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PHILADELPHIA — The Democrats who want Rep. Chris Rabb to win tomorrow’s congressional primary agree with the Democrats who want him to lose it. His job got easier when another Democrat imploded over ICE.
The race for Pennsylvania’s 3rd district, the state’s bluest House seat, pits Rabb against state Sen. Sharif Street and Ala Stanford, the founder of a group that got COVID vaccines to Black Philadelphians. Stanford got important early support from D.C.-based groups, attracted by her story, unimpressed by Street, and wary of a far-left Democrat like Rabb.
But on April 24, Stanford got tongue-tied when asked to explain her position on abolishing ICE.
“That’s a good question, and you can, um, pause, because I just want to think about it for a minute,” Stanford told an NBC affiliate, before speculating that ICE could be replaced: “Once you abolish, you have to rebuild.”
Stanford was badly damaged by the clip, dropping out of a planned debate.
She’s not the only Democrat flummoxed by the question, or the topic. Four months after the killing of two Minnesota protesters by ICE agents, the fate of the 24-year-old immigration enforcement agency is one of the most fought-over questions in Democratic primaries — from solidly blue to purple to even red districts Democrats hope to nab in a potential wave.
The party is guaranteed a win in deep-blue Philadelphia. In swing states and districts, there’s worry that the ICE issue is being defined by Republican resolutions, pop-up conservative PACs, and progressive litmus testers, before the party comes up with a position it can defend.
“Many voters had visceral reactions to the way ICE was run under Kristi Noem, peaking with the killings in Minnesota over the winter,” said Phil Gardner, the co-founder of the Blue Dog Action PAC that supports centrist Democrats. “Those feelings have lingered, so campaigns on both sides are playing off peoples’ fear and anger to win primary elections. But if Democrats make their general election message about immigration enforcement and democracy, they will have learned literally nothing from their losses in 2024.”
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Every incumbent House Democrat opposed last year’s GOP tax package, which handed $75 billion to ICE to spend over four years. But those who voted for a non-binding pro-ICE resolution have been pilloried for it. And Republicans have noticed, running ads in Democratic primaries that highlight the “abolish ICE” views of the candidates they think would be easier to beat.
Democratic primary voters had a negative view of ICE even before the Minnesota killings, which amped up the salience of the issue in campaigns. In March, national polling for YouGov found that 77% of self-identified Democrats wanted to “abolish” the agency. Support for new ICE restrictions, like requiring its agents to wear uniforms and no masks, are even more popular.
Democrats who expected competitive races in November were cautious about taking solidly anti-ICE positions. Some voted last year for a resolution, introduced after a shooting at an ICE facility, that endorsed “full support for ICE agents, officers, and staff performing their law enforcement duties.”
That resolution became an albatross in Democratic primaries. In Minnesota, where many D.C. Democrats believe that Rep. Angie Craig is their stronger candidate for U.S. Senate, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan has hammered her for votes that “empowered Donald Trump and praised ICE.” In Michigan, where the same Democrats want Rep. Haley Stevens to replace retiring Sen. Gary Peters, her vote for the resolution has helped her progressive challengers with primary voters.
“Michigan needs a Senator who will stand up against this paramilitary force and is unafraid to abolish a violent agency weaponized against us,” said Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive public health leader endorsed by Bernie Sanders last week.
Both Craig and Stevens faced those attacks after allies had tried to help them — with ads about their fight against ICE. In Michigan, a pop-up PAC called the Center for Democratic Priorities began running ads that thanked Stevens for her Hold ICE Accountable Act, which has no co-sponsors and is unlikely to pass. In Minnesota, another pop-up nonprofit, the Civic Progress Fund, ran similar thank-you ads for Craig, setting up another attack on her record from Flanagan.
Craig, like Stevens, has defended the resolution vote, and blamed Republicans for a “gotcha” move of adding pro-ICE language to what would have been a clean statement on anti-semitism. “Would the lieutenant governor have voted against a resolution to condemn anti-semitism?” she asked HuffPost.
Secretive groups that are helping far-left candidates have frequently portrayed them as true-blue ICE abolitionists. Lead Left PAC, which Democrats suspect is a GOP-funded pop-up, is boosting a left-wing county commissioner in Pennsylvania’s 7th District, where Gov. Josh Shapiro and a coalition of liberals support moderate firefighter Bob Brooks. The PAC’s ad portrays McClure as the only Democrat who “kicked ICE out” of his community.
Lead Left is doing the same in Texas’s 35th District, a new seat that was drawn to elect a Republican, but that Democrats hope to compete for if they nominate moderate police officer Johnny Garcia. The PAC has been helping Maureen Galindo, a sex therapist whose attacks on “zionist billionaires” have offended Jewish Democrats.
A mailer from Lead Left, shared with Semafor, tells voters that Galindo will “permanently dismantle ICE, and work to prosecute any ICE agent who participated in Donald Trump’s program of family separation.” And a Lead Left digital ad running in the district clips moments from a candidate forum where Galindo said that “ICE shouldn’t exist,” and “we need to eliminate ICE completely.”
The View From Democrats
In an interview, Rabb easily answered the question that had stumped Stanford. He would abolish ICE and all of its work did not need to be continued by some other agency.
“We didn’t have immigrant detention centers, which are essentially concentration camps, before 9/11,” said Rabb. “Through bipartisan complicity, under the Clinton administration in the mid-90s, they passed very problematic, comprehensive legislation that criminalized brown immigration, which allowed for there to become a structure for ICE to do what it’s doing now. ICE existed and was bad before Trump, under Biden, under Obama – who was called the deporter in chief, as you know.”
The View From Republicans
“House Democrats are getting dragged so far left in their primaries that candidates are tripping over themselves to embrace abolishing ICE and other extreme anti-law enforcement positions that are terribly toxic with the general electorate,” said NRCC Spokesman Mike Marinella. “The NRCC will make sure every voter knows that if anti-law enforcement Democrats were in charge, they’ll side with violent criminal illegal immigrants over the safety of American families.”
David’s view
Stanford’s problem in Philadelphia was basic: She’d embraced a slogan (“abolish ICE”) before figuring out her own, informed position on the political question. Kamala Harris won her district by 77 points, and progressives effectively highlighted the litmus tests she was uncomfortable with (Israel and ICE) and shared her mistakes across social media.
There are 434 House districts less Democratic than this one, but there’s general agreement among Democrats: Their leaders should be trying to break ICE apart. We’ve already seen, in primaries this year, how anything in a candidate’s record that could be framed as pro-ICE can be used against them, like donors to Illinois candidates or Tom Steyer’s decades-old investments in private prisons.
But I see two Democratic problems here. One is a real disagreement inside the party about what immigration enforcement should look like after Donald Trump, with many progressives arguing that they missed a chance to de-fang it before Trump returned to office. The other, related problem is that Democrats haven’t really tackled that question – which, at root, is about who should and should not be allowed in the country, besides citizens.
The candidates who passionately want to stand down ICE and welcome more immigrants have the simpler argument, and in primaries, the stronger hand.
Notable
- Chris Rabb got a glowing write-up in The Nation, predicting that he’ll become one of the most outspoken progressives in the House.