It was probably no surprise that Rep. Ilhan Omar, arguably the most corrupt of Minneapolis’ Somali community, announced the Congressional Progressive Caucus has “adopted an official position” to defund Immigration & Customs Enforcement.
“Our caucus members will oppose all funding for immigration enforcement in any immigration enforcement bills until meaningful reforms are enacted to end militarized policing practices,” said the woman accused of marrying her brother to evade U.S. immigration laws. Omar’s message was praised by radical groups everywhere, many tied to the left’s “defund the police” movement amid 2020’s Black Lives Matter riots.
Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., introduced a bill on Wednesday that would — without adult supervision in Congress — gut the $75 billion funding increase ICE received in President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill and dump the money into propping up the Obamacare subsidy scam, the Associated Press reported. Curiously, Moulton, now looking to dethrone old leftist Ed Markey in Massachusetts’ Senate primary, blamed out-of-touch Democrats for the party’s sweeping losses in 2024.
Much of the vitriol has ramped up in the days following a federal law enforcement agent’s fatal shooting of anti- ICE activist and accused domestic terrorist Renee Good. The agent suffered internal bleeding in the torso after the Minneapolis woman accelerated and struck the officer with her vehicle, the Department of Homeland Security told The Federalist on Wednesday. The agent shot Good, who died at the scene.
Perhaps the defund ICE message is playing well in solidly blue districts, but competitive district politics is a different animal.
California Rep. Dave Min and other “vulnerable Democrats” in competitive races this year seem to be betting that voters will rally around their anti-ICE rhetoric.
‘A Leverage Point to Exploit’
Min, like other Democrats in closer races, backs impeaching Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and has called the work of enforcing immigration laws “illegal” and “unconstitutional”. He’s got the backing of Omar and her Squad pals at the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC.
Min ridiculously claimed that “there is not a single place in America, including California, that does not comply with federal immigration law, that hampers federal immigration enforcement …” The claim is patently false. And Min has called a House committee investigation into Minnesota’s massive fraud scandal “partisan and racist.”
The Cook Political Report ranks the first-term Democrat’s 47th Congressional District as competitive but likely remains in Dems’ control. Republicans, however, see the seat previously held by Katie Porter — the far-left but front-running gubernatorial candidate with a short fuse — very winnable. Min beat Republican opponent Scott Baugh by less than 3 percentage points in 2024 after a lengthy delay in the vote count.
Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet, looking for a second term representing Michigan’s competitive 8th Congressional District, seems to be on the anti-ICE bandwagon. The incumbent appeared earlier this week at a protest in Midland, where her like-minded leftist supporters carried signs with obscene messages, such as “F- – – ICE. Rivet’s progressive colleagues are talking about using the end-of-January budget deadline for another insane government shutdown as “a leverage point to exploit” in their drive to defund ICE, Axios reported.
Greg Landsman, the incumbent Democrat representing Ohio’s toss-up 1st Congressional District, and Rep. Derek Tran, who holds California’s competitive 45th District congressional seat, have been dutifully shouting one of the top Democratic Party talking points of late. They insist that ICE and Trump’s efforts to clean up the illegal immigration mess his predecessor made “have not made America safer.” It’s a difficult argument to make after federal law enforcement officers have taken thousands of illegal immigrant convicts — many of them with very violent rap sheets — off the streets and out of the country. Landsman claims the Trump administration’s immigration policies have been ineffective. The record shows otherwise.
‘I Know My Choice’
Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, running for re-election in a Texas congressional district that leans Republican, recently attacked the Trump administration’s “reckless immigration policies” and accused the executive branch of “endangering American lives.” Gonzalez, of course, fails to mention Lone Star State victims of open-border policies — like Jocelyn Nungaray, the 12-year-old Houston girl who prosecutors say was raped and brutally murdered by two illegal immigrants from Venezuela, possible members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
William Lawrence, the Democrat challenger trying to unseat Michigan’s first-term 7th Congressional District Representative Tom Barrett, has gone all-in on abolishing ICE. Lawrence has been saying some hideous things about federal law enforcement agents.
“We get to choose whether we want the president to have masked shock troops to turn against his enemies. I know my choice.” the leftist said in one X post.
“ICE has been offering new recruits up to a $50k signing bonus. I wonder if they get a shooting bonus too,” he wrote in another post, definitely turning up the temperature in heated U.S. politics. In another hyperbolic post he declared, “This administration occupies American cities, they kill, and they lie.”
Lawrence celebrated a local Hilton Hotel franchisee’s decision to refuse Minneapolis-based Department of Homeland Security law enforcement officials service. That post didn’t age well.
Cook rates the congressional race a toss-up. Will moderate voters support such far-left representation?
And then there’s liberal windbag Eugene Vindman, seeking another term representing Virginia’s competitive 7h Congressional District. The Democrat, who likes to wag his finger at political violence unless it’s coming from his fellow liberals (and it usually is), recently compared the mass murder of Iranian demonstrators protesting against Iran’s brutal regime to “what we see with ICE on America’s streets.”
‘It’s the Rhetoric’
These liberals are going to have to pick up some votes from the nonaffiliated — voters without a party. While recent polls show support for ICE operations declining, a good share of independent voters support the job ICE is doing after seeing their communities overrun by illegal immigrants in recent years. Last month, more than half of U.S. adults questioned in a Pew Research poll supported deportation of illegal immigrants, at least at some level. Trump ran and was elected on his promise to clean up America’s illegal immigration mess.
The call to “abolish ICE” should go over as well as the “defund the police” movement pushed by many of the same leftist politicians in 2020. Not good. Center-left think tank Third Way is urging Democrats to stop the politically “lethal” rhetoric.
“The impulse is emotional,” the group wrote in a memo, Fox News reported. “The slogan is simple. But politically, it is lethal. Every call to abolish ICE risks squandering one of the clearest opportunities in years to secure meaningful reform of immigration enforcement — while handing Republicans exactly the fight they want. This piece argues for a harder and smarter approach: abolish abuses, not ICE.”
Department of Homeland Security officers are paying a high price for Democrat politicians’ hostile rhetoric. DHS spokesman Harry Fones told The Federalist this week that radical rhetoric from sanctuary politicians has helped fuel a 1,300 percent surge in attacks against ICE officers, a 3,200 percent increase in vehicular attacks and an 8,000 percent increase in death threats. On Wednesday evening, DHS said an ICE agent was attacked in Minneapolis by two suspects while the officer was trying to apprehend a violent illegal immigrant from Venezuela.
“It’s the rhetoric you’re seeing out of these left-wing politicians … Every day our officers are being compared to Nazis and the Gestapo. That’s just wrong,” Fones told me on the latest episode of The Federalist Radio Hour.
“The radical ‘Abolish ICE’ crusade from far-left Democrats seemed like a relic of the past, but it’s the brand new litmus test for Democrats who are barely hanging on and begging on their knees to get approval from their socialist base,” Mike Marinella, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said in a statement to The Federalist. “The full embrace of their deeply unpopular, lunatic policies exposes the brain rot that has taken over the Democrat Party.”
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
