year the agency has taken on the character of a paramilitary force and secret police, increasingly staffed by right-wing extremists and armed with military-grade weapons. This transformation has been fueled by the roughly $75 billion Republicans poured into the agency through last year’s omnibus bill, making it the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the country and better resourced than most of the world’s militaries. 

These billions in supplemental funds have already gone toward hiring an additional 12,000 agents, more than doubling the agency’s workforce in less than a year after the agency gutted hiring standards. Watchdog groups have raised alarms about the ideological composition of these new recruits, citing recruitment messaging that echoes white-nationalist themes and reports of agents with tattoos associated with far-right groups like the Proud Boys. The administration has not only transformed the agency into a jobs program for unemployable racists and reactionaries, but equipped them with weapons and surveillance tools more commonly seen in war zones than American cities.

On Friday, Sen. Bernie Sanders put forward an amendment to the funding deal that would have repealed the $75 billion in additional funding for ICE and redirected that money to Medicaid, which Republicans cut in their Big Beautiful Bill. The amendment was predictably rejected by the Republican majority and the issue dropped. 

If Democrats are serious about reining in ICE, then clawing back the funds that enabled its transformation into a paramilitary force over the past year should be one of their top demands. Instead, the party’s leadership has opened negotiations with a list of lackluster reforms that barely scratch the surface of the crisis’ underlying causes. 

After already squandering much of their leverage, Democrats appear to be headed for another disappointing capitulation. It’s time to ask: With an opposition party like this, who needs Republicans?