With another deadline looming at the end of the month, party leaders must use the power they have to begin dismantling Trump’s police state.
Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino, flanked by masked agents, at the perimeter of the site where Renee Good was shot to death.(Scott Olson / Getty Images)
Democrats must shut down the government over ICE or face their voters’ wrath
Last week’s public execution of an unarmed Minneapolis mom engaged in routine ICE-watching feels like a critical juncture in the Trump administration’s attempted authoritarian takeover of the United States. And while congressional Democrats may sometimes take too much heat from activists for not doing things they literally can’t do, this escalation of internal repression coincides with another impending January 30 budget deadline. To keep funding the government, Republicans either need to win at least seven Democratic Senate votes to keep the government open or nuke the Senate’s filibuster rule and own it all.
For Democrats, this shouldn’t be hard. If the party can’t take a stand here for their own voters in the Twin Cities and elsewhere who are effectively living under an open-ended, vengeful military occupation, it may fritter away what looks like a decisive advantage in the upcoming midterm elections. Many Democratic voters now keen to have the party begin the long fight to reclaim basic constitutional protections and democratic traditions shredded by the Trump regime would be discouraged from turning out this November if the party refuses to meet this latest crisis with anything other than polite consultant-massaged demands to institute improved training protocols for ICE goons poised to terrorize our cities. Worse, another extended episode of “Democrats inexplicably fold a winning hand” could fracture the party altogether, with newly radicalized urban “wine moms” joining together with the coalition’s long-aggrieved left flank to decamp for a new party altogether.
The situation in Minnesota is far worse than Democratic elites seem to realize. Across the Twin Cities last week, parents scrambled to find childcare as public schools closed for two days in anticipation of massive protests and street clashes with ICE agents roaming the city’s streets with total impunity. According to observers on the ground, the city feels more like a checkpoint-festooned war zone than the thriving, peaceful city that it was before another far-right racial panic—this time over Somali immigrants allegedly defrauding the government—led our utterly batshit president to send a staggering 3,000 federal agents to terrorize the city’s residents. As one good Minneapolis friend (and mother of two) told me, “Every time you take your kids out of the house, it feels like a calculated risk”.
As besieged Democratic voters look around to see if anyone is going to help them, many of their representatives in Congress are yet once more invoking their powerlessness as a minority party while feebly invoking the hope that a Trump-stacked judiciary will roll back the worst excesses of ICE’S national terror campaign. There may very well be enough senators to allow a continuing funding resolution to sail through the chamber, effectively rubber-stamping the continued funding of the $175 billion slush fund that the immigration enforcement complex claimed in Trump’s signature spending bill last year. And as they announce their plans to once again appease the autocrat—cue the “…but it might work for us!” Arrested Development memes—they will almost certainly be clutching a copy of a memo from a new Third Way–lite “think tank” called the Searchlight Institute that claims “saying you want to “Abolish ICE” is exchanging one kind of lawlessness for another.”
Democrats don’t necessarily need to shut down the government until ICE is abolished—that will require recapturing power in Washington and cashiering virtually the entire senior leadership of the party. But they should, at minimum, demand an immediate decrease in the agency’s funding, as in a new bill from the House Progressive Caucus that would strip $175 billion from ICE and use it for affordable housing. Democrats should also demand as a condition for keeping the government open that ICE end its surge in the Twin Cities and other major metropolitan areas, force any remaining agents to obtain warrants before arresting anyone, outlaw the cowardly wearing of masks, and permanently and verifiably cease all operations in and around schools, places of worship, hospitals and courthouses. They should also secure the passage of the Qualified Immunity Abolition Bill introduced in the House by Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and in the Senate by Senator Ed Markey (D-MA). The innocent Americans subjected to ICE’s reign of terror cannot and should not have to wait until January 2027 for any hope of relief from their nightmarish ordeal. Democrats need to make every effort to deliver that salvation now.
Despite what you might hear from people like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman—aka Joe Manchin in a hoodie—Democrats would have public opinion on their side here if they choose to fight. In a January 12 YouGov poll, respondents said they believe ICE is making them less safe by a 13 point margin, and for the first time in any publicly released survey, a 46–43 percent plurality supports abolishing ICE altogether. By a 20-point margin, respondents believe that Renee Nicole Good’s killing was not justified. The only people buying the Trump administration’s ludicrous propaganda about her videotaped murder are immovable MAGA cultists who would let Donald Trump clean out their retirement savings right in front of them and light it on fire if they believed it would own the libs. The complacent consultant class, meanwhile, is trying to scare Democrats away from a frontal attack on ICE funding with the stale, nonsensical claim about how the summer 2020 “defund the police” movement was electoral poison even though that year just happened to be the one in which Democrats captured their one and only governing trifecta since 2008. If that’s poison, inject it straight into my veins, baby.
This Searchlight Brain is what is led House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to spend much of their 15-minute joint press conference the day after Good’s murder saluting their retiring, elderly colleague Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and highlighting the affordability crisis rather than threatening to withhold funding to the government if Trump doesn’t end his brownshirt assault on American cities. “We are focused on lowering costs,” Schumer somberly intoned as ICE agents continued to threaten to murder peaceful protesters on camera. “We believe that’s what the American people want.” While Jeffries called Good’s murder “an abomination and a disgrace,” neither he nor Schumer could commit to cutting any of ICE’S funding—which was tripled last year. Instead, both leaders intoned the need to extend ACA tax credits—even though Senate Democrats couldn’t be bothered to fight for them just a few months ago.
What Jeffries, Schumer and every other timorous Hill Democrat needs to understand is that whether you can drive your kids to school without passing through a series of military checkpoints, worrying that your fellow parents will be abducted and disappeared in front of your horrified children and whether you yourself will be gunned down by a rampaging ICE agent is not just a kitchen table issue but the kitchen table issue for many voters right now.
If they don’t see that rage reflected back at them in word and deed by their political leaders, voters will eventually turn elsewhere. The fate of the UK Labour Party’s government is instructive here. Elected to one of the largest parliamentary majorities in modern history in July 2024, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s clueless government has spent most of its time rolling back trans rights and trying to outflank the repulsive, nativist Reform Party to the right on immigration. The outcome is a disastrous and truly astonishing 18 percent approval rating for Starmer in the most recent YouGov poll. Many surveys suggest that Labour would finish a distant third if elections were held today. Perhaps most worryingly for Labour’s future is that 30 percent of 18–24-year-old voters say they would vote for the Green Party, raising the possibility that the Labour Party itself is on life support as an institution. To think that this couldn’t happen to a Democratic Party that defies its own voters again and again on everything from Israel to ICE is delusional.
The alternative is clear. Democrats must shut down the government indefinitely until Republicans agree to stop ICE from terrorizing both immigrants and ordinary Americans. There is, of course, no guarantee that they would win, but even a losing battle would galvanize the party’s base and give them, and the long-suffering residents of cities targeted by this rancid and hateful regime, something to fight for in November and beyond.
David FarisDavid Faris is a professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in Slate, The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and Washington Monthly. You can find him on Bluesky at @davidfaris.bluesky.social.