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Democrats Have Much to Gain—and Nothing to Fear—From Attacking ICE
New Republic • Jan 27, 2026

Democrats Have Much to Gain—and Nothing to Fear—From Attacking ICE

When the Democrats were gun-shy early last year about criticizing President Trump’s ramp-up of immigrant raids and deportations, that approach was substantively bad but made sense electorally. The percentage of Americans who wanted immigration levels to decrease had jumped from 31 percent in 2021, at the start of President Biden’s tenure, to 55 percent in 2024. Similarly, even though support for abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is at its highest level ever, only about 46 percent of Americans currently hold that stance. That number is likely lower in purple and red states, making it a somewhat dicey electoral position for the party. But overall, views on immigration and ICE are rapidly shifting leftward as more Americans recoil at the administration’s crackdown on cities like Minneapolis, an ICE agent’s killing of Renee Nicole Good, and the shooting of Alex Pretti by Customs and Border Protection officers. There is a huge opportunity for Democrats to push for a new vision for immigration enforcement in America—basically anything short of abolishing ICE, and eventually that too. The party should lean into a coming fight over Department of Homeland Security funding (which expires on January 30) and demand that Trump withdraw ICE personnel from Minneapolis and never again deploy them to punish blue cities. Polling tells a very clear story—Americans have seen Trump’s immigration agenda, and they reject it. The number of Americans who want immigration levels dropped has plunged back to 30 percent, according to Gallup polling. Fifty-seven percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration, while only 41 percent approve, according to a recent New York Times/Siena poll. Fifty-seven percent disagree with how ICE is conducting its duties, compared to only 37 percent who agree, per YouGov. And all of these surveys were taken before Pretti’s killing, which drew condemnation from professional athletes and others who usually stay out of politics. “Especially on immigration, policy has moved far to the right, and far beyond what the public supports. Hence the huge swings,” says G. Elliott Morris, author of the excellent newsletter “Strength in Numbers.” These numbers should cause a shift in Democratic Party strategy. Post-2024, party leaders such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffies generally settled on an economic-centric approach. So they largely sidestepped aggressive rhetoric or strong opposition as Trump defunded colleges, banned diversity and inclusion efforts, and increased immigration enforcement. They were willing to engage in a government shutdown last fall in part because it was very tied to an economic issue (health care subsidies for Obamacare).Schumer, after watching the 2025 electoral successes of New York’s Zohran Mamdani and other candidates who emphasized affordability, had recently doubled down on this strategy. And while I would have liked to see Democrats do more to try to limit Trump’s autocratic actions on noneconomic issues last year, this strategy made electoral sense. But with Trump’s standing on immigration issues now low and the public more open to immigration and wary of ICE, there is far less electoral risk in directly confronting the president on what had been one of his strongest issues. Democrats of course should still talk about economic issues, but immigration, and particularly immigration enforcement, is now in their favor electorally. And the substantive case has never been clearer. During Trump’s first term, the idea of abolishing ICE became prominent because the agency was conducting overly aggressive raids, often targeting people who were nonviolent. Now, not only are those raids even more extensive but Trump has turned ICE and CBP into a national police force under his command, deployed to cities that he dislikes and literally murdering people who object to his