The White House’s botched response to the shooting of an anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement activist in Minnesota has turned a majority of Americans against President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. This has emboldened Democrats to shut down the Department of Homeland Security until a laundry list of demands is met. Some of the demands are reasonable, but most are not. However the dispute is resolved in Congress, Democrat-controlled states are overreacting and rushing to implement the same far-left, open borders policies that led so many voters to abandon their party in 2024.
DHS shut down at midnight, as the Senate adjourned Friday without passing a reauthorization of the department’s spending authority. Democrats’ ire is directed at ICE and Customs and Border Protection, but these agencies will not be affected by the shutdown because their funding was boosted in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Instead, Coast Guard employees will not be paid and training exercises will be halted; Federal Emergency Management Agency work will be stopped; and the Transportation Security Administration will work without pay.
Some of the Democrats‘ demands are reasonable, such as their call for body cameras on all DHS law enforcement personnel. But the DHS funding bill they blocked included $20 million for such cameras.
Some of their other demands are completely unreasonable, such as for ICE and CBP to cease all law enforcement activity “near” so-called “sensitive locations” including medical facilities, schools, child care facilities, churches, and courts. Everywhere in a city is “near” such a location. In practice, this limitation would amount to a ban on all immigration law enforcement.
Allowing Democratic district attorneys to prosecute federal law enforcement agents and officers for simply doing their jobs is also a non-starter since so many on the Left consider the mere arrest and detention of an illegal immigrant to be “kidnapping.”
The steps Democrats are taking at the state level are deeply damaging. The Maryland legislature just passed a bill that bans all cooperation between state law enforcement and federal immigration authorities. This includes the 287(g) program, which enables ICE to deputize local officers to perform specified immigration enforcement duties, as well as the Jail Enforcement Model and the Warrant Service Officer program, which enable local law enforcement to search ICE databases to see if someone under arrest has a deportation order against them and allows local law officers to execute immigration warrants in jails.
“It’s a true public safety tool,” Frederick County Sheriff Chuck Jenkins, a Republican, said of 287(g). “We simply don’t return criminals back onto the street. We hand those individuals off to ICE in a safe setting in their detention center.”
“Looking the other way does not make our community stronger,” said Wicomico County Executive Julie Giordano, also a Republican. “Refusing to act does not make us compassionate; it makes us negligent.”
Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) has issued an executive order ending all 287(g) programs agreed to by her predecessor, the popular former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
At the federal level, candidates running on an explicit “abolish ICE” platform are winning Democratic primaries. In New Jersey, progressive candidate Analilia Mejia, a former political director for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), recently defeated a moderate Democrat for a vacated House seat.
“We’ve been ready to do this work for the last decade,” Cathryn Jackson, of the open-borders organization We Are CASA, said of Maryland’s anti-ICE bill. “We’re glad the legislature has finally caught up.”
Jackson’s statement underscores the reality that the anti-ICE legislation being embraced by Democrats is not a moderate or common-sense response to ICE overreach. It is a continuation of the anti-American open-border policies of the former President Joe Biden’s administration.
A WELCOME COURSE CORRECTION IN MINNESOTA
Trump has corrected course on Biden’s immigration policies. Border czar Tom Homan is rightly prioritizing law and order above quotas and theatrical social media productions. Given time, he should be able to steer Trump’s approval on immigration policy back into positive territory.
Heading into 2028, voters will have a stark contrast between the parties: a Republican Party that delivered border security and a Democratic Party bent on returning to the chaos of the Biden border crisis.