This Is the Perfect Moment for Democrats to Grow a Spine

The time for triangulating is over. With the second murder of a Minneapolis citizen at the hands of untrained, immunity-drunk, and predatory federal agents, Democrats must fundamentally shift their approach to immigration policy. It’s long past time for the party to move past its learned helplessness in the face of MAGA bloodlust fantasies about an invading horde of undocumented immigrants—and to vindicate the human rights of workers and neighbors confronting Gestapo-style seizures, renditions, and executions of a lawless invading force. Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old VA nurse shot 11 times in the back after being thrown to the ground by federal goons, was documenting their abuses in the hopes of halting them and returning our federal government to some semblance of moral responsibility. The bare minimum that national Democrats can do in his memory is to dismantle the ICE bureaucracy of terror once and for all.

After Pretti’s execution on Saturday, a key swing bloc of Senate Democrats had signaled that they would vote no on the House-passed appropriations bill that would deliver $10 billion in additional funding for ICE. This is on top of the tripling of the agency’s budget secured in last summer’s tax-and-spending bill. House GOP leaders had already carved out the ICE appropriation into a separate bill funding the Department of Homeland Security, so that another swing bloc of right-leaning Democrats would support it after a number of their pet spending priorities were attached to the legislation. That tactic was also garnering support from Democratic senators, with Appropriations Vice Chair Patty Murray of Washington all but assuring that Republicans would land the seven Democratic votes required to avoid a filibuster. Yet now that the feds have murdered another Minneapolis resident, Democratic support for the measure has collapsed, leaving GOP majority leader John Thune with the option of either blowing up the filibuster or stripping out DHS funding as a standalone bill that wouldn’t clear the 60-vote filibuster threshold, and thereby potentially touching off a partial government shutdown.

In material terms, the Senate vote wouldn’t do much to slow down the rampaging ICE invasions, given the agency’s vast $85 billion annual budget; ICE continued its marauding national tour during last year’s record-long government shutdown after all. But in political terms, the Democrats must not sidestep this battle. Democrats had previously relied on strong polling support for Trump’s immigration views to rationalize their passivity on the issue—yet public opinion is turning against ICE. A YouGov poll released on Saturday, hours before Pretti’s execution, showed 46 percent of all respondents backing the agency’s abolition, compared to 41 percent opposing it. The gap widens to 12 percent among independent voters—now the largest segment of the electorate—with 47 percent backing ICE’s abolition, and 35 percent opposing. Fifty-percent of respondents said they strongly disapprove of ICE, and just 24 percent of independents registered support for the agency. There’s every reason to believe that these negative numbers will continue to grow in the wake of Pretti’s horrific murder.

As political scientist David Faris recently argued in The Nation—again, prior to Pretti’s killing—Democrats cannot continue their dilatory enabling role in backing the rise of an immigration police state:

If the party can’t take a stand here for their own voters in the Twin Cities and elsewhere who are effectively living under an open-ended, vengeful military occupation, it may fritter away what looks like a decisive advantage in the upcoming midterm elections. Many Democratic voters now keen to have the party begin the long fight to reclaim basic constitutional protections and democratic traditions shredded by the Trump regime would be discouraged from turning out this November if the party refuses to meet this latest crisis with anything other than polite consultant-massaged demands to institute improved training protocols for ICE goons poised to terrorize our cities.

Unfortunately, the political exigency here stands athwart a dismal Democratic record of preserving status-quo state predation in immigration policy. Over the past decade of xenophobic immigrant-baiting on the right, the leaders of the Democratic Party have adopted their standard difference-trimming playbook to an issue that was always a stark question of basic human rights and basic human decency. The MAGA claim that the United States was in the grip of a violent immigrant crime wave was a blatant lie, as were scores of related dehumanizing slurs, from the nonsensical assertion that immigrants were bankrupting Social Security and health coverage to the urban legend that Haitian immigrants were eating the pets belonging to their neighbors in Springfield, Ohio. (Indeed, the ICE mobilization in Minneapolis is in response to another discredited battery of MAGA lies about a massive scheme of welfare fraud allegedly perpetrated by Somali-run daycare centers in Minnesota—though just how an armed Freikorps mobilization is expected to combat the accounting-based conduct of welfare fraud has never been explained.)

Occasionally, Democratic lawmakers would try to swat down some of the right’s most lurid and baseless claims, but they also took great care to grant the basic premise of this hate campaign: that border enforcement in this country was broken and that some vast unspecified cohort of undocumented immigrants were, in some vague and implausible way, preying on the birthright safety and prosperity of native-born Americans. That’s why President Barack Obama oversaw a greater volume of deportations than Donald Trump had, prior to the present Trump administration’s mass deportation policy; it’s also why, once you combine interior removals of immigrants with administrative returns at or near the border, the Biden White House clocked a higher number of immigrants exiting the country in the first eight months of its final year than the second Trump administration has during the same time frame in 2025. It’s why Biden and his Democratic allies on the Hill continued increasing ICE’s budget lines. And it’s why the same Democratic Senate caucus now belatedly trying to stake out a dissenting position on state-sanctioned murder meekly rolled over to ensure the passage of the Laken Riley Act, which laid the groundwork for ICE’s rolling siege on Democratic-led cities.

The reasoning behind the House appropriations bid to continue spiking ICE funding is very much of a piece with this long train of Democratic capitulations on right-wing immigration crackdowns: If the party once again submits to the right-wing consensus on immigration, it won’t suffer a defection of highly coveted (if increasingly mythical) moderate voters in the next election cycle.

But the flagrantly fascist actions of the Trump White House have upended even the milquetoast logic of traditional Democratic acquiescence. There’s no middle ground to be staked out in a murderous authoritarian siege. In addition to the dramatic shift against Trump’s immigration program in opinion surveys, there’s now a mass revulsion against ICE in unlikely forums like NFL Reddit boards. For a political establishment that’s spent the past decade bending over backward to accommodate the smallest errant grievance from Trump-voting diner patrons, that should be a five-alarm wake-up call.

And aside from self-interested electoral calculations, the moral case against allowing ICE to survive is now unanswerable. In a powerful YouTube video posted shortly after Pretti’s execution, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie made the straightforward case that the administration’s concerted release of ideological death squads in US cities renders Trump’s presidency illegitimate. Bouie doesn’t cite manifestos from the margins of political life, but rather section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which forbids insurrectionists against the United States from holding federal office, and the language of the Declaration of Independence. That strikes me as a sound fundamental basis for the Democrats to finally act with genuine moral authority on a genuine moral issue.

The present crisis also calls to mind the counsel of Martin Luther King Jr. in “A Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” as he surveys the callow lecturing of his self-appointed Job’s consolers in the white moderate wing of liberalism. King wrote:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s greatest stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

King’s indictments extend not just to today’s congressional Democratic leaders but to all the major institutions we’ve seen capitulate to Trump’s fascist-gangster agenda over the past year, from universities and media corporations to the commercial interests backstopping the ICE regime. Voting down the next round of ICE funding won’t reverse this collapse into authoritarianism, but it would at least be a step in the right direction. It would also represent a quantum leap beyond the shallow understanding and lukewarm acceptance that has long been the Democrats’ calling card in immigration policy.