Democrats’ demands to reform ICE, briefly explained

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A series of recent polls hammer home just how unpopular ICE has become: Almost half of voters say they’d like to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and six in 10 say the agency has gone too far.

This week, Senate Democrats are attempting to leverage that disapproval into reform.

I want to be clear on one thing up top: We don’t yet know the nitty-gritty of the Democrats’ policy proposals. During a press conference on Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was asked if any of these issues represented “red lines” for him, and he essentially said that Democrats knew they needed to negotiate still.

That said, the proposals he presented provide an early look at one possible path forward. In today’s edition, we answer the question: What are Democrats demanding of ICE — and what are they leaving off the table?

Historically, ICE made relatively few arrests at homes, worksites, and other public places. Instead, “the vast majority of arrests that ICE used to conduct were really transfers of custody from a state or local authority to the federal government,” said David Hausman, a UC Berkeley Law assistant professor and the faculty director of the Deportation Data Project.

As Hausman recently explained to my colleague Christian Paz, however, that norm has changed — and radically — under President Donald Trump. ICE now carries out thousands of “at-large” arrests in public. Many stem from so-called “roving patrols,” in which immigration officers stop and interrogate people about their immigration status without a warrant.

Senate Democrats pitched a two-part solution to this roving problem: first, a requirement that ICE coordinate with state and local police; and second, a revision of the rules governing immigration arrest warrants.

Presumably, these reforms would nudge ICE back to its pre-2025 norm, when arrests almost always resulted from targeted enforcement actions. (Ironically, the Supreme Court had the opportunity to rein in roving patrols last year… and actually did the opposite.)

We’ve all seen the videos — and they’re often violent. ICE agents around the country have smashed car windows, rammed down doors, and tackled, beat or Tasered subjects of immigration enforcement operations. Since Trump’s second inauguration, agents used chokeholds and other banned, life-threatening maneuvers on at least 40 occasions without consequences, a ProPublica investigation found.

To curtail that violence, Democrats say that federal agents should be subject to the same use-of-force policies that govern state and local law enforcement agencies. Such policies differ in their specifics, but they typically require officers to deescalate dangerous confrontations and constrain when they can use deadly force. Just as important, use-of-force rules often include mandatory reporting and investigation requirements.

The devil is in the details, though: Who will conduct these investigations? And will victims of ICE gain the ability to sue the offending agents?

ICE’s new predilection for face gaiters and aviator sunglasses “enables abuse by making it harder for the mistreated to identify abusive officers, and thus hold them to account,” as my colleague Eric Levitz put it. That has been true even in the highest-profile and most closely scrutinized cases: According to the Minnesota Star Tribune, state investigators still don’t know the names of the agents who shot and killed Alex Pretti last weekend.

Democrats are demanding that federal immigration agents remove face coverings, carry visible identification, and wear body cameras in the future. “No more anonymous agents, no more secret operatives,” said Schumer.

This might be the most straightforward of the reforms, on paper. But it’s also a controversial one: Republicans insist that masks protect ICE agents from harassment, and some have also argued that the bipartisan funding bill negotiated before Pretti’s death included $20 million for body-worn cameras.

For those of you keeping score at home, you’ll notice that many would-be reforms didn’t make Democrats’ list. Senators reportedly debated more than a dozen ideas for reining in ICE before settling on what Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia called “a limited number of reforms that will put significant restraints on potential abuses.” Bills introduced in the Senate and the House over the past year have also proposed a wide range of potential guardrails.

Those include an explicit ban on racial profiling during immigration stops; a prohibition on ICE raids at “sensitive locations” such as schools and churches; the elimination of arrest quotas; the withdrawal of federal agents from Minneapolis; a ban on the detainment of US citizens; and a mandatory review of all use-of-force incidents.

Many activists and progressive lawmakers have also called for the dissolution of ICE, a position that — according to a couple of recent polls — has gained rapid traction with voters.

Schumer has reportedly instructed his caucus to focus on a different goal, however: “restrain, reform, and restrict” immigration enforcement. And if that doesn’t work, Congress, the courts, and the public still have several other options.