5
#000000
#FFFFFF
Opinion
Memo to the Congressional Dems: Abolishing ICE in the Mainstream Democratic Position
If a Democrat on Capitol Hill endorses anything less than the elimination of ICE, the media and advocacy groups need to point out that they are in the fringe of the party.
Jan 30, 2026
Often times, the followers in a political party are far ahead of where their leadership is. This is indeed the case regarding the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. While Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill talk about reforming ICE and making changes in how ICE operates, rank and file Democrats have concluded that ICE must be abolished.
In polling conducted by YouGov on January, just under two-thirds of Democrats (62%) strongly support abolishing ICE while 14% somewhat support abolishing ICE. The bottom line here is that more than three-quarters of Democratic voters (76%) support doing away with ICE.
The only accurate way to describe Democratic support for abolishing ICE is that it is the overwhelmingly mainstream Democratic position. If a Democrat on Capitol Hill endorses anything less than the elimination of ICE, the media and advocacy groups need to point out that they are in the fringe of the party.
A Democratic member of Congress may argue that in order to win they need not only Democratic votes, but Independents as well. There is good news here for ICE opponents. Independent voters, though certainly not as supportive of abolishing ICE as Democrats, do support abolishing ICE. According to the YouGov polling, just over 1 in 3 (35%) of Independent voters strongly support abolishing ICE, while 12% of Independents somewhat support abolishing ICE. The bottom line here is that a 47% plurality of Independent voters support abolishing ICE.
I would hope that Democrats on Capitol Hill would take substantial political comfort in deciding to vote to eliminate ICE.
Successful politics is always about adding people to your coalition. The polling data from YouGov clearly shows that it is easy to build a strong coalition with Democratic and Independent voters to support abolishing ICE. I would suggest that anyone who tells you otherwise is either disingenuous or can not do the simple arithmetic.
Democratic support for abolishing ICE is so great that almost any Democratic member of Congress who fails to support the abolition of ICE could easily face a primary challenge. The dividing lines are that clear.
I would hope that Democrats on Capitol Hill would take substantial political comfort in deciding to vote to eliminate ICE. Abolishing ICE is strongly supported by the majority of Democrats. To any Democrat thinking of compromising on the abolition of ICE, I would ask if you are not going to support something that has the support of 76% of your party, are you really a Democrat?
Keep Reading
Show Less
Why Trump's Attack on Minneapolis Is Also an Attack on Our Elections
This armed assault on a major American city, coupled with a thuggish offer implying that the bully boys might be pulled back if state officials will betray their voters, shows the damage that can be done without outright canceling the midterms.
Jan 29, 2026
The nation has been convulsed by the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Millions now see with sickening clarity a lawless assault by federal officers on an American city and its people. As The Wall Street Journal editorialized, it is a “moral and political debacle for the Trump presidency.”
The videos were followed by a fusillade of lies from senior government officials. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Pretti had engaged in “domestic terrorism.” White House aide Stephen Miller called Pretti an “assassin” who tried to “murder federal agents.” Border official Gregory Bovino declared, “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” The instant impulse by these high officials was to bully and smear.
Another outrageous statement by a cabinet official has not gotten enough attention.
On Saturday, Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz linking the violence in Minneapolis to a demand that the state give the Justice Department complete access to the state’s sensitive voter rolls, among other things. There’s no explicit quid pro quo offered—but anyone familiar with Grade B gangster movies won’t miss the implication. Certainly that’s how state officials have read it. Let that sink in: Federal agents have killed innocent civilians in cold blood. And the response of the attorney general of the United States is to use it as leverage to illegally access voter data. That is an unambiguous abuse of power.
That sense of crisis, consciously instigated, can create opportunities to undermine the election and sow doubt and division.
As my colleague Wendy Weiser has written, “What do voter rolls have to do with ICE? Nothing. But they have a lot to do with the administration’s ongoing efforts to meddle in elections.”
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon provided Bondi with the only legal and responsible answer (a simple “no”), describing her offer as “an apparent ransom.”
Make no mistake: The federal government has no authorization to demand confidential voter information from the states. In our constitutional system, states are responsible for maintaining and protecting voter rolls. Indeed, various state and federal laws limit how much data the federal government can collect.
But that hasn’t stopped it from trying. Bondi’s Justice Department has demanded access to the voter records of 44 states and Washington, DC, and it has sued more than 20 states for not complying. Two courts have already ruled on the side of the states.
Why would the administration want to hoover up this data? It would give election deniers new ammunition to push false claims of voting by people who are not US citizens. It would help the federal government pressure states into reckless voter purges, which would kick eligible citizens off the rolls just as November rolls around.
