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Democrats want to rein in President Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The trouble is, they have no good options to do that.
They could vote to shut the agency down at the end of month, but ICE would still be sitting on tens of billions of dollars in funding from Trump’s tax cuts bill. Some of them want to transfer that ICE money to other law enforcement agencies, but that’s more of a long-term project that would require them to have congressional majorities.
And some Democrats are holding out long shot hopes for a bipartisan deal with Republicans that can place some guardrails on the agency after its operations in Minnesota, including the shooting death of 37-year-old US citizen Renee Good, attracted national attention to the Trump administration’s aggressive interior enforcement across the country.
ICE’s actions in Minnesota have amplified a steadily building outrage among Democrats and their base. A familiar question is now tripping up the party: What can be done about it?
“It’s going to be quite a fight. Because what they are doing is so unacceptable that I think there are going to be a lot of people who are going to be reluctant to fund it at all,” Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, told Semafor.
King is bracing for potential ICE action in his state. And Democrats have just two weeks to decide whether to filibuster a Department of Homeland Security bill in the Senate, even as funding the rest of the government continues to hum along on a bipartisan basis.
The choice will be “very hard,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M. “What’s going on at DHS is … I don’t even have words for it. It’s so many things, but it’s un-American across the board.”
Heinrich added that “I haven’t made a decision” on how best to restrain the “hostile, rogue agency … but it will be fully based on what I think will have the most impact on changing the direction of that agency.”
Some Democrats believe blocking the DHS bill to shut down ICE would not be effective, because the agency is already sitting on that windfall from the tax law and because a closure would sweep up other agencies, like TSA and the Coast Guard. King observed that “during the last shutdown they operated under the [GOP tax law].”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Appropriations Committee chairs and ranking members “are trying to come up with a solution … we’ll see what they come up with.”
Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., who’s taking the lead for her party on DHS funding, said she just made a new offer to Democrats: “We’re continuing to take that dialogue open, which I think is really positive for a potential pathway forward.”
But even centrist Democrats are skeptical such a deal can be made and believe the most pragmatic option is to fund DHS on a stopgap bill, otherwise known as a continuing resolution.
“My guess is that it may go by CR. We may not actually get agreement on a bill,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.
Republican leaders are optimistic that as many as 10 of the 12 regular government funding bills will be passed by the Jan. 30 deadline. But DHS is already isolated from the herd of bipartisanship.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said the DHS bill “will be the hardest one” and said it’s the most likely candidate for a stopgap. That would mean at least seven Democratic senators — and potentially more, depending on GOP defections — would have to vote yes to avoid a DHS shutdown.
“I will not vote for one more dime for Trump’s ICE operations,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md. Asked if he hopes the rest of the party joins him, he replied: “I’m just speaking for myself.”
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Democrats shut the government down over health care for 43 days. They got no policy victory out of it — the Affordable Care Act subsidies they were fighting for have now expired — but they believe they at least focused public attention on rising insurance costs and pinned the expiration on Republicans.
Polls show Trump is vulnerable on immigration enforcement, too. But does the party need a shutdown to make that point?
“It’s going to be a real challenge. There’s no question, what we’re seeing from ICE is raising all sorts of concerns about how the department is being managed,” said centrist Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich. “We have to use every tool in our toolbox to make sure that people are held accountable for their actions.”
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., one of three members of Schumer’s caucus who repeatedly opposed shutting down the government last year, wants to redirect $75 billion in ICE funding to local law enforcement agencies. She argued that if lawmakers “transfer these funds, we won’t rescind ICE’s regular appropriations.”
Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., who is running for the Senate, has a similar proposal that would direct the money to expired ACA subsidies.
Democrats could push for a vote on both of those ideas as amendments, but they won’t pass. Some Democrats might then feel comfortable voting for a stopgap funding bill after such a vote.
But others are pushing a more confrontational approach.
“We ought to use the power of the purse to compel reforms and recruiting and training. We ought to use every tool available to try to overhaul DHS,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. “I don’t think we should just give them a pass.”
Room for Disagreement
Republicans believe Democrats don’t want another shutdown — even a smaller one focused on DHS. They said Democrats would be blamed for shutting down crucial DHS agencies far beyond ICE, from FEMA to TSA to the Coast Guard.
“They’re not thinking through what all DHS does,” Britt said. “So I think that would be really shortsighted.”
Her friend Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., agreed: “We just can’t resist to engage and provoke these extreme reactions. Do we get tired of losing?”
Burgess’s view
Democrats are in a serious bind about DHS, beyond the political noise about “abolish ICE” sloganeering.
Shutting down the entire department might feel cathartic and energize their base, but practically speaking, the Trump administration is sitting on so much money for ICE that a shutdown would do little to hamstring that agency.
The 2025 shutdown (eventually) taught us that there is a coalition of eight Democratic caucus members who are willing to fund the government and take the heat from the rest of the party.
What I’m not totally convinced of yet is that the same coalition exists to keep ICE going with no new limits. I don’t think you can rule out a smaller government shutdown, at this point.