rule. It’s one of the most radical, authoritarian policies of his presidency.So what ICE changes should Democrats push for? I am not sure that national party leaders or figures in red or purple states should call for abolishing ICE right now. ICE abolition is ultimately the right policy. ICE has only existed since 2003. Abolishing the agency and relying on other parts of local, state, and federal governments to enforce immigration would work just fine. Abolishing ICE is substantially different from and easier than abolishing local police departments. But polls suggest the term abolish turns off some voters. And if the idea seems politically risky, the party can’t unify around it because swing-state members will keep objecting to it. But there is plenty short of abolition to do. Democrats should try to roll back the massive funding increases that ICE received last year. They should ban agents from wearing masks unless absolutely necessary. They should put restrictions on how ICE is deployed to cities. ICE immediately leaving Minneapolis must be a condition for any further DHS funding. The administration must allow local and state investigations of Good’s and Pretti’s killings and potentially charges filed against the officers. The quotas for arrests that ICE has set must be withdrawn. At the same time, abolishing ICE needs to be on the party’s long-term agenda. An agency that can be deployed as a fascist police force for future Republican presidents can’t remain in place. The next Democratic president must either outright eliminate ICE or downsize it so that the agency can never repeat its actions of 2025 again. So Democrats in more liberal areas should keep making that case and building support for getting rid of ICE. And it’s critical that Democrats running in purple and red states and more moderate presidential candidates focus on policies short of abolition that they can support now, while also not demonizing the idea of abolition in the future. We can’t afford a repeat of the defunding the police debate, which many center-left Democrats used as an opportunity not to emphasize their reform-but-not-defund proposals but to instead triangulate against the party’s left wing, praise the cops, and weaken the case for any reforms. There are some good signs from moderates on this issue. New York Representative Tom Suozzi, who usually revels in slamming the party’s left and was one of the seven Democrats who voted for increased DHS funding in the House last week, put out a fiery statement on Monday declaring, “President Trump must immediately end ‘Operation Metro Surge’ and ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis.” Even better was a recent remark from Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego, who has established himself as a moderate voice in the party and often takes more conservative stands on immigration. Asked in a CNN interview about his opposition to abolishing ICE, Gallego used different language than his more progressive colleagues but didn’t bash their ideas. “ICE needs to be totally torn down. It has to be created in the image of what people want, right? And what does that look like?” he said, according to The Hill. “From my experience running in Arizona, in a very hard, hard state when it comes to immigration and immigration issues, people want immigration enforcement that goes after criminals, right, and focuses on criminals, and immigration enforcement that is actually focused on security, and not the goon squad that has come from Stephen Miller and Donald Trump.”“Totally torn down” may not be “abolish,” but it’s a call for major changes and leaves room for abolition down the line. But that’s in the long term. Right now, what Democrats need to avoid is meaningless symbolic actions. I hate Kristi Noem too, but she is not going to be impeached and removed from office. I worry that the Democrats calling for that are simply trying to duck the underlying issues. The debate over DHS funding gives the Democrats a chance to actually change ICE’s policies right now. They need to take it. There is no longer any electoral excuse not to.

