WASHINGTON – For more than a month, Democrats have refused to fund the Department of Homeland Security while demanding that the agency limit Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in ten specific ways after federal agents killed two people during federal immigration operations in Minnesota in January.
“We will not continue to allow what we’re seeing on the streets. Thousands of Americans, of immigrants, of our neighbors from Chicago to Minneapolis are saying ‘enough is enough,’” said Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill.
Democrats’ push for immigration enforcement reform has fueled a funding standoff on Capitol Hill that triggered a partial shutdown of DHS in mid-February after lawmakers failed to reach a funding agreement. The shutdown followed their dispute over the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, including the January deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
Amid the backlash, President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of 700 federal agents from Minnesota and sent border czar Tom Homan to lead immigration enforcement, who later announced the wind down of the operation, but also stressed support for Trump’s goal of widespread deportation of undocumented immigrants.
“We are not surrendering the President’s mission on a mass deportation operation. If you are in the country illegally, if we find you, we’ll deport you,” Homan said at a press conference in Minneapolis last month.
On Capitol Hill, the budget standoff raised a broader question about whether Democrats can realistically use the DHS funding fight to force changes to federal immigration enforcement while Republicans control Congress.
Democratic leaders have made 10 demands in the DHS funding bill to restrict ICE officers’ aggressive tactics as a condition for funding Homeland Security. The demands include removing face coverings, identifying themselves during operations, and less aggressive force standards.
“They have the leverage to withhold the funding, so the issue is what do you do with it?”
Georgetown Law School supervising attorney Sophia Genovese told Medill News Service.
Genovese pointed to the shutdown in the fall when Republicans entered the negotiations expecting Democrats to eventually concede, and Democrats ultimately agreed to a deal without securing the policy changes they had demanded.
She said her concern is that if Republicans hold out long enough again, public attention could fade and Democrats could face similar pressure to fold.
“The public strongly supports this. This is an issue that’s going to keep coming up,” Genovese said. “But the fear is if they’re going to capitulate and fold and continue to allow this crisis to occur again.”
In recent months, Democrats have also introduced a series of bills to advance their push for ICE accountability.
At a news conference in February, Senator Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Reps. Andrea Salinas, D-Ore. and Derek Tran, D-Calif., introduced the “ICE and CBP Constitutional Accountability Act”, which would allow individuals to seek civil damages if U.S. Customs and Border Protection or ICE officers violate their rights.
Rep. Salinas criticized Trump’s 2025 budget bill that awarded more than $170 billion towards border and interior enforcement, and said the legislation would check ICE and CBP by targeting funds from the 2025 budget bill and using those funds to compensate victims.
“Without accountability, there are no consequences. And without consequences, they will keep violating the Constitution,” Salinas said.
That same month, Rep. Ramirez introduced the “Melt ICE Act”, a bill that would end funding for immigration detention and enforcement under DHS and redirect the money to community services. She said continued funding for DHS fuels human suffering and called for abolishing ICE.
“It must be dismantled piece by piece, and we need something new, a system that actually honors our rights, a system based on dignity, humanity,” Ramirez said.
Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said he hopes Democrats can secure significant reforms to ICE's operations, but he is skeptical that Trump will support meaningful change and would instead veto the bills.
“He’s had a very bad policy. He’s the person who appointed Noem during the rampage in Minneapolis, and he’s really politicized the whole issue so I don’t think he has confidence in reasonable reform,” Welch told Medill News Service. “ICE should be subject to all of the same standards in training, engagement, and warrants that apply to police enforcement in every community across the country.”
Genovese said the proposed legislation falls into several categories, including bills aimed at shrinking the immigration enforcement system and reducing deportations, measures that seek to reform agents’ conduct without limiting enforcement, and others she said would have little practical impact.
“Are all of these bills feeding into an overall reduction of the Department of Homeland Security’s enforcement apparatus, or are these pieces of legislation just simple appeasements for the public? And so that’s something the Democrats need to think critically about,” Genovese said.
Genovese argued that even some Republicans are beginning to recognize the need for limits on immigration enforcement.
“They are disappointed with the immigration enforcement actions they are seeing,” Genovese said. “Even if not every single bill passes, I think Democrats have a tremendous opportunity to get some of these bills passed.”
Indeed, in March, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem faced two days of sharp questioning from Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate Judiciary Committees over her leadership and the administration’s immigration crackdown.
“What we’ve seen is innocent people getting detained that turn out are American citizens,” Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said heatedly to Noem. “We’re beginning to get the American people to think that deporting people is wrong. It’s the exact opposite. The way you’re going about deporting them is wrong.”
Soon after the hearing, Trump fired Noem as homeland security secretary and nominated Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., as her replacement.
Rep. Ramirez told Medill News Service that both parties must ask whether they are standing up for their constituents, the rule of law, and the Constitution, and to take action without making excuses or delaying the work.
“Are they going to continue to make excuses and not have a spine and allow Donald Trump to continue to terrorize their communities? So I think it's really important that right now, we're building the case to be able to actually ‘melt ICE’,” Ramirez said.
Gloria Ngwa is a Journalism and Psychology Student at Northwestern University.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.