There was a time when calling for the dismantling of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency was considered too risky for a Democrat to campaign on.
But today, images of aggressive immigration arrests in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., New Orleans and Charlotte, North Carolina, have led to anti-ICE sentiment creeping back into the party’s messaging.
“Let me be clear: F--- ICE,” Patty Garcia, who is running for Congress in Illinois’ 4th Congressional District, said when she launched her bid. “It’s time to abolish ICE and hold Trump and his entire clan accountable.”
In Maine, Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner — in what’s shaping up to be one of the highest profile races in the nation — vowed to hold ICE agents responsible and “make them take their masks off” if Democrats gained power in the midterms.
“Organizations that are used to kidnap Americans are not organizations that should exist in the future,” Platner said at a town hall last month. “We need to have public hearings … frankly, probably trials down the road. Because the American people deserve to know what the hell is going on right now and how the people doing it can justify it to themselves.”
In New York, a 25-year-old survivor of the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, is making his first congressional bid on a platform that includes a call to abolish ICE.
“An organization that can be turned into the President’s fascist secret police in a matter of months cannot be reformed, only dismantled,” Cameron Kasky, a candidate for New York’s 12th Congressional District, states on his website.
All of the brazen talk by some Democrats comes as President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown increasingly draws political backlash at the ballot box, in polling and even among some in his own party. In most cases, Democrats have held back from calling for the outright abolition of ICE and instead are pushing for transparency, oversight or restricting local and state government cooperation with federal immigration officials.
There’s a difference today from how Democrats messaged the issue in 2018, when the “Abolish ICE” movement swept across the progressive end of the party. Many Democrats are now calling for an end to what they’ve coined “secret police,” saying they’re carrying out “kidnappings.” Most emphasize the need for a secure border and support deportations that target criminals, but they say today’s immigration efforts are shrouded in secrecy and lack accountability.
It represents a shift in how these Democrats plan to position themselves on one of the leading issues that swept Trump into office last year.
During Joe Biden’s presidency, public sentiment swung toward intensified border security and deportations after lax border enforcement led to an influx of migrant crossings. On the campaign trail last year, Trump portrayed his opponent, Democrat Kamala Harris — whom Biden tasked with looking at the root causes of migration from Central America — as too soft on illegal immigration.
Trump’s relentless focus on immigration was cited in NBC exit polls as among the top issues among 2024 voters who supported him.
But since federal immigration agents have landed in cities across the country, public officials have sought ways to push back on Department of Homeland Security operations. The growing backlash is amplified by images of noncriminal undocumented immigrants being apprehended by masked federal agents, often aggressively. NBC News exit polling after the Nov. 4 elections showed Latino voters were concerned about Trump’s actions on immigration enforcement, with majorities of Latinos in New Jersey, Virginia, California and New York City saying the administration had gone too far. In New Jersey, municipalities that were at least 60% Latino that supported Trump or saw soft Democratic support in 2024 swung to Democrats by double digits.
While much of the rhetoric is targeted at ICE, the Border Patrol has taken a lead role in many of the deportation operations. Last month, immigration agents arrested a Chicago day care worker in front of students. In another instance, the targeting of an immigrant working on home construction in a residential neighborhood erupted into chaos, leading to a 2-year-old playing nearby to be exposed to tear gas.
“Everything has changed since Chicago. The images coming out of Chicago, the images coming out of Charlotte,” said Joe Calvello, senior adviser to Platner. “People across America I think are deeply disturbed by this. They view it as deeply un-American.”
“This is what Graham deeply believes, there needs to be accountability,” Calvello continued. “We need to unmask these people who are terrorizing not only our neighbors and community members, but American citizens.”
By contrast, Platner’s primary opponent in the Senate race, Maine Gov. Janet Mills, would not sign a bill prohibiting local law enforcement from cooperating with immigration agents.
In 2018, when Trump’s first administration faced fierce opposition for separating immigrant families, an anti-ICE movement emerged that many Democrats clung to nationally as a litmus test of sorts.
By 2020, however, as a crowded presidential primary was underway, some of their past statements involving the defunding of police or immigration agencies came back to haunt them. That included Harris, who had at one point in 2018 said that, with regard to ICE, “we need to probably even think about starting from scratch.” While Harris had also said that immigration agencies had a role to play, opponents often portrayed her as having moved too far to the left.
Calls for an outright elimination of ICE are still less common today than they were in 2018. At the same time, Democrats across the country are seeking ways through legislation and resolutions to strip the agency of some of its core functions or impose strict accountability measures. In September, California passed the No Secret Police Act and other legislation that bans ICE and other law enforcement from wearing masks or face coverings during enforcement and to display visible IDs. Similar efforts are underway in New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
A DHS official said it all comes at a cost, however.
