As the nation reckons with the shooting death of Alex Pretti at the hands of Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis, Democrats intensified Monday calls for far-reaching consequences for the country’s immigration agencies.
Their push for a transformation is playing out in Congress, in national Democratic messaging and, increasingly, in new campaign ads as Democratic primaries begin to take shape ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Some Democrats want to all-out gut Immigration and Customs Enforcement and reform Customs and Border Protection, slash funding or hold congressional hearings. Others are calling for the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
Others want to go still further.
“Prosecute ICE,” reads a new ad from Kat Abughazaleh, a Democratic congressional candidate in Illinois’ 9th District. She and fellow Democrat Daniel Biss, the mayor of the Chicago suburb of Evanston, have tangled with immigration officers at suburban Chicago’s Broadview immigrant processing facility since early last year. Biss, too, has called for months for investigations and potential future prosecutions of immigration agents.
“Under his watch, Evanston was one of the first cities to send local law enforcement to document ICE abductions, the first step toward accountability for federal agents,” Biss’ campaign told NBC News in a statement. “After the recent shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Daniel has been crystal clear that the perpetrators of these murders must be brought to justice.”
While calls to defund ICE had been growing louder in some corners of the party for months, the sentiment to overhaul ICE and DHS is taking off. Candidates from deep-blue districts in the Chicago area to ruby-red states like Texas are elevating the issue in their campaigns, showing how rapidly the political landscape is evolving amid broad concern about Pretti’s death and other recent incidents.
Things are also shifting quickly within the Democratic Party, which has struggled to navigate immigration issues in recent elections.
A Democratic think tank that recently warned the party against using “Abolish ICE” language is acknowledging the politics have dramatically shifted since Pretti was killed over the weekend.
Unlike a warning it gave less than two weeks ago, a new memo from Third Way, first shared with NBC News on Monday, does not address using the term “abolish ICE” one way or another.
The document outlines recommended talking points for Democrats as they ramp up the fight in Congress and on the campaign trail, including demanding a complete overhaul of both ICE and the Border Patrol and saying: “Secretary Noem is incompetent and must go. Where misconduct rises to the level of abuse of power, impeachment is not radical — it is a constitutional responsibility.”
Questions over ICE support are already being used in Democratic primary attack ads, including in Illinois, where violent deportation actions played out for months. Lt. Gov Juliana Stratton commissioned a mobile billboard Monday night to roam outside her Senate primary debate against Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, seizing on past contributions to his campaign.
Last month, Krishnamoorthi donated past contributions he received from a Palantir executive to an immigration rights group after a Chicago Sun-Times story raised questions about them. Krishnamoorthi released a TV ad Monday in which he says: “We should abolish Trump’s ICE. We can’t have a government or ICE running out of control.”
Wave of responses
Pretti’s killing led a cascade of Democrats to pledge to block funding for the Department of Homeland Security, including some who had just crossed party lines to vote for the funding.
“I failed to view the DHS funding vote as a referendum on the illegal and immoral conduct of ICE in Minneapolis,” said Rep. Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y., who represents a Long Island-based district that Donald Trump won in 2024. He was one of just seven Democrats to support the DHS funding package.
“I hear the anger from my constituents, and I take responsibility for that. I have long been critical of ICE’s unlawful behavior and I must do a better job demonstrating that,” Suozzi said on Facebook, later calling on Trump to “immediately end” ICE operations in Minneapolis.
Democratic Rep. Laura Gillen, who also represents a competitive district on Long Island and voted for the DHS funding measure, said in response to Pretti’s killing that Noem “must be impeached immediately.”
Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who represents Minnesota and is weighing a run for governor, said Sunday on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that she would oppose DHS funding. She stopped short of saying ICE should be abolished.
“We’re always going to have some immigration enforcement in this country and border control,” Klobuchar said. “I think most Americans believe that. But the way that this agency has been functioning is completely against every tenet of law enforcement.”
Democrats running for the Senate in deep-red Texas are also calling for changes to ICE after Saturday’s shooting. During their debate late Saturday afternoon, neither Rep. Jasmine Crockett nor state Rep. James Talarico used the word “abolish” to describe their positions on ICE — but both called for overhauling it.
“We absolutely have to clean house, whatever that looks like,” Crockett said.
Talarico said, “It’s time to tear down this secret police force and replace it with an agency that actually is going to focus on public safety.”
On Friday, Gov. Janet Mills, who is running for the Senate in Maine, called on Congress to “curtail” funding for ICE. After Pretti was killed, she went a step further, saying the Senate “should reject the Department of Homeland Security funding bill until there are measures in place to stop ICE’s abuses of power and lawless, dangerous conduct.”