Plainly, it’s all part of a broader strategy to meddle with our elections. Last weekend, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said Republicans are looking into yet another version of the unpopular SAVE Act—the bill that would require American citizens to produce a birth certificate, passport, or similar document to register to vote. At least 21 million Americans lack ready access to those documents, according to our research. The bill narrowly passed the House but stalled in the Senate last year after massive public pushback.
Bondi’s letter is a gross escalation of this effort—an explicit abuse of this moment to coerce Minnesota to step into line.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) worries that this escalation is by design. Over the weekend, he warned that the “Trump administration is creating this mayhem, particularly in cities in swing states, in order to take control of the election.”
When Donald Trump took office the first time in 2017, he talked of “American carnage.” Shooting of bystanders, squads of masked armed men, terrorized immigrants, clouds of tear gas, vague claims of conspiracy, and more—all bring that “carnage” to life. That sense of crisis, consciously instigated, can create opportunities to undermine the election and sow doubt and division.
To be clear (and I get asked this a lot): Donald Trump cannot cancel the midterms. Presidents have no power to do that.
But this armed assault on a major American city, coupled with a thuggish offer implying that the bully boys might be pulled back if state officials will betray their voters, shows the damage that can be done nonetheless.
The dignified and angry public response from around the country to the latest killing suggests maybe something has snapped. It would not be the first time in our history that government violence kindled an even more powerful reaction.
It’s not only the safety and sanity of people in Minnesota that’s at stake. As we are reminded once again, our democracy is on the line.
Keep Reading
Show Less
US Senate, Do the Right Thing and Refuse to Fund ICE
Senators who believe in compassion and human rights have a unique opportunity to pull back the agency’s powers by refusing to back an appropriations bill passed by the House of Representatives that would renew ICE's budget.
Jan 29, 2026
More Americans now support abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, than keeping it.
A January 13, 2026 Economist/YouGov poll found that 46% want to eliminate ICE, compared to 43% who support preserving it. It’s a trend that’s been growing since ICE agents have been running rampant in US cities during Donald Trump’s second term.
A majority of Americans in 2024 backed strict immigration enforcement, so this surge in anti-ICE sentiment likely stems from the agency’s draconian crackdown on immigrants, protesters, citizens, and even children. Most recently, federal agents shot and killed an ICU nurse named Alex Pretti in Minneapolis when he came to the defense of other protesters.
Pretti was only the latest casualty. On New Year’s eve, a Black man named Keith Porter was killed in Los Angeles, allegedly at the hands of an off-duty ICE officer with a documented history of abusing children and being racist and homophobic.
Imagine living in a nation where, instead of pouring our collective resources into hurting and killing our fellow human beings, we pay to house, feed, clothe, educate, and care for one another.
A week later in Minneapolis, ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot and killed a white woman named Renee Good in an incident that galvanized the nation.
During the same crackdown, ICE agents dragged an elderly Hmong American man into the street in his underwear in frigid temperatures after invading his home and terrorizing his family. Other agents tear-gassed a family of eight trying to get home from their son’s sporting event, causing their infant child to lose consciousness.
These are just the documented incidents involving US citizens. Meanwhile, immigrant children as young as 5 years old are being targeted and detained, and dozens of noncitizens have died in ICE custody.
Senators who believe in compassion and human rights have a unique opportunity to pull back the agency’s powers by refusing to back an appropriations bill passed by the House of Representatives. That bill, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, “would renew ICE’s excessive budget, with no strings attached, adding to the over $170 billion in taxpayer funds already allocated for immigration enforcement in July 2025.”
Although seven House Democrats voted for the bill alongside Republicans, a majority of Democrats voted against it and there are even rumblings within the party to support the idea of eliminating the agency altogether. Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) recently introduced legislation to that effect.
Abolishing ICE is not only good for human rights in the nation—it would also free up funding for such critical needs as healthcare. “My position has always been clear that ICE funding should be cut,” explained Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) after Good was shot, adding: “the cuts to your healthcare are what’s paying for this.”
She’s right. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” deeply slashed Medicaid funding and allowed subsidies that lowered healthcare costs for Affordable Care Act plans to expire at the same time it hiked ICE funding to historic levels.
ICE funding comes out of the pockets of all working Americans—who are currently, absurdly, funding an agency with striking similarities to Hitler’s Brown Shirts. This comes at a time of continued economic insecurity for a majority of Americans.
For a microcosm of what it would look like to reverse the equation, look at New York City. In just a few weeks the city’s popular new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who has clearly stated his desire to abolish ICE, has taken actionable steps toward affordable housing, universal childcare, and other bread-and-butter issues.
Imagine living in a nation where, instead of pouring our collective resources into hurting and killing our fellow human beings, we pay to house, feed, clothe, educate, and care for one another.