“Comparing ICE day-in and day-out to the Nazi Gestapo, the Secret Police, and slave patrols has consequences. Our law enforcement officers are facing a more than 1050% increase in assaults against them and 8000% increase in death threats. The men and women at ICE and CBP and all of our federal law enforcement agencies put their lives on the line every day to arrest violent criminal illegal aliens to protect and defend the lives of American citizens. Make no mistake, this type of rhetoric is contributing to the surge in assaults of officers through their repeated vilification and demonization,” Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS assistant secretary, said in a statement.
“Our law enforcement officers are fathers and mothers, sons and daughters. They get up every morning to try and make our communities safer. Like everyone else, we just want to go home to our families at night. The violence and dehumanization of these men and women who are simply enforcing the law must stop.”
DHS has often cited elevated threats against law enforcement but has not provided supporting data.
The 2018 anti-ICE movement was in part expanded after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used it as a central tenet in her stunning upset win over an entrenched New York Democratic congressman.
Since Trump took office in January, she’s reasserted that position, tangling with his administration to the point that his border czar, Tom Homan, threatened “maybe she’s gonna be in trouble.”
In May, she reiterated her support for ICE’s elimination and recently has held “know your rights” sessions in her district with immigrants who might be targeted for deportation. The White House seemed so certain that this was a losing issue, it posted a whole article on Ocasio-Cortez’s call for the elimination of ICE on its official web page.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., introduced legislation that would ban ICE from detaining or deporting U.S. citizens. A ProPublica investigation found more than 170 instances of citizens held by immigration officials. In an interview, Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., said he wants to use Congress’ purse strings to demand more oversight of DHS, which Republicans have infused with billions of dollars in additional funding.
Today, at least some Democrats feel they are on far safer ground as even the president’s allies are questioning administration tactics. Rep. Maria Salazar, R-Fla., told NBC News that the recent off-year elections should be a “wake-up call for the GOP.” In those races, notably for the governors’ seats in New Jersey and Virginia, Republicans lost by wider margins than expected, and Hispanic Latino voters with whom Trump made record gains in 2024 swung back to Democrats.
In addition, roughly a half-dozen Republicans in Congress said the administration needed to rethink some aspects of its immigration crackdown, including the sweeping nature of Trump’s immigration push, according to a review of public statements by NBC News.
The administration needs “a smarter plan than just rounding up every single person and deporting them,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said in an October podcast interview, as she broke with the administration on the issue, expressing concerns about the effect of removing a portion of the workforce.
Other high-profile condemnations of the treatment of immigrants have grown louder, from country music star Zach Bryan to Pope Leo XIV. Most recently, the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, which has long supported immigration rights, took a rare step and for the first time in 13 years issued a special message denouncing the administration’s actions.
It is amid that backdrop that Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., called not just for ICE’s elimination, but argued from the House floor last week that DHS should be eliminated as an agency, perhaps shifting some functions elsewhere.
“We brought DHS into this world less than 25 years ago. We can build a world without it as well,” she said.
In an interview, Ramirez said that now, federal agents are acting without constraints and were unwilling to be accountable to anyone but Trump.
“The tides are turning and the American people are seeing ICE as one of the biggest threats to democracy itself,” Ramirez said. “It’s a contradiction to what this agency was created to be,” Ramirez said. “They are terrorizing communities across the city, and you’ve seen this across the country.”
In the race to succeed retiring Rep. Jan Schakowsky in Illinois’ 9th Congressional District, top-polling contenders Kat Abughazaleh and Daniel Biss have both called for ICE to be abolished.
Abughazaleh wasn’t just a frequent presence in protests at an immigrant processing facility that became ground zero for pushback on the deportation efforts; she was indicted after she was accused of impeding a government vehicle from moving forward.
“I absolutely would characterize ICE as secret police, and it is absolutely imperative that we abolish ICE,” she told HuffPost.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat and a potential 2028 White House contender, has served as a national foil to Trump on the immigration issue, repeatedly holding up examples of overreach.
In an interview, Pritzker also said that some form of border patrol must always exist and that in past administrations, ICE had operated within its jurisdiction.
“We need secure borders,” he said. “You don’t have a country unless you have a secure border.”
Pritzker, though, focused on Trump’s role in steering ICE and CBP from having gone “way beyond the mission that they were founded for.”
“This president has essentially authorized them and provided them immunity for going after people who have committed what is, by law, a misdemeanor,” Pritzker said. “He’s essentially treating those people like they’re the worst of the worst, and they’re choosing to be cruel and to dehumanize people.”