The ICE Resistance That You’re Not Seeing
New Republic • Jan 27, 2026

The ICE Resistance That You’re Not Seeing

The people patrolling the streets of the Twin Cities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents call themselves “commuters.” That just about captures the minute-to-minute experience of being with them. I rode along with these commuters for a day, and the story that no one sees is that it was really no more exciting than any drive to and fro in a medium-size city on an endless kaleidoscoping loop of surface streets. The differences between their old daily routines and their new ones only make these drives more stultifying, not less.There’s an audio Signal chat happening in the background: alternating silence with strong Minnesota accents calling in the license plate numbers of SUVs. You can’t talk. You can’t listen to music. One veteran commuter tells me the experience is hell on his ADHD. “I can’t even listen to podcasts.”Drawing from a spreadsheet amassed from eyewitnesses to ICE activity, the database operator on the call identifies most of the license plates called in as negative or suspected. Others are confirmed not affiliated with the agency. But the indicators of “friendlies” are no longer reliable. ICE agents have marked cars with student-driver stickers and SpongeBob decals. There are rumors that they’re also adding comically stereotypical bumper stickers for various liberal causes. In one chat, someone says they saw an ICE agent disembark from a Subaru with a sticker that just said “queer.” A person I’m driving with laughs. “Can you imagine? Just ‘queer’?”I’ve only been granted access to these drives because friends from my old life here vouched for me. Others checked my social media history. One person consulted a mutual friend who happens to be a well-known science fiction author to make sure I was on the up-and-up. The drivers don’t know how they’re connected to the broader effort except through the crowdsourced database. The Signal chat reorganizes daily. One of the people I drive with, a lawyer, uses his real first name because he suspects attempts at operational security are well meaning but ultimately futile. And indeed, commuters share stories of being approached by ICE agents and called by name, or of starting to follow a car only to be driven past their own homes.Other volunteers say strangers have approached them as they watch over corners and schools—people dressed in liberal mufti rather than the drab ICE camo—saying they’re with Indivisible, or that they just want to help, asking who to talk to about getting involved. There’s now been news coverage of such infiltrations, apparently so easy someone at the Free Press managed to do it.Of course, the commuters and corner watchers organizing this are not experts at subterfuge. As one person told me, “I think we’ve decided that between scale and perfect op-sec, we’ll go with volume.”The code names are the only place where you find a thread of underplayed Midwest surrealism, which put a T-Rex sculpture in the background of the Renee Nicole Good murder footage. I cannot repeat those code names verbatim, but they included references to the state fair, Star Wars, Firefly, sports teams, and phrases that rhymed with Fuck ICE. I suppose it’s OK to reveal there were several variations on Mom.We drove through Home Depot and Menards parking lots, passing businesses with signs indicating that ICE was not welcome, communicated on a politeness scale from “Customers only” to “Fuck off, ICE.” My chauffeurs pointed out the sites along the way.“That’s where ICE dragged a pregnant woman through the snow.”“That’s where ICE pulled two men out and handcuffed them face down in the parking lot.”“That’s the apartment building where they busted down a door.”I was on my way back to a friend’s house when a driver said, “And over there, that’s where they killed Renee Nicole Good. Do you want to drive by George Floyd Square? It’s only a couple blocks south from here.” ICE murdered Alex Pretti the morning I left town; that was a few minutes directly north.Observers have transmitted so much violence from Minneapolis, so much horror flooding our phones. But driving through these now-quiet neighborhoods—my home for a decade—broke me as much as anything. The mundanity. The way life had to move on.Crime scenes, every one of those places, but too many to tape off individually, too many to meaningfully count as crime scenes. A crime scene that’s a life-size map of the world.Ask any survivor of domestic abuse: Physical violence is just the punctuation at the end of the sentence. What makes life unbearable is that it could happen at any moment. The thrum of expectant fear is what abusers are after. Hypervigilance is the real punishment. It exhausts the will.Inside the car, the heater is running and the windshield wipers keep a metronome. It would lull you, except the ice turns the streets to cobblestones. You become very aware of how many dark SUVs there are in the world.Once, a vehicle passing by us was confirmed. We do a gentle three-point turn to follow, losing it. Or, once, we spotted and confirmed an SUV that we followed only to get stuck behind a stoplight. A driver tells me that he once tailed a confirmed car for a few miles then it sped up and changed over three lanes of traffic to exit, “And I wasn’t going to do that.” Another commuter tells me later that reckless driving can be a way to distinguish ICE vehicles but that natives can be careless, too. With just a touch of the judgment that Minneapolians have shucked, she says, “Maybe this will inspire some of us to become better drivers ourselves.”We hear whistles and shouts a block away and drive over. People in high-visibility vests are running toward the sound as well, and I put my phone to the cold glass to record. By the time we get to where the sound seemed to be coming from, people are walking away and there’s no obvious center of whatever happened.There’s an illicit thrill to spotting a vehicle, because all that edginess might finally get some release. But at the same time, when one participant volunteered to go to a site where a confirmed ICE truck had been spotted and said, “Just let them try something, those fucks,” the person I was with looked over at me and raised his eyebrows. It would be very un-Minnesotan to scold. The point of the interventions is not confrontation.Yes, these folks are willing to put their bodies on the line to save their neighbors. But they know they’re