The Senate now faces such a choice. It was only after Pretti was killed that Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) signaled his party would take a stand and block the vote.
This can and should be the first step toward eliminating ICE altogether.
Keep Reading
Show Less
The Death of a Fascist Autocrat: On Pre-Writing Donald Trump's Obituary
The very decision to elect Trump to the presidency, not once, but twice, should be considered the popular equivalent of preparing an obituary not just for him but for this country, this planet, all of us.
Jan 29, 2026
Having reached a certain age and long been fascinated by obituaries, I sometimes think about both Donald Trump’s and my own. At 79, he’s just slightly less than two years younger than me, though of course I wasn’t the 45th president of the United States or the 47th one either. And eight chaotic years (or more?) as president (assuming he makes it that far) guarantee him a monster (and I do indeed use that word advisedly) set of obituaries when he dies, whereas almost a quarter-century at TomDispatch guarantees me nothing at all.
And I wouldn’t argue with that for a second. After all, Donald Trump has been (and continues to be) a truly one-of-a-kind president of the United States — though the word “kind” (as opposed to “king”) doesn’t actually apply to him, does it? Think of him, in fact, as the mad hatter of American presidents. If you remember, that Alice in Wonderland character was accused of “murdering the time.” And that, in its own strange fashion, seems like quite a reasonable description of at least one of the crimes of President Donald Trump.
The man who believes that climate change is a “green new scam” has tried, among other things, to shut down every major East Coast offshore wind power project in sight (though judges, including one he appointed to the bench, have so far denied him that right). Meanwhile, he’s been working to ensure that coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, remains a major source of American energy. He and his crew aren’t even letting major coal-burning power plants whose days are all too literally past close.
Phew, that paragraph left me out of breath — so much for my wind power! — and I didn’t even get everything in. After all, he’s also had the urge to pull every last barrel of oil out of Venezuela (even if, once upon a time, he did all too accurately call that country’s petroleum the “worst oil probably anywhere in the world” and “garbage”). And in the process, he is indeed engaged in murdering time — at least, the time we humans have left to live reasonably decent lives on this planet, which is, it seems, no longer truly ours but, at least for now, significantly his.
At 79, he gives old age new meaning. He’s the anything-goes president on a planet going down, down, down. The only thing, it seems, that doesn’t go down (not yet, at least) is Donald J. Trump.
In some sense, you might say that Donald Trump is hard at work trying to ensure not only that he’ll get a major obituary on his death, but that humanity will, too. In that sense, give him credit. He’s trying to put us all in the paper and give us all the experience he’s had of being “the news.”
And I wonder if someday, if not your obituary and mine, perhaps those of our children or grandchildren will start out something like this: “He/she died in his/her home in the midst of a blinding heat wave/a devastating storm/a historically unprecedented flood [or you name it] on a planet still growing hotter and more uncomfortable by the decade, if not the year.”
The U.S. Is an Increasingly Violent Petro State
When it comes to obituaries, don’t think it’s just the climate that’s the problem. We are living in a distinctly mad world of the living (and the dead). And OMG, it’s increasingly apparent that, on a planet where wars are still proliferating from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan (and the burning of fossil fuels to fight them is already adding significantly to the devastation of the planet), things are unlikely to get better any time soon. As the Costs of War project reminds us: “The U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s single largest institutional consumer of oil — and as a result, one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters.”
And just to take one grim example, “my” president wants to take our tax dollars and apply them even more strikingly — in fact, in a blindingly record fashion — to the Pentagon budget, the thing that, once upon a time, was called, however inaccurately, the “defense budget.” It’s already at somewhere close to a trillion dollars a year and, give him credit, he only wants to raise it by another half-trillion dollars to $1.5 trillion.
And no, that is not a typo! Believe me, there’s no misprint there! That’s what he thinks he needs to do to create a “dream military,” which (at least in his mind) would undoubtedly ensure that Greenland will become the 51st state, Canada the 52nd, Cuba the 53rd, and Colombia the 54th. The 55th, then, could well be China. (Or so he might dream anyway. Or perhaps the phrase should be: so he might nightmare anyway.) And don’t fret. That increase in the military budget is only likely to mean a $6 trillion increase in our taxes over the next decade (or roughly $45,000 per family).
Oh, wait, this is already the nation with by far the largest military budget on Earth that, over all the endless decades since it emerged globally victorious from World War II, couldn’t win a single significant war — not in Korea, nor in Vietnam, nor Afghanistan, nor Iraq, nor even, possibly, in the weeks to come on the streets of Minneapolis. Nowhere. And count on this, another half-trillion dollars a year will ensure only one thing: that the United States won’t win yet more wars ever more extravagantly, whether in Greenland or somewhere else entirely, while never learning even the most obvious lessons from such a grim reality.
