A funny thing happened on the way to the Democrats’ latest budget capitulation. They acquired some spine.
It began when key Senate progressives, led by Chris Murphy (CT) and Elizabeth Warren (MA) were joined by more moderate colleagues in demanding that Minority Leader Chuck Schumer hold out for serious constraints on ICE as a condition of approving other parts of the 2026 budget. In the end, Democrats voted unanimously—even Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman—to strip DHS from the rest of last week’s package that kept the government open, pending major ICE reforms.
Then, in a role reversal, Democrats in the House took an even harder line than their Senate counterparts. The deal that Democrats won was funding of the rest of the government but just two-week funding for the Department of Homeland Security, during which time specific constraints on ICE are to be negotiated.
With the defection of some right-wing Republicans, Speaker Mike Johnson was barely able to get the House to approve the deal yesterday, by a vote of 217 to 214. Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries had to lend Johnson some Democratic votes to get the measure passed at all.
Now comes the hard part. Democrats realize they have public opinion on their side. They are united while Republicans are split.
Trump and his puppeteer Stephen Miller have tried to get ICE excesses off the front pages by replacing the sadistic Greg Bovino with border czar Tom Homan as on-the-ground commissar in Minneapolis, and having Homan and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem offer some token concessions.
Noem says ICE troops will get body cameras. Homan this morning held a press conference to announce that he was drawing down the ICE force by 700. But he didn’t say when, and that still leaves over 2,000 officers.
Homan added that the force would be reduced only when “intimidation” of ICE agents ceased. This is another way of demanding that local residents end their right of peaceful protest. That’s not going to happen.
“We will not draw down on personnel providing security and responding to hostile incidents until we see a change in what’s happening,” he said. Homan still doesn’t get it. One person’s “hostile incident” is another person’s First Amendment right. This provocation will only invite more demonstrations.
So ICE is neither off TV nor out of the headlines. The ICE thugs as well as their masters continue displaying the need for explicit statutory restraints, if not outright dissolution of the agency.
There are also still major issues to be negotiated with Minnesota state and local officials, such as the state and city role in the investigations of the ICE murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and the terms on which local officials will turn over immigrants wanted by ICE who did not commit serious crimes.
On Tap This story first appeared in the On Tap newsletter, a weekday email featuring commentary on the daily news from Robert Kuttner and Harold Meyerson.
Meanwhile, the courts are also taking a harder line. Monday night, in a scathing order, U.S. District Court Judge Ana C. Reyes blocked Noem’s attempted withdrawal of Temporary Protected Status for some 353,000 Haitians living legally in the United States since the catastrophic Haitian earthquake of 2010. The revocation of TPS would render them undocumented immediately and invite ICE arrests.
Judge Reyes wrote that Noem had offered zero evidence of her contention that Haitian refugees are sponging off welfare. On the contrary: “In 2021, 94.6% of TPS holders nationwide were employed.”
The judge pointedly added, “Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants. Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the [Administrative Procedure Act] to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program. The record to-date shows she has yet to do that.”
There are now just ten days left before the two-week continuing resolution expires and DHS runs out of funding. It seems unlikely, given the splits in their own ranks, that Republicans will meet Democratic demands by then, but even less likely that Democrats will back down.
In the recent shutdown last fall, political responsibility was blurred. Not this time. The broad public wants the kind of limits Democrats are demanding as a condition of extending the two-week DHS deal. They include not just body cameras and an end to masks, but independent investigations of abuses, and an end to ICE issuing its own arrest warrants in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
And Democrats want to go further. On Friday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) got a floor vote for his amendment to claw back $75 billion in ICE funding and redirect the money to restore Medicaid cuts in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. The amendment won the votes of every Senate Democrat and two Republicans.
The Republican leadership is on the losing side of a losing issue. The longer they hold out in resisting overdue constraints on ICE, the more they lose public opinion generally.
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