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CBP Chief Rodney Scott (left), Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons (middle) and USCIS Director Joseph Edlow (right) testify at budget hearing.
Jamie Gareh/Medill News Service)
ICE Director Requests Additional $5.4 Billion at Congressional Budget Hearing
Apr 24, 2026
WASHINGTON- The acting director of ICE on Thursday told Congress that while the Trump administration pumped $75 billion extra into ICE over four years, many activities remain cash starved and the agency needs about $5.4 billion in additional funding for 2027.
There’s misinformation with the Big Beautiful Bill that ICE is fully funded,” said Todd Lyons, acting director of ICE, whose resignation was announced later that day.
He added that the recent influx of money funds adequately funds detaining and deporting immigrants. But everything from “putting gas in the vehicles” to special unit investigation teams remained underfunded. He cited growing needs, in particular, to fund their intelligence network and victim specialist teams.
“We just don’t have that [money],” he said.
With the passing of the One Big Beautiful Bill in July 2025, ICE had already become the largest law enforcement agency in the U.S.. The administration’s request for even more money came amid intense and continuing controversy over agents’ tactics, which have caused mass protests across the country.
“They [ICE] have been out of control,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., to Medill News as he walked through the tunnels of the U.S. Capitol. “They have acted grossly, illegally and unconstitutionally.”
Democrats at the hearing argued that funding for law enforcement agencies like ICE should not increase without significant reform and oversight. These same demands from Democrats spurred a partial government shutdown that began in February - now the longest in U.S. history. The hearing, however, focused on next year’s funding.
Lyons argued that the agency needed more money to continue its efforts. He said that 451,000 people had been detained by ICE under the Trump administration. Including “281,000 with criminal histories, 8,400 gang members and 1,600 known and suspected terrorists,” he said.
Immigration advocacy groups and academic researchers challenged that data, finding that 71% of current ICE detainees have no criminal conviction.
Republicans at the hearing echoed Lyons, highlighting ICE’s role in national security, while some Democrats expressed their concerns about the prospect of additional funding. Among other things, Democrats pointed to the 44 detainees who have died in ICE custody during the Trump administration.
“That is a 20-year high for an agency that was only formed in 2003,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn.
She spoke about ICE agents arresting US citizens without warrants, tear-gassing a family on their way home from a basketball game, sexual abuse in detention centers and one Cuban man who recently died while in detention due to excessive force. His death was ruled a homicide, according to an autopsy report.
“In January of this year, ICE violated nearly 100 federal court orders,” she said, “which the chief federal judge in the state of Minnesota estimated was more violations than some federal agencies have committed during their entire existence.”
Rep. Lauren Underwood, D-Ill., questioned the pattern of “reckless, incompetent, cruel, illegal, corrupt and unconstitutional behavior,” she has seen from ICE agents. “These are leadership problems, not funding problems,” she said, later declaring that she would not give the agency “another penny.”
Colleen Putzel, a spokesperson from the D.C. based think tank the Migration Policy Institute, expressed frustration with the potential of an increased ICE budget, describing what she sees as a “mismatch” in funding in the immigration system.
She explained that while the budget for immigration enforcement operations like ICE remains at “large and growing levels,” other immigration agencies, such as the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Executive Office for Immigration Review, have seen drastic cuts.
For example, the office, which runs immigration courts, has seen a quarter of their immigration judges fired in the past year. This has helped create a back-log of 3.8 million cases.
Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., who held office during the height of Operation Midway Blitz at the end of last year, sees a country where family budgets decline while ICE budgets grow.
“It would be a travesty for taxpayers," she said to Medill News Service, and for many across the country asking “Why is my gas price so expensive? Why can’t I buy a home? Why is my life so hard?”
Jamie Gareh is a graduate student at Medill.
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The Illinois State Capitol Building, in Springfield, Illinois on MAY 05, 2012.
(Photo By Raymond Boyd/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Illinois House Passes Bill to Restrict Construction of Immigration Detention Centers in Communities
Apr 24, 2026
The Illinois House passed a legislative proposal in a 72-35 partisan vote that would restrict where immigration detention centers can be built, located or operated in the state.
