It’s true, but they won’t.

The time for triangulating is over. With the second murder of a Minneapolis citizen at the hands of untrained, immunity-drunk, and predatory federal agents, Democrats must fundamentally shift their approach to immigration policy. It’s long past time for the party to move past its learned helplessness in the face of MAGA bloodlust fantasies about an invading horde of undocumented immigrants—and to vindicate the human rights of workers and neighbors confronting Gestapo-style seizures, renditions, and executions of a lawless invading force. Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old VA nurse shot 11 times in the back after being thrown to the ground by federal goons, was documenting their abuses in the hopes of halting them and returning our federal government to some semblance of moral responsibility. The bare minimum that national Democrats can do in his memory is to dismantle the ICE bureaucracy of terror once and for all.

After Pretti’s execution on Saturday, a key swing bloc of Senate Democrats had signaled that they would vote no on the House-passed appropriations bill that would deliver $10 billion in additional funding for ICE. This is on top of the tripling of the agency’s budget secured in last summer’s tax-and-spending bill. House GOP leaders had already carved out the ICE appropriation into a separate bill funding the Department of Homeland Security, so that another swing bloc of right-leaning Democrats would support it after a number of their pet spending priorities were attached to the legislation. That tactic was also garnering support from Democratic senators, with Appropriations Vice Chair Patty Murray of Washington all but assuring that Republicans would land the seven Democratic votes required to avoid a filibuster. Yet now that the feds have murdered another Minneapolis resident, Democratic support for the measure has collapsed, leaving GOP majority leader John Thune with the option of either blowing up the filibuster or stripping out DHS funding as a standalone bill that wouldn’t clear the 60-vote filibuster threshold, and thereby potentially touching off a partial government shutdown.

In material terms, the Senate vote wouldn’t do much to slow down the rampaging ICE invasions, given the agency’s vast $85 billion annual budget; ICE continued its marauding national tour during last year’s record-long government shutdown after all. But in political terms, the Democrats must not sidestep this battle. Democrats had previously relied on strong polling support for Trump’s immigration views to rationalize their passivity on the issue—yet public opinion is turning against ICE. A YouGov poll released on Saturday, hours before Pretti’s execution, showed 46 percent of all respondents backing the agency’s abolition, compared to 41 percent opposing it. The gap widens to 12 percent among independent voters—now the largest segment of the electorate—with 47 percent backing ICE’s abolition, and 35 percent opposing. Fifty-percent of respondents said they strongly disapprove of ICE, and just 24 percent of independents registered support for the agency. There’s every reason to believe that these negative numbers will continue to grow in the wake of Pretti’s horrific murder.