And no, for some reason, Donald Trump has never actually used the word “nightmare” either in relation to himself or his presidency, though he certainly did accuse the Democrats of being the party of “the socialist nightmare.” Nor did he use it in his recent interview with the New York Times when he was asked about whether there were any limits whatsoever on his own global power. Instead, he responded this way: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
So now, you can breathe a giant sigh of relief, right? Who could possibly worry about his mind? If Donald Trump’s “morality” is the only thing that stands between us and him doing more or less anything he wants, however destructively, on this planet of ours, then what could possibly go wrong?
And speaking of nightmares (or even obituaries), oil is Donald Trump’s dream liquid — and oil is hell. In the long run on this already overheating planet of ours, oil means war, not on this country’s potential enemies, or even Donald Trump’s, but on all of us. (And the U.S. is indeed an increasingly violent petro state, as Mark Hertsgaard has recently reminded us at the Nation magazine.)
The very decision to elect Trump to the presidency, not once, but twice, should be considered the popular equivalent of preparing an obituary not just for him but for this country, this planet, all of us. And it might read something like this. Or rather, let me just start it for you, since I know that you won’t have the slightest problem filling in the rest:
“Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, died yesterday. Born in New York City on June 14, 1946, he would come to be known for many things from the TV show The Apprentice to pussy-grabbing. (“I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything… Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”) And that admission, which came just before his first presidential election contest against Hillary Clinton, didn’t do the trick. He still won, which certainly tells you something about the United States (if, that is, we were writing an obituary not of a president but of a country).
But perhaps his presidency was most significant not for grabbing this country’s pussy, but for murdering time. He was America’s first green-new-scam president, the “drill, baby, drill” candidate who proved all too ready to devastate not just a few women, or a pile of American voters, but the planet itself. Hey, if you happen to want to close down wind farms, but keep coal plants open, you know just the man to vote for (yet again).”
The Anything-Goes President
We don’t know yet what our future holds. Donald Trump could have a heart attack tomorrow and kiss this planet and the rest of us goodbye. But if he lasts the next three years, having already figured out how to largely ignore Congress — really, who needs Congress to blow up ships in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific Ocean, or invade Venezuela, or take Greenland? — and do whatever the hell he wants to do, the Constitution be damned, there’s always the distinct possibility that he’ll deal with the 22nd Amendment, which prevents any president from having a third term in office, in a similar fashion. When it comes to running for president yet again, he’s already said: “I would love to do it.” And perhaps the key line in any future obituary of Donald Trump could prove to be that he broke new ground by becoming the first president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win (or do I mean seize?) a third term in office and so become the first true American autocrat.
There’s no question, he’s the man, and if he can’t do it, nobody can. And believe me, if he succeeds, he won’t be forgotten, not on a planet he’s lent such a hand to sending down, down, down. In some fashion, you might say, he’s put a tariff on all of us when it comes to life on Earth and that’s no small… well, I hesitate to say it… accomplishment.
If only we could put a tariff on him — call it the autocrat tariff — and make him pay us for the suffering he’s caused and will undoubtedly continue to cause. I mean, when you think about his “accomplishments,” it’s no small thing the second time around to have left Congress largely in the lurch and done whatever pleased him most, with only his “own morality” to stop him.
At 79, he gives old age new meaning. He’s the anything-goes president on a planet going down, down, down. The only thing, it seems, that doesn’t go down (not yet, at least) is Donald J. Trump.
Having reached this point, I now wonder if my task in this piece shouldn’t have been writing obituaries for Donald Trump and me but writing one for humanity and Planet Earth (at least as we’ve known it all these millennia). In some sense, here’s the extraordinary thing: in November 2024, a near majority of American voters, 49.8% of us, to be exact, voted yet again for him as president. Anybody can understand and even excuse making a mistake once in this strange world of ours. But twice? Really? When it comes not just to a president of the United States but to the very fate of this planet?
I have a feeling that, if Trump makes it to a third term, he — not Congress — would have to change the preamble to the Constitution of these (dis)United States of America to read this way:
“I, the Only Person Who Matters in the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Autocracy, establish Injustice, ensure domestic and global Chaos, provide for a common offensiveness, promote the general Poorfare, and secure the Blessings of Autocrcacy to myself and my Posterity (if they even make it), do ordain and establish this Constitution for the (Dis)United States of America and a world going to hell in a handbasket.”
And having done that, I suspect that we would then have to start preparing an obituary (which might be headlined “Murdering Time in the Age of Donald Trump”) for this planet of ours, at least as we humans have known it all these endless centuries.
Keep Reading
Show Less
Most Popular