Public support for the call to “Abolish ICE” is growing in the wake of the disturbing killing of Minnesota mom Renee Good, and the constant stream of stories and footage of similarly shocking abuses by ICE agents in Minneapolis and other cities.
New polling released this week by The Economist and YouGov confirmed support for ICE is rapidly eroding: For the first time ever, support for abolishing ICE has eclipsed opposition to the idea, by a margin of 46 percent to 43 percent — and the idea of keeping ICE in its current form is 10 points less popular than abolishing it altogether.
A private memo from Democratic firm Blue Rose Research, first reported by The New Republic, found 76 percent had seen the footage of ICE agent Jonathan Ross shooting Good three times, and 86 percent had heard about the incident. Voters polled in that survey overwhelmingly backed measures that would require ICE officers to obtain a warrant before arrest (+29 points) and would ban them from wearing masks (+16 points).
Outrage over ICE’s flagrant abuses of power has been so widespread that Democratic lawmakers are racing to offer voters ideas of what look like to rein in the agency — even as there seems to be a stark a divide between public opinion and the comparatively mild measures Democrats in Congress appear willing to take to limit ICE’s power. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) was ridiculed online after pledging to introduce a bill that would put QR codes displaying the officer’s name, badge number, and agency on their uniforms. Democrats Ro Khanna and Jasmine Crockett have introduced the “ICE Oversight and Reform Resolution,” which would mandate agents wear body cameras and de-escalation training and ban the wearing of masks.
Such proposals, advocates say, would do little to curb abuses of the kind seen in horrifying footage of Minneapolis and other American cities. Actually stopping ICE, they believe, would require stripping the agency of funding and ending its ability to arrest and detain individuals.
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ICE was founded in 2003 as part of the reorganization of the Department of Homeland Security. But, as Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch, a coalition of groups who advocate for an end immigration detention, points out, that “creation” was really the consolidation into one agency of actions that were already being carried out by several others.
“For so many years, the relationship between ICE and local police was the reason why deportations skyrocketed”
In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which increased penalties on immigrants who violated the law — both documented and undocumented — and made it easier to deport them. After its formation in the early 2000s, ICE generally operated by partnering with local police who helped carry out arrests, detentions, and deportations.
“For so many years — especially under the Bush and Obama years — the relationship between ICE and local police was the reason why deportations skyrocketed,” Shah says. “[ICE] having those tiny jail contracts, having agreements with the sheriff’s departments, working with city police — that’s the way people were funneled into the system.”
There was backlash to that arrangement and many communities ended those relationships, refusing to allow their local police department to partner with ICE on immigration enforcement arrests or detentions. The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act — Trump’s signature budget bill, which passed in July of last year — dramatically increased the ICE budget, reducing its reliance on those local partners and allocating funds for the creation of a massive immigration detention apparatus that will be owned and operated by the federal government itself — one that, advocates warn, will be difficult to dismantle once it is in place.
“From my perspective, one of the most significant things that happened last year was the passage of the budget bill in July,” Shah says. For the last decade, ICE has operated with a budget of between $4 and $5 billion a year, but under Trump’s bill that figure is set to grow to more than $8 billion this year, more than $12 billion next year, and almost $16 billion dollars in 2028, according to calculations from the Center for American Progress’s Barry Kogan.
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A draft solicitation obtained by The Washington Post last year showed the federal government was working to establish “a deliberate feeder system” that will distribute immigrants to one of seven large-scale warehouses across the country. The plan would allow ICE to hold up to 80,000 immigrant detainees at a time, according to the Post.
“As anybody who’s worked against mass incarceration or U.S. militarism can tell you: Once you start building this stuff, it’s actually really hard to take it down,” Shah says. “Our job right now is blocking as much as we possibly can. Yes, they got this funding, but we can still block these new detention centers. We can still do the work to prevent them from carrying out all of Stephen Miller‘s fantasies.”
Communities where these new ICE facilities are being proposed — including Social Circle, Georgia, and Merrimack, New Hampshire — are already mobilizing to stop them from going forward. Doing so, Shah says, is one of the key ways civilians themselves can work to prevent the further growth of ICE.
“We can still do the work to prevent them from carrying out all of Stephen Miller’s fantasies”
Another way to limit ICE’s power is to strip the agency of the funding it would use to execute on this dramatic expansion. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has been at the forefront of that push. “We’re seeing what they’re doing with this reckless explosion in funding, and I want everybody to understand that the cuts to your health care are what’s paying for this,” she said, speaking to reporters earlier this week.
On Wednesday, Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) proposed a bill that would reverse the ICE funding, allocating that money instead into tax credits designed to offset the increase in health care premium. “The One Big Beautiful Bill nearly triples ICE’s budget at a time when American families across the country are facing higher premiums due to the ACA premiums tax credit lapsing,” Moulton told WGBH.
On Thursday, Michigan Rep. Shri Thanedar introduced a bill that went even further. His “Abolish ICE Act” not only proposes a total rescission of ICE funding but the abolition of the entire agency within 90 days of the proposed bill’s passage. “We must reform ICE, but it looks at this stage, folks, that ICE is beyond reform,” Thanedar said at a press conference previewing the legislation on Wednesday. “ICE is totally out of control.”
It’s not clear yet how many of his colleagues will be willing to join him on that bill. Their reluctance may stem from the counsel of centrist think tanks like Third Way and Searchlight Institute who have cautioned Democrats to avoid renewing calls to abolish the agency, saying such efforts would be “politically lethal,” and urging them to rallying around the call “Reform and Retrain” ICE instead.
For now, the most encouraging signal from the Democratic Party as a whole is its growing opposition to legislation that will fund the Department of Homeland Security this year. Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has said members of his caucus will not support a spending bill that either increases funding for ICE or lacks new accountability measures on the agency. “Right now, there’s no bipartisan path forward for the Department of Homeland Security,” Jeffries told reporters Wednesday. The fate of that bill, which is required to pass the House by January 30 under an agreement that ended last year’s government shutdown, will be the biggest indication yet of how committed Democrats are to changing ICE’s current trajectory.
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