Her primary opponent, military veteran and oyster farmer Graham Platner, attended an anti-ICE rally in Maine and wrote on X after Pretti was killed, “ICE needs to be dismantled.” At a town hall late last year, he was more direct: “Organizations that are used to kidnap Americans are not organizations that should exist in the future,” he said.
The polling picture
Democrats are condemning ICE and stances on funding or abolishing the agency altogether are shifting as Americans have expressed increasing concerns with its tactics.
Polling conducted before Pretti was killed but after an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Good this month, found majorities disapproving of the agency’s operations.
A Democratic aide, who was not authorized to speak publicly, questioned how far Democrats in Congress would really go once the rubber hit the road.
“I don’t know if people are truly committed to imagining something new. It’s a lot of talking, little action,” the staffer said, adding that even with emotions high Monday, some elected officials were still reluctant to step forward as co-sponsors for new legislation. “If not now, when is the moment?”
A New York Times/Siena College poll conducted two weeks ago found 61% of registered voters saying ICE’s tactics have gone “too far,” compared with 26% who said they were just right and 11% who said they have not gone far enough.
Another poll, a CBS/YouGov survey also conducted in mid-January, found the same 61% share of Americans saying ICE is “too tough” when it stops and detains people, while 24% said it is about right and 15% said it is not tough enough.
Negative views of ICE have also increased in recent years.
Half of registered voters surveyed by NBC News in late October had negative views of ICE — a 24-point increase from April 2018, when the agency was being criticized during Trump’s first term. The increase in negative views since then is driven largely by Democrats and independents.
Early dividing lines
Positions on ICE are emerging as early dividing lines in some Democratic primaries, even as the party shifts toward reining in the agency and DHS broadly.
In Michigan, home to a key Senate race this year, progressive physician Abdul El-Sayed called out his Democratic primary opponents for failing to explicitly say ICE should be abolished. His campaign noted in a new release that Rep. Haley Stevens and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow have not gone as far as El-Sayed in saying it should no longer exist.
“ICE is a paramilitary force deployed against our Constitutional order for the service of one would-be dictator. How many more people do they need to shoot?” El-Sayed said in a statement, later adding, “Rather than protecting us, it has become the thing from which we need to be protected. Abolishing this agency is the only safe path forward.”
McMorrow said Monday in a video on social media that ICE “needs a complete overhaul,” and over the weekend she encouraged Congress not to send “one more penny” to ICE “until we get the same oversight and accountability we demand from every law enforcement agency.”
Stevens, who voted against a government funding bill that included funding for DHS last week, announced over the weekend that she would co-sponsor a measure to move ICE funding to state and local law enforcement.
“Not one penny more should go to ICE. Kristi Noem must be impeached,” Stevens said in a statement. “It’s past time for Donald Trump to listen to state and local officials and call off his lawless federal agents.”
Potential 2028 presidential candidates are calibrating their positions, too. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has called for abolishing “Trump’s ICE,” a cushioned stance that is similar to Krishnamoorthi’s.
But right now, the divides over ICE are already beginning to play out on the airwaves, most notably in a crowded Democratic primary in New Jersey. The Feb. 5 special primary will choose a likely successor in Congress to Gov. Mikie Sherrill, who resigned her seat to take her new job.
United Democracy Project, a super PAC tied to the pro-Israel advocacy group AIPAC, launched an ad against Democratic former Rep. Tom Malinowski in the race, saying Malinowski “voted with Trump and the Republicans to fund ICE, more than 200 million for Trump’s deportation force,” when he was in Congress in 2019. The vote in question was for a broader government funding bill that won support from just over half of Democrats in the House at the time.
Malinowski pushed back against the attack on X, writing that “I want to defund ICE’s brutality” and noting that he voted with other New Jersey Democrats for funds for “humanitarian aid and security at the border.”
An outside group dubbed 218 Project launched a response ad to boost Malinowski, with the narrator saying, “Malinowski will defund ICE.”
Brendan Gill, another top candidate in the race, launched an ad featuring his wife talking about their daughter’s being frightened, saying: “Kids at school said ICE was going to deport her. It’s heartbreaking knowing her fear is what Trump wants.”
Gill says in the ad, “I won’t stand for it, not for my kids, not for anyone.”
And grassroots organizer Analilia Mejia, who has the endorsement of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said this month that ICE should be eliminated, saying in a video on social media: “Abolish ICE now! You can’t reform that. It’s not fixable.”