House Bill 5024 would amend state code so that an immigration detention center cannot be located, constructed, or operated by the federal government within 1,500 feet of a home or apartment complex, as well as any school, day care center, public park, or house of worship. Current detention facilities in the state would not be affected by the legislation.
The bill was introduced by House Speaker Emmanuel 'Chris' Welch in response to what he described as federal actions involving the Broadview detention facility.
“This is not an abstract policy debate for me — this is personal, and it is deeply local. The Broadview detention facility sits in the heart of the district I represent. And during Operation Midway Blitz, the people who live in and around that community did not just witness aggressive federal activity — they lived through trauma,” Welch said in a press statement.
“This bill says something very simple and very reasonable: detention facilities do not belong in the middle of our neighborhoods. They should not be next to schools. They should not be near day care centers. They should not sit beside parks, public housing, places of worship, or private homes. Because when a detention center is dropped into the middle of a residential community, it doesn’t just affect the people inside that building — it affects every child walking to school, every senior looking out their window, and every family trying to live in peace,” he continued.
One of the most notable witnesses on the bill was Broadview Mayor Katrina Thompson, who testified in March in support of the legislation.
Appearing via Zoom, Thompson voiced support for the measure, highlighting concerns about how Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity at the village’s detention center has impacted residents.
Those concerns follow Operation Midway Blitz, which began in September 2025 and led Gov. JB Pritzker to create the Illinois Accountability Commission in response to federal immigration enforcement actions.
“In Broadview, we have residents who live as close as 600 feet away from the ICE facility,” Thompson told committee members. “That is not a statistic; those are people, families, children, individuals whose daily lives are directly impacted by what happens around that facility.”
House Republicans voiced concerns about the legislation, including Rep. Patrick Windhorst, who said the bill reflects ongoing conflict between Illinois Democrats and the federal government.
“The result of this effort to not work together with the federal government to resolve the issues, particularly related to immigration and enforcement of our laws, has resulted in huge problems in our state that the majority party attempts to blame the current presidential administration for,” Windhorst said, according to WQAD 8.
“But we need to take a hard look at what we're doing as a state to make sure we're fulfilling our obligations to protect our citizens and to enforce the laws, including the federal laws of our country,” he continued.
In Illinois, privately owned detention centers have been banned since 2019, with the enactment of the Private Detention Facility Moratorium Act, which prohibits state and local government agencies from contracting with or paying private prison companies for detention purposes, including federal immigration detention.
The bill is currently in the Senate Assignments Committee. If passed and signed by Gov. Pritzker, it would take effect immediately.
Angeles Ponpa is the Managing Editor of Latino News Network Midwest, overseeing Illinois Latino News, Wisconsin Latino News, and Michigan Latino News. She is based in Illinois.
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Nearly 40% of Maryland newspapers question whether they will be able to operate without more funding within the next two years.
Adobe Stock
MD Bill To Support Local News Appears Unlikely To Pass This Session
Apr 24, 2026
As Maryland’s legislative session winds down, a bill in the General Assembly intended to support local newspapers across the state appears unlikely to pass.
The Local Newspapers for Maryland Communities Act would have required the state government to spend 50% of their print and digital advertising budget on local outlets in the state. The bill does not favor any particular news outlets, rather stipulating that organizations must produce original local content and have at least one reporter in or around Maryland.
Daniel Trielli, an assistant professor of media and democracy at the University of Maryland, said that type of support has been done in many communities.
"It might seem like a weird mechanism to support local news," he said, "but the reality is that this is a very traditional way that societies and communities have found, throughout history and throughout many countries, to support local news."
Maryland counties each have at least one newspaper, according to a 2025 report by the Northwestern University Local News Initiative. Nine Maryland counties, though, only have one news outlet covering their respective regions.
Trielli said the financial outlook for local newspapers across the state and country is dire. A 2024 report from the University of Maryland at College Park found nearly 40% of local publications in the state weren’t confident they could continue operating in two years without increased revenue.