only in danger individually. As a crowd, they’re indestructible. You hear it almost constantly: “I don’t mean to be flip about this,” one commuter said, “but they can’t shoot us all.”The instances of physical violence only goose the number of people willing to be targets. Says Chris, “Every time they attack us, another round of volunteers comes in. We refuse to be cowed.”One of the chauffeurs I’m with had previously had a brush with real trouble: altercations in parking lots, ICE goons getting out and surrounding his car, everything just shy of cinematic action. He says, “It’s incredibly boring until someone points a gun at your face.”I tell him I must be a good-luck charm. It’s been so quiet. He says, “Every hour we spend driving around, making them change course or drive away, it’s another hour they’re not dragging people out of their homes.”The winters have taught Minnesotans to withstand the grind of watchfulness. That’s what it takes to make roads and sidewalks safe, even when they look OK. And the persistence of hockey moms undergirds it all: They are prepared with phone trees, scheduling, car pools.So much of the resistance is either carried out by women or coded as women’s work—unheralded, boring, unglamorous, and mostly undocumented. “You’re in the middle of resisting fascism, and someone still needs to do laundry,” Chris points out. A single father and a Parent-Teacher Association president, he stepped forward early on to do admin and dispatch, sometimes pulling four-, five-, six-hour shifts.“I was eating nothing but takeout. I said something, and now I’ve got a full fridge.” The grocery deliveries to immigrant families are vital. What keeps those deliveries happening are the deliveries to the people making deliveries. It’s mutual aid all the way down.Someone even volunteered to do the other volunteers’ day jobs, the work-work—formatting spreadsheets, answering emails. She volunteered to sit at a desk; she has young kids and doesn’t want to leave them alone. So she offered what she could: clerical skills.When I asked to talk to more of those folks—the ones doing the paperwork and laundry—I got polite refusals. Via Signal, someone apologized. “We’re all really scared right now.” Others were more self-effacing. Not sure if they’d make a good interview. Other people were doing so much more.Women’s work. Lightly frustrating in its humility. Labor without spectacle, mostly unnoticed except to each other. Detection can only bring wrath. As my friend Dara pointed out, the people hiding Jews in Nazi Germany couldn’t risk even a hint of noncompliance in any other aspect of their lives. This is what it means to have an invisible job: You’ll only get noticed if you make a mistake.According to the Unidos MN, tens of thousands in Minnesota have gone through constitutional observer training since the ICE occupation started. I know for sure there are people below the surface of that. “For every person you see out there, there are ten more you’ll never see,” one person told me. Credit is due to those who organized after George Floyd, and to those who grieved political inaction after the Annunciation Catholic School shooting and the assassination of Melissa Hortman and her family. This scale of organization could not have happened without those infrastructures in place. One activist wondered if more people have flocked to the ICE resistance because it’s a task that feels—in spite of everything—like it might have an end. It resembles national disaster relief more than a political movement, in how visible the uppermost layers are and how everyone wants to contribute something, and how easy it is to do so.You don’t have to reach out and sign up anywhere. It’s almost the opposite of recruitment, in the traditional sense. ICE is so pervasive, and the conflicts are happening in both the places you’d expect and the places you’d never guess, that the line between “activist” and “person who lives here” gets erased in real time. They’ve made it stupid-easy to get involved. Just wearing a whistle can put you in the middle of it.I was at the march downtown the day of the citywide strike. I made my way to the front, taking snaps of signs and getting in a question or two. It was loud and could have been louder but for everyone trying to talk and scream through their scarves. The scale of it became clear only from the skyway above the street. Dozens of us watched, rapt, as the frozen river of people oozed slowly through the streets. It was so cold that trees were in danger of exploding a little further north, but there were 50,000 people there.It was a powerful message of resilience. But what I’m trying to tell you is that there are no ready-made visuals to represent the larger fight. A cell phone? A spreadsheet? The icon for the Signal app? Movements have always been built on administration, on paperwork, on the jujitsu of competing legalese. The backbone of the Civil Rights Movement was SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. We remember the nonviolent part, but we forget the committee. There were a lot of mimeographs to be made between showdowns. There are always invisible gears in the machinery of justice; I just didn’t expect them to be so secret.When I was being driven around the Cities in lightly falling, fluffy snow, the whole scene was rendered in real-life grayscale. I had a shameful, selfish thought: This is the opposite of a color lead. My editor sent me all the way out here for this?I thought of all the useless video I had taken, and then of the terabytes more of data on a thousand other phones. All the interactions that didn’t escalate or even turn out to be ICE action. All those videos are evidence of the terror too—evidence of the wearying watchfulness that an occupation wrests from people. How occupations colonize memory as much as space.The shots of ICE agents leaving a scene, of storefronts that aren’t blasted through, of apartments whose doors remain whole—all of that is abundant but unaccessible proof of what can be accomplished without leadership, just community and will. I thought of all the people, recording all these uneventful videos. If the world is just, the videos will be deleted someday, making room for pictures of grandchildren and lakeside sunsets. And the commuters’ memories of this time will only make the images sweeter, because the person taking them will think of the moments just like those that the disappeared—and Renee Nicole Good, and now Alex Pretti—didn’t live to see.

