House Democrats were mostly united Thursday in opposition to funding U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but the party remains deeply divided over how far to push the issue if it takes the majority next year.
Many Democrats say the agency is beyond fixing and should be abolished. Others say immigration enforcement is necessary but needs far more guardrails on agents.
More nuanced views rest somewhere in between.
Despite those disagreements, House Democrats voted overwhelmingly against a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security. They said the legislation would do little to rein in ICE amid widespread concerns that enforcement actions have stepped outside legal bounds and the ethically appropriate use of force.
The final vote was 220-207, with seven Democrats voting with all but one Republican in support of the measure.
The bill funds Customs and Border Protection, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Secret Service and Homeland Security Investigations, which works to combat crimes such as human trafficking, drug and weapons smuggling, child exploitation, and cyber and financial crimes.
For most Democrats, the measure was effectively a referendum on ICE.
“The particulars of the bill don’t matter as much,” Rep. Mark Pocan, Wisconsin Democrat, told The Washington Times. “As long as ICE is still getting funding, it’s a problem for most people.”
Although Democrats are unified against ICE’s aggressive immigration enforcement tactics, divisions surface over resolving the issue.
The simplification of the “abolish ICE” movement, first popularized on the left during President Trump’s first term and again taking root in his second, frustrates swing-district Democrats who do not want to be broadly painted as anti-law enforcement.
“Defund the police was the stupidest expression ever done in the history of politics. Abolish ICE is kind of up there,” said Rep. Tom Suozzi, a New York Democrat who was among the few in his party to support the Homeland Security Department spending bill.
“We have to reform things,” he told The Times. “We have to make sure that they follow the rules, but we’re not going to abolish the law enforcement agency responsible for enforcing the laws.”
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Plenty of liberals disagree.
“It’s always been abolish ICE,” Rep. Summer Lee, Pennsylvania Democrat, said on social media. “Last week, a new poll found that for the first time, more Americans support abolishing ICE than oppose it. This week, Republicans are proposing hundreds of millions in funding for this lawless agency.”
She was referring to a poll by The Economist/YouGov after the fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis this month. It found that 46% of Americans support abolishing ICE and 43% are opposed.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Democrat, said she stands by her argument to abolish ICE.
“I feel that ICE’s very design is against the law and civil liberties,” she said. “It was designed in the spirit of the Patriot Act and this kind of post-9/11 warrantless era.”
Some Democrats who have called to abolish ICE in the past are adopting a harsher but more open-ended phrase.
“The term I use now is f—- ICE,” Mr. Pocan said.
He said the new phrase better reflects the frustration over what the agency has become, with a growing “intensity” of fear as agents pull people from their homes and the overall “inhumanity” in their treatment of citizens and noncitizens alike.
“Reform” ICE is the preferred language of most House Democratic leaders.
“The message for us is that we need to reform this lawless agency that is out of control,” said House Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar of California.
He said Democrats have tried to use legislative language in appropriations and other bills to do that, but lawmakers have broader concerns because they do not believe the Trump administration is willing to follow the law.
“Even if we do all of these good things, we can’t control how it’s being implemented, and that scares us because our communities are scared,” Mr. Aguilar said.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York and other Democratic leaders informed their caucus during a private meeting Wednesday that they would vote against the bill to fund the Homeland Security Department, giving a green light to rank-and-file members.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican, said those Democrats are “irrationally” opposing ICE and are unwilling to separate their views from the need to fund other essential areas of the Homeland Security Department.
“This is not a game,” Mr. Johnson said. “And if anybody is playing political games with that, they’re going to have to take it up with their constituents.”
Several swing-district Democrats decided their concerns about ICE were not reason enough to oppose the entire spending bill.
“I’m in a plus-10 Trump district. I got my own calculation I’ve got to make, and other folks got to make their calculations on that,” said Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas.
Mr. Cuellar, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the homeland security bill, said he would like to have secured stronger provisions on required training for ICE agents, prohibiting agents from arresting American citizens and more, but Republicans rejected those ideas.
He said passing the spending bill with the oversight provisions Democrats did secure, including money for body cameras and more funding for the department’s inspector general to investigate misconduct, is better than a stopgap measure that would not include those items or shutting down the entire department.
“The reality is, until we take over the House, Republicans control the House, the Senate and the White House, and they have a little bit more leverage than we do,” Mr. Cuellar said. “But that will change in November.”
If Democrats win the House majority in the midterm elections, they will face intense deliberations over how to rein in ICE while Mr. Trump is in office and whether to eliminate the agency altogether, at least as it exists now.
Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, told The Times that ICE is needed but requires far more accountability.
“I think what people have seen with their own eyes, that’s not who we are,” he said, referring to the killing of Ms. Good and other viral videos showing ICE agents manhandling people they are apprehending.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration integrity, security and enforcement, said she wants to overhaul ICE and the Homeland Security Department more broadly, but she avoids using the term “abolish” because it can be misunderstood.
She has floated various legislative proposals to make sweeping immigration changes and has spoken in depth about those ideas. She argues that more Democrats should spend time explaining to voters why the system is broken and what the party would do about it.
“We just have a bunch of Democrats who have gone around trying to be tougher on immigration than Republicans. It’s never worked,” Ms. Jayapal said. “You can’t out Republican Republicans because you’re going to lose your base, and you’re not going to get any of the Republicans to come over to you.”
• Mallory Wilson contributed to this report.
• Lindsey McPherson can be reached at lmcpherson@washingtontimes.com.
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