Democrats Aren’t Reining in ICE. Here’s How They Could.
ICE is out of control. Democrats have numerous ways to restrain the agency, from barring ICE from domestic spying and terminating its contracts with tech companies to creating and fully funding an independent body to investigate its many abuses.
Democrats are poised to waste the strongest leverage they’ve had yet to rein in an out-of-control ICE deportation machine since Donald Trump took office. (Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)
Congressional Democrats are almost preternaturally talented at missing the moment, especially when it comes to immigration. They’re about to do it again.
Democrats are poised to waste the strongest leverage they’ve had yet to rein in an out-of-control Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deportation machine since Donald Trump took office. As unrepentant Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other DHS agents wage war on American cities, thumb their nose at the law, and kill with impunity, Democrats in Congress have belatedly decided to fight the attempt to hand the department more funding, and use the unpopularity of ICE’s activities and the potential for a government shutdown to force restrictions on DHS’s activities. Unfortunately, those restrictions have turned out to be a handful of toothless reforms.
Those reforms range from the minor but welcome (agents can’t wear masks and must wear body cameras, and have to end roving patrols) to the largely irrelevant (agents must use actual judicial warrants and use-of-force standards that match local police). The reason the latter are irrelevant is because DHS agents already have strict use-of-force standards as well as a legal requirement to use judicial warrants — the problem is that they simply ignore the law and face no consequences for doing so.
Worse, it’s not just the more conservative Senate leadership pushing this. This is essentially the same set of demands that the chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus came out for late last week.
As the American Prospect’s David Dayen pointed out, these demands — which are actually an even less ambitious set of asks than Democrats started last week out with — are so conservative, ICE has already basically met them as part of its and Trump administration’s public relations scramble following Alex Pretti’s killing. Sen. Chuck Schumer and the Democrats are effectively letting Trump and his deportation machine off the hook even as the Dems have maximum leverage, with the president and his allies sweating about the political fallout from both DHS’s excesses and a government shutdown.
Most absurdly, Democrats are doing this even as leading members of the party widely compare ICE to the Gestapo, Adolf Hitler’s secret police. Take a second to think about that: the Democrats believe ICE is literally transforming into the feared secret police used by an infamous dictator to kill and jail his political opposition but are going to punt on their one big chance to halt that same transformation.
Democratic leaders would likely counter that, no matter what the polling says, outright abolishing ICE is still too radical a position that would prove unpopular. Let’s, for the sake of argument, grant them that. But there are plenty of serious reforms that would meaningfully change ICE and other DHS agencies’ conduct for the better — if any lawmakers actually took them up.
How to Stop the Formation of a Secret Police
Arguably, the most urgent one is strictly limiting DHS’s sprawling domestic surveillance program. ICE had already become a sprawling domestic spy agency well before Trump took office, using private sector data brokers that let it effectively carry out warrantless surveillance and build dossiers on almost every adult in the country, immigrant and citizen alike. Way before agents terrorized Minneapolis this winter, they were using that surveillance to target journalists, activists, protesters, and immigration attorneys — in other words, Americans exercising their constitutional rights.
That spying capability is now on steroids, with ICE and other DHS agencies using its new money to invest even more heavily in a combination of facial recognition technology, automatic license plate readers, fake cell phone towers to spy on phones, phone location data, social media surveillance, and spyware and phone-hacking software for gaining entry into people’s phones. This is alongside its newly obtained permission to draw on highly sensitive personal data held by government agencies like the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration, and its contracts with Palantir for centralized collation of all of this invasive data.
One of the results is a spate of databases and watch lists built by ICE and DHS targeting US citizens and other legal residents, purely over their First Amendment–protected activities, which these agencies have ludicrously redefined as “domestic terrorism.” This is all obviously deeply dangerous to Americans and their basic freedoms.
Lawmakers should outright ban DHS agencies like ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and Border Patrol from continuing to spy on and keep databases of US citizens and legal residents. There is no reason that agencies whose mission is to enforce immigration law should be policing dissent, let alone building an enormous surveillance dragnet ensnaring the entire US population.
And if these agencies’ hunt for immigrants requires even the accidental violation of the rights and privacy of US citizens, then protecting the latter should take precedence — even if it means letting some undocumented people and even lawbreakers go. This is a foundational American value, and agencies tasked with combating actual national security threats like the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency already operate under similar restrictions. Why should DHS enjoy an exception?
