Will Democrats Vote to Give Trump More Money for ICE?
Americans increasingly want to see ICE abolished. Yet, Democrats could soon help Trump expand his violent anti-immigration campaign.
On Tuesday, for the first time, a poll found a plurality of Americans support the idea of abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE – indicating that public support for the agency has sharply waned after an agent’s gruesome killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, amid Donald Trump’s violent invasion of Minnesota.
Now, Democrats must decide whether they want to give ICE even more money.
An appropriations package moving through Congress – which Democrats have helped negotiate – would give ICE money to expand its detention beds, even above the levels provided in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which gave the president tens of billions of dollars to supercharge his militarized mass-deportation campaign.
Appropriations bills are subject to the Senate filibuster, which requires 60 votes to pass most legislation. That means Trump is counting on a number of Senate Democrats, at least seven, to help pass this bill and give ICE extra cash to further ramp up its immigration raids, which are being carried out by masked secret police. The deadline to pass the appropriations package and avoid a government shutdown is January 30.
When asked about how likely it is that Democrats will block additional ICE funding, Rep. Rashida Tlaib told Zeteo, “I am confident that they understand this moment is important to have accountability, but many are still talking about ‘guardrails’ …There is no way to reform an agency that was built to do exactly what it’s doing.”
ICE’s brutality is under scrutiny now, partly because Trump is “bragging about it,” Tlaib said, but the agency’s violence started long before him, and her constituents have been warning Washington for years. Tlaib said she told her Democratic colleagues months ago to “remember what ICE is capable of,” and warned that supporting the agency wouldn’t make communities safer.