Trump Has No Way Out in Minneapolis
New Republic • Jan 27, 2026

Trump Has No Way Out in Minneapolis

Tom Homan—the Trump administration “border czar” who thinks undocumented immigrants should be looking “over their shoulder,” that the mayors of sanctuary cities should be locked up, and who is perhaps best known for accepting $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents posing as business executives last year—is headed to Minneapolis. And Greg Bovino, the pint-size fascist who has overseen much of the Border Patrol’s operations in the city, is reportedly leaving—and will reportedly be retiring soon. These twin developments could be interpreted—as many in the media have—as a sign that the president is trying to walk back a monthlong occupation during which immigration agents murdered two civilians. (Renee Nicole Good was killed by an ICE officer, and Alex Pretti by a CBP officer. Those two deaths account for two-thirds of the murders committed in Minneapolis in 2026.) It certainly seems that the administration is trying to find a way to retreat. But Homan’s deployment is perhaps more telling in what it reveals about how the administration approaches retreat itself. They know that the Minneapolis operation is a disaster, that it has left two innocent people dead and turned much of the country against them. It has been such a disaster inside Minneapolis that the Republican Party’s leading candidate for governor, Chris Madel, dropped out of the race on Monday, seeming to cut ties with his party in the process. “I cannot support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on the citizens of our state, nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so,” Madel said, in a video posted on X. Replacing Bovino with Homan is a sign that the administration knows that something needs to change. But it’s also a sign of where its priorities lie. They are presiding over a murderous disaster in Minneapolis. They know it is failing to achieve both its stated “aim” of ridding the city of criminal undocumented immigrants and its unstated goal of cowing the populace into submission. They know it will likely lead to more deaths. But they cannot retreat or admit defeat—so all we’re getting is a different corrupt person in charge, just one they hope is less murderous. When Vice President JD Vance was in Minneapolis last week, as part of the Trump administration’s attempt at damage control over Good’s killing, he heard a “crazy story.” Some “ICE and CBP officers” were eating dinner at a restaurant in the city at some point during the nearly monthlong federal occupation when, all of a sudden, a group of unruly protesters descended. Restaurant staff locked the doors. They were stuck there for a period of time—Vance didn’t say how long—until other federal officers arrived and dispersed the protesters. Four days after Vance heard that story, Border Patrol agents murdered Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse who was documenting their operations in the city and who was shot several times in the head while trying to assist a woman they were manhandling. When I was in Minneapolis, I heard a number of crazy stories. But near the top of the list:A couple of off duty ICE and CBP officers were going to dinner in Minneapolis. They were doxed and their location revealed, and the restaurant was then mobbed. The officers were locked in…— JD Vance (@JDVance) January 25, 2026Still, Vance’s “crazy” story captures an administration that’s struggling to respond both to the horrific events it has unleashed and to the public’s response to them. The point of his story is ostensibly that the ICE and CBP officers who are terrorizing Minnesotans are actually the ones under siege—that it is they, not immigrant communities or their advocates, who are actually in danger in Minnesota. The subtext is that these officers are right to feel threatened at all times and that anything they do is justified because, well, they get yelled at when they go out to eat sometimes. It’s a pathetic narrative and one whose implications are straightforwardly fascistic. The administration’s goons have the right to impunity. They have the right to do whatever they like, whenever they like. If anyone tries to stop them, they are “domestic terrorists”—the preposterous term that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has used to describe Good and Pretti. They are obviously lying. Vance’s story is, in some way, an acknowledgment of that. Pretti was legally carrying a gun but had been disarmed and was restrained when he was shot repeatedly. Good was driving away from officers when she was shot in the face. The best they can do to concoct an explanation is that officers are being terrorized and, as a result, are prone to lash out. That is obviously a horrible defense of state violence or violence in general.Public opinion has shifted dramatically on the administration’s approach to immigration: Trump’s approval rating on the issue is, per a New York Times/Siena poll that dropped last week, 20 points underwater. Normally, in these situations, you recalibrate. Normally, you retreat. Instead, the administration is sending in Homan and hoping for the best. It may be recalibrating, though. On Monday evening, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey posted that he had spoken to President Trump, who “agreed the present situation can’t continue” and said he would be pulling out some agents from the city. It’s not clear what that means precisely, but it is somewhat hopeful. Still, the general dynamic is that the president is unwilling to do anything that appears to admit defeat or even to change course. Doing so would, of course, undermine the entire premise of his political project: that the American people would welcome a country cleansed of immigrants and they would celebrate as his jackbooted thugs cleared the nation’s filthy city streets.Homan is supposedly less inclined toward showy uses of force designed to cow the public than Bovino or Noem are. But only somewhat. The operations in Minneapolis to go after undocumented immigrants with criminal records will continue, and they will continue to sweep up U.S. citizens and children. There will still be protests, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that anyone in Minneapolis, whatever their citizenship status, is any safer today than they were over the weekend. Another innocent person may well be shot dead by masked agents within a week or two.This is barely a pivot, in other words. You can change the face of the fascist administration on the ground in Minneapolis, but it remains fascist all the same.

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