The News
A Wednesday shooting at a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office is prompting the Trump administration to push critics of its deportation policy to tone down their rhetoric.
Democrats are unlikely to heed that advice.
As of Wednesday afternoon, no Democrat who’d condemned ICE for its tactics or protested outside ICE processing centers had walked back those comments. And Democrats who have confronted ICE agents or gotten arrested at protests have consistently drawn more voters and donors to their campaigns this year.
Their party is out of power in Washington, flummoxed by low approval ratings, and still debating the decisions that cost it the 2024 election. But Democrats have found sturdy ground resisting attempts to police their speech following the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
“What happened in Dallas is an unacceptable tragedy, period. No matter what, no matter who did it, no matter who was shot,” said Daniel Biss, a Democratic candidate for Congress in Chicago’s liberal suburbs and the sitting mayor of Evanston, Illinois.
“But pretending that appropriate, nonviolent dissent is what causes violence?” Biss added. “It’s the same as getting Jimmy Kimmel [suspended]. It’s trying to use threats and intimidation to silence dissent.”
Democrats showed no signs of backing down even as Trump’s close allies sharply warned against anti-ICE activity after the shooting in Dallas, which authorities said killed one detainee and injured two others. (None of the reported casualties were law enforcement.)
“If your political rhetoric encourages violence against our law enforcement, you can go straight to hell,” Vice President JD Vance said later Wednesday at a speech in North Carolina.
Know More
Biss and another Democratic candidate in the race, progressive Kat Abughazaleh, were physically pushed by ICE agents at a protest last week at a facility in Broadview, Ill., which they want closed down.
Agents used tear gas to break up the protest. Both Democrats got a boost in attention and donations, especially Abughazaleh, who was filmed from several angles being thrown to the ground by an unidentified agent.
“This is actually the third time ICE has forcibly moved and thrown me on the ground,” said Abughazaleh, who has repeatedly joined a long-running protest at the facility. “I’m a very throwable person.”
Her campaign plans to donate $10,000 of the money that Abughazaleh raised after the incident to local immigration groups. The new attention included a post from DHS that accused her of “siding with vicious cartels, human traffickers, and violent criminals” by “impeding ICE operations,” a characterization she rejected.
“Continuing to peacefully protest Trump’s illegal and immoral deportations is more important than ever. Violent actors do not represent the vast majority of protesters (who ICE brutalizes and abducts, despite no violent action),” she told Semafor after the Dallas shooting.
Both Biss and Abughazaleh support abolishing ICE, and the winner of their primary will be heavily favored to hold a seat whose voters backed Kamala Harris by 37 points last year.
But Republican campaign committees have been tracking anti-ICE comments by candidates in targeted seats in a broader effort to portray Democrats as unhinged and dangerous — a new iteration of a tactic from Trump’s first term, when Republicans linked public expressions of Democratic anger to political violence.
At the same time, the Democratic base has rewarded candidates who’ve confronted federal agencies or otherwise gotten arrested for opposing Trump policies. In July, Isaiah Martin, a 27-year old former Hill staffer running in the special election for a safe Democratic seat in Houston, was removed from a Texas GOP redistricting hearing and arrested.
According to his campaign, Martin had been raising around $15,000 per week before the arrest; he raised $100,000 after he shouted “you should all be ashamed” and was pulled out of the hearing room.
“The people that I meet on the street have been talking about this issue,” Martin told Semafor, answering critics who were skeptical about what the arrest had achieved. “The folks in the barber shop come up to me and say that they had no idea what was going on, and now they’re activated.”
Ezra Levin, the co-founder of the liberal community group Indivisible, said that there had been more interest in the next wave of “No Kings” protests since Kimmel’s suspension by Disney.
Indivisible would be part of pre-event volunteer training on how to “defuse and identify political violence,” he said, but protesters would not limit what they said about the administration, ICE, or anything else.
The protests at the Broadview ICE facility began years ago and grew in recent weeks. Abughazaleh told Semafor that she would be back for the next one on Friday.
The View From Republicans
Republicans were nearly unanimous about the danger of Democrats attacking ICE. The White House’s X account described comments from Dallas-area Rep. Jasmine Crockett comparing ICE to “slave patrols” as rhetoric that “leads to violence.”
“Today’s Democrats don’t just excuse criminal illegal immigrants; they celebrate them: bragging about arrests, parading the chaos, and turning it into cash,” said NRCC spokesman Mike Marinella.
Room for Disagreement
Some Democrats continue to try for a calmer tone in politics overall, regardless of party.
Rep. Marc Veasey, a Texas Democrat whose district was drawn out by a GOP gerrymander, said in a statement after the Dallas shooting that “as we mourn, we must also lower the temperature of our politics. Stoking the flames of fear and anger only makes tragedies like this more likely.”
David’s view
Back in August, a number of Democrats anonymously told Axios that their constituents wanted to see them resisting the Trump administration more forcefully, even if they risked getting physically hurt while doing so.
Democrats protesting ICE and comparing them to fascist police forces are working in that environment. I wouldn’t expect that to change.
That’s because they view themselves as operating in the tradition of other resistance movements, and are betting that voters will see the masked agents of the state as the aggressors.
And they watched Trump pardon people accused of violence against police on Jan. 6, 2021, after four years of (many) Republicans arguing that most rioters were simply trying to defend democracy.
Notable
In Wired, Kate Knibbs profiles Abughazaleh and her campaign strategy of taking on Republicans in person, with uncompromising rhetoric. “She’s betting that voters, above all else, want a brawler.”
- In the Washington Post, Liz Goodwin talks with Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who worries that his party has been too “timid” about challenging Trump on immigration and ICE. “This job is not worth it if you constantly have to be putting your finger to the wind.”
- In Puck, Peter Hamby asks whether Martin’s attention-getting rhetoric and social media reach is the way of the future. “He’s gambling that he can win a campaign by thinking like a content creator first and a traditional candidate second.”