"Often it is the case that local news is surviving by very little day by day," he said. "Just a little boost in their finances can make a real big difference in the survival of these news organizations."
Similar policies have been tried at the municipal level in major cities. New York City allocated more than $70 million over the first five years of its program.
MD Bill To Support Local News Appears Unlikely To Pass This Session was originally published by The Public News Service and is republished with permission.
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selective focus photo of U.S.A. flag
Photo by Andrew Ruiz on Unsplash
The Founders Built Safeguards. Our Politics Rendered Them Useless
Apr 18, 2026
The men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 were students of history, and it taught them a singular lesson: power corrupts, and unchecked power can destroy a republic.
They designed our experiment with overlapping safeguards to ensure that no single faction, branch, or man could hold the nation hostage. What remained unresolved was agency: who, exactly, can determine when to trigger those safeguards? History has since exposed this as the system's deepest vulnerability.
The Constitution assigns Congress the power of impeachment but says nothing about the political will required to use it. It grants the cabinet the authority to remove an incapacitated president but assumes that cabinet members will prioritize constitutional duty over personal loyalty. It tasks Congress with checking executive overreach, yet it cannot compel a partisan legislature to act.
In each case, accountability mechanisms exist. The decision about when to use it was delegated to individuals in a political system. The Founders hoped this system would produce honorable leaders, though they could not guarantee it. Nearly two and a half centuries later, we are forced to confront the consequences when it fails to do so.
Impeachment has become a partisan exercise. The 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967 for genuine incapacity, remains a theoretical option no cabinet has ever invoked, regardless of circumstances.
Congress is the branch the Founders designed to be the most powerful and responsive to the people. Yet it has retreated into near-total dysfunction, unable to check the executive even when majorities of its members privately believe it should.
One need look no further than April 7 for a clarifying illustration of how completely those safeguards have collapsed. President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that "a whole civilization (Iran) will die tonight, never to be brought back again," coupled with vows to destroy every bridge and power plant in the country.
Legal experts quickly warned that threatened strikes on civilian infrastructure could be war crimes. Congressional Democrats demanded that Republicans invoke the 25th Amendment or call Congress back for impeachment. Neither happened. Congressional Republicans stayed mostly silent. The cabinet did not meet. Congress remained on vacation. The guardrails, in other words, held as well as they ever did now—not at all.
Article II of the Constitution states the president "shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." The phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors" is intentionally vague. The Founders knew future abuses might take unexpected forms.
They did not anticipate the Senate trial becoming a foregone conclusion before the first witness was called. Now, acquittal or conviction is predetermined by the party that holds the chamber. When a remedy exists only on paper and cannot be applied, it is not a remedy; it is theater.
The 25th Amendment presents a different, but equally sobering, dilemma. Section 4 allows the vice president and a majority of the cabinet to declare a president unable to discharge his duties. It has never been used. Not once.
The issue is not that modern presidents have never shown troubling behavior. Instead, cabinet members are political appointees loyal to the person who selected them, not to an abstract constitutional duty.
The question is not if April 7 alone warranted action but whether any situation today would prompt the Cabinet to act.
And then there is Congress, or rather, the hollow shell where Congress used to be. The body the Founders envisioned as the most muscular branch of government was also the branch closest to the people. It has spent decades ceding authority to the executive. At the same time, it has become too partisan to use the powers it keeps.
The Founders feared factionalism above almost everything else. George Washington devoted much of his Farewell Address to warning against "the baneful effects of the spirit of party."
James Madison, in Federalist No. 10, acknowledged the danger of faction. He believed the constitutional structure would contain it. He was right about the danger, and wrong about the cure. The constitutional structure did not contain faction. Faction consumed it.
None of this means the republic is doomed. But we must be honest about the distance between the Founders’ safeguards and today’s political culture. Impeachment is a high bar. The 25th Amendment is even higher. Yet a system that refuses even to ask whether those bars have been reached has forgotten how to protect itself.
One check remains—the voters. Whether that is enough is the defining question of our time.
Lynn Schmidt is a columnist and Editorial Board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She holds a master's of science in political science as well as a bachelor's of science in nursing.
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