Besides that, its contracts with Palantir — one of whose founders openly and explicitly said on X that the aim of its technology is to hunt and kill people with left-wing politics — and with spyware manufacturer Paragon should be terminated and permanently barred. Same goes for its contracts with a variety of other tech companies and private sector firms that allow it to circumvent Americans’ privacy rights, and for its use of invasive, privacy-shredding, and error-ridden technology like facial recognition.
At very minimum, ICE and DHS’s domestic spying programs should be laid bare to the public, so voters at least know what these agencies are secretly getting up to with their tax dollars. According to leaks provided to journalist Ken Klippenstein from concerned whistleblowers within DHS, as just one of the twenty-one programs ICE alone has launched within the United States, it has plainclothes agents pretend to be ordinary civilians to gather intelligence. Most Americans know nothing about that kind of activity, and it is hard to imagine, given their overwhelming and growing disapproval of ICE, that they would be happy about it if they did.
Speaking of Americans, there should be harsher penalties for agents who detain or deport US citizens. This is already illegal, but as we’ve seen over the past year, the fact that something is against the law is no longer enough to stop DHS agents from doing it anyway, as they have rampantly (and, it appears, purposefully) been doing both of these things to US citizens since the start of last year.
For this to stop, either agents should lose their jobs, or criminal punishments should be enhanced and pursued, in order to root out agents unfit for the job and put a check on abusive behavior. You could likewise explicitly outlaw and, if it continues, punish DHS agents who use racial profiling and documented, pervasive use of excessive, nonlethal force, which, like these other violations, is continuing as you read this despite ICE having nominally agreed to stop it.
There’s been a lot of focus on DHS agents’ training, usually from the standpoint of their needing more of it. But part of the reason that they’ve been so aggressive is because of long-standing joint training with notoriously abusive Israeli forces, whose focus is on combating terrorism — an increasingly meaningless term that the Trump administration is now redefining to mean protesters and legal observers. Americans across party lines are disgusted with Israeli soldiers’ genocide in Gaza, which was similarly justified on the basis of fighting terrorism; it is extremely doubtful that they are comfortable with those some soldiers training the law enforcement officers who run around their streets.
Meanwhile, Democrats should return to some of the actual constructive demands they mystifyingly dropped in recent days: ending arrest quotas, sending CBP agents back to the border, barring DHS agents from operating in certain locations (like schools or, especially urgent, being anywhere near polling places), reducing its needlessly bloated new budget, and, of course, forcing DHS to turn over those responsible for the murders in Minneapolis — who are, scandalously, on paid leave right now after having their identities hidden — and related evidence.
The New Democrats and Progressive caucus cochairs have added the demand to “ensure robust minimum standards of care at detention facilities,” including access to medical care, clean water, and food. This is good; the conditions in detention centers are abominable. But lawmakers should also demand a halt to ICE’s purchase spree of warehouse detention centers, if not a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)–style sell-off of those already bought. An end to arrest quotas and the curbing of various other excesses will make them unnecessary anyway.
While they’re at it, lawmakers should create and empower a special, independent commission to investigate these and other current and future DHS abuses. Given the scale of misbehavior, it will need to be enormously well-staffed and resourced — and luckily, the money to fund it could simply be reallocated from the $168 billion that was last year handed to DHS, more than $70 billion of it just to ICE alone, a sum the department cannot possibly even spend.
No Better Time
Sprawling domestic spying programs, databases of dissidents, increasing targeting of and violence toward citizens, a system of black sites on home soil — this is all profoundly abnormal and strange for an agency tasked with enforcing immigration law, and there is no other country in the world whose equivalent to ICE is doing it. The fears of ICE and other DHS agencies turning into a secret police are well-founded in light of these activities, and the above reforms aimed at ending them would go a long way toward preventing the emergence of the kind of police state lawmakers are now openly worried about.
These are just ideas off the top of one person’s head with an hour or so of thought; legislative aides and researchers can no doubt come up with many more provisions that would allow lawmakers at this moment to meaningfully restrain an agency and department that is acting in a rogue and lawless fashion. If Democrats truly believe what they say about the dangers of Trump’s deportation machine, then they can’t act like there will be a later, better time to do something about it.