cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/20252
Americans across the country are protesting federal agents’ violent crackdown on immigrant communities and on dissent, support for doing away with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement entirely is at an all-time high in the wake of an officer’s killing of a legal observer, and the outrage is intensifying just as the Democratic Party has negotiating power ahead of a January 30 deadline for funding the government.
A number of Democrats, however, are hesitant to leverage their position in the appropriations fight to rein in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the agencies it controls, including ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which oversees Border Patrol.
That reluctance, said journalist Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo, should result in primary challenges for “every Democrat who wants to fund and still support ICE.”
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As Common Dreams reported Wednesday, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which includes nearly 100 Democratic members of the US House of Representatives, said clearly that it would “oppose all funding” for federal immigration enforcement agencies in the upcoming appropriations bills unless, as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said, "meaningful reforms are enacted to end militarized policing practices.”
The House and Senate are currently negotiating a dozen spending bills to keep the government running past the January 30 deadline, and each bill must garner at least 60 votes to pass in the Senate.
A DHS funding bill was already excluded from a spending package earlier this week amid outcry over the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis and the agency’s violent treatment of demonstrators, bystanders, and even residents who are not involved in protests against President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
But at the Bulwark, Joe Perticone reported Tuesday that a number of Democrats in the Senate expressed doubt that they would treat ICE funding in appropriations bills as a red line to force the administration to drastically change its approach to immigration enforcement.
“I certainly don’t want see funding increases,” Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) told the Bulwark. “We’re going through these negotiations right now. I don’t want see that funding… I don’t ever make predictions about where my vote’s coming down on, but what I will say is that I’m certainly gonna fight to stop it.”
Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) told the Bulwark that she would not want to increase ICE’s budget, which includes $75 billion it was given in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) last year, but said Republicans were “taking the lead on these [appropriation bills].”
“Is this what they want to rubber-stamp for residential neighborhoods across this country?" she asked. "Thousands of masked, armed agents coming into their communities?”
But while criticizing the agency’s practices, she told the Bulwark that discussions about reforming ICE’s enforcement should be separate from the appropriations debate.
“That’s obviously—I don’t wanna get in the weeds—that’s obviously an authorizing committee issue,” she said. “When we’re talking about appropriations, I call on my Republicans… Do they wanna rubber-stamp this or what?”
Organizer and attorney Aaron Regunberg compared the comments—which echoed earlier remarks from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)—to saying: “We are the resistance. We are also negotiating furiously to figure out how to fully fund the Gestapo.”
Sens. Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto, both Democrats from Nevada, announced their own proposal on Thursday to redirect some of the OBBBA funding to local law enforcement agencies—many of which work with ICE.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, did not make any specific policy commitments regarding what changes ICE and DHS would need to make to ensure funding for immigration enforcement continues, but has suggested that Border Patrol agents should return to the border instead of being unleashed in communities with ICE, agents should be banned from wearing masks and required to wear identification, and federal officers must obtain warrants for immigration arrests.
“You should demand that we make sure that this appropriations process is used to make ICE comply with the law,” Murphy told Time magazine. “And I see a lot of signs out there—not one additional dime for ICE in this budget.”
Murphy also told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that Republicans must decide if they are “willing to shut down the government simply to endorse the most lawless Department of Homeland Security in the history of the country.”
Last fall, the federal government saw its longest shutdown in US history, with funding lapsing for 43 days after Democrats refused to approve a spending package that would have allowed Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire and threatened healthcare for millions. Ultimately, some Democrats caved, and the subsidies lapsed.
Journalist Aaron Rupar said that ahead of the January 30 deadline, “Senate Democrats absolutely have to shut the government down to stop this ICE insanity in the Twin Cities.”
“This is not sustainable and cannot be normalized,” said Rupar. “Any Democratic vote to provide money to the thugs who are brutalizing this community is a grave betrayal to the people here. Accountability can’t wait.”
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
Republicans gleefully slash funding for education, healthcare, childcare, the environment, you name it, and then when Democrats are handed a slam-dunk political win to not fund the Gestapo after they’ve executed an unarmed middle-aged mother, they endlessly wring their hands over it. Pathetic.
Abolish ICE, too divisive
Defund ICE, not possible
ICE is poorly trained
Trained to do what?
TRAINED TO DO WHAT?!
What was that quote about how no one is scared of pissing off the dem base, but both parties are scared of pissing off the GOP base?
I know I’m being charitable to the dem base, but I digress.
The dem base are significantly better than the party, at least.
That’s how faux left bourgeois parties are. Same in Australia and the UK. The “left wing” major party is well to the right of their poor supporters, wedged by the system they either dare not break or have eternal faith in for some reason.
i wonder what the messaging about ice will be like in the next election to justifying keeping them around.
Who are these people even trying to win over?
Recent Chapo guest made a good point: they’re not trying to win anyone over, they want ICE to exist under their control so they’re the ones who get to deport immigrants
Their donors
Yo I’ve seen videos of
screaming at ICE, don’t do them dirty like thatThis emoji was clipped from a photo taken inside the Capitol on Jan. 6th, so it also has that connotation.
Oh that’s hilarious
Miryam Adelson?
And here I thought summary execution of ICE officers was the popular choice
Literally the least they could do. Anyone who isnt trying to get them not only disbanded as a government agency but to have it declared a terrorist group and arrest every single person who joined. Anything short of that is complicity
Deport ICE. They don’t even know what Americans look like.
Deport ICE to the
Oh so it would be fine if they left Americans alone if they were correctly identifying humans based on how they look so they got the right people?
Americans look like everybody everywhere. Trying to identify citizens by sight is a fool’s errand (literally).
Yeah that’s the point I was making
It’s kind of weird how inept the Dems are this time. During trump 1 they were pretty good at co-opting movements and directing popular sentiment.
They think co-opting BLM hurt them and that “defund the police” was a bad political position.
They probably lost 12 whole voters in Pennsylvania by not outright stating trans people should be treated like sub-par lumber. Think of all the moderates! (Being moderate now means you support the idea of pre-establishing a 200$ lunch debt for every schoolchild, so they learn the value of pulling themselves up by the bootstraps.)
When you join a political party you typically must sincerely agree with and endorse that party’s political platform, worldview and professed values. What are Democrat members agreeing to when they join, if they can go on to support ICE, little more than Trump’s Brown Shirts? Either ICE is acceptable to the Dems, or they should eject these party members. Then can always join GoP. But they won’t, because this is symptomatic of Bourgeois Dictatorship, capture of both major parties by capital. Fake-left parties and two party systems have been instrumental in removing, and manufacturing consent for the removal of, working class gains post WWII, made by largely unionized, even socialist, working classes.
