{"id":18078,"date":"2026-01-22T23:46:54","date_gmt":"2026-01-22T23:46:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/house-dems-rally-against-ice-funding-just-one-year-after-dozens-broke-ranks-on-immigration\/"},"modified":"2026-01-22T23:46:54","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T23:46:54","slug":"house-dems-rally-against-ice-funding-just-one-year-after-dozens-broke-ranks-on-immigration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/house-dems-rally-against-ice-funding-just-one-year-after-dozens-broke-ranks-on-immigration\/","title":{"rendered":"House Dems rally against ICE funding just one year after dozens broke ranks on immigration"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

House Democrats voted overwhelmingly Thursday to block additional funding for ICE, a remarkable shift from when dozens of them voted to expand the Trump administration\u2019s immigration enforcement authority just one year ago \u2014 and a sign of how quickly the political ground has moved since President Donald Trump returned to the White House.<\/p>\n

Just seven Democrats voted for the Homeland Security spending bill that included billions for Immigration and Customs Enforcement: Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, Jared Golden of Maine, Laura Gillen and Tom Suozzi of New York, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Florida and Don Davis of North Carolina. All represent tough terrain \u2014 Trump carried all of their districts but Gillen\u2019s, which he lost by just over one point.<\/p>\n

Other Democrats, incensed by an ICE agent\u2019s shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, voted against the bill \u2014 including many who voted exactly one year ago to pass the Laken Riley Act that allows for the detention of undocumented immigrants accused of certain crimes.<\/p>\n

One of them, Rep. Susie Lee (D-Nev.), a top GOP target in the midterms from a district Trump narrowly carried in 2024, argued this vote was different.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we have seen time and again is ICE has blatantly violated our Constitution and our law, whether you\u2019re talking about the shooting of a young mother to sending a five year old thousands of miles away to entice his father to turn himself in \u2014 this type of shit is not American,\u201d Lee said in an interview Thursday. \u201cICE has plenty of money \u2026 I can\u2019t in good conscience give them any more money until we get some type of guardrails.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even the Democrats who voted for the funding were sharply critical of ICE.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hate what ICE is doing in my district and across the country. It’s atrocious. It’s appalling. We should find ways to defund those operations in a surgical way,\u201d Gonzalez said in a brief interview, adding that he supported the bill because it also included funding for Coast Guard and FEMA operations. \u201cBut voting no, just to make a statement, could have its own repercussions.\u201d<\/p>\n

The House passed the DHS funding bill 220 to 207.<\/p>\n

Democrats\u2019 near-united stand against the bill comes amid building opposition to Trump\u2019s mass deportation campaign. A 49 percent plurality of voters in a new Blue Light News poll conducted Jan. 16 to 19 said the effort \u2014 including Trump\u2019s widespread deployment of ICE agents across the U.S. \u2014 is too aggressive.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe shift is dramatic. And I think the reason for the shift is: Last year the debate in the country was about getting control of the borders and out-of-control immigration. Now the entire situation is about ICE itself and its behavior,\u201d Mark Longabaugh, a veteran Democratic strategist, said of the party\u2019s recalibration on immigration.<\/p>\n

Amid the growing public furor over ICE\u2019s hardline tactics, congressional Democrats had demanded that any new Homeland Security funding come with more guardrails.<\/p>\n

The bill most of them voted against Thursday funds ICE at $10 billion through the rest of the fiscal year<\/u><\/a> that ends in September, while cutting funding for removal and enforcement operations by $115 million and Border Patrol funding by $1.8 billion<\/u><\/a>. It also included some Democratic demands: decreasing the number of detention beds by 5,500, providing $20 million each for body cameras for agents and independent oversight of DHS detention facilities, and directing the department to give officers more training on diffusing conflict while interacting with the public.<\/p>\n

It does not include other items Democrats pushed for, however, such as banning agents from wearing masks during operations, requiring judicial warrants, preventing DHS from detaining and deporting U.S. citizens and blocking the department from using other agencies\u2019 personnel for immigration enforcement.<\/p>\n

The Democrats who voted in favor of the funding bill argued it was preferable to the alternative \u2014 giving Trump what Cuellar described as a \u201cblank check\u201d to carry out his hardline immigration agenda \u201cvirtually unchecked.\u201d<\/p>\n

And some expressed concerns about ramifications for their districts if other agencies who receive their funding through DHS were cut off. Davis warned of the potential consequences of lapsed FEMA and Coast Guard funding in his home state of North Carolina that has been battered by storms and floods in recent years.<\/p>\n

\u201cObviously we should have the honest conversations about warrants. We should have the honest conversations about taking off the masks,\u201d Davis said Thursday. But \u201cif we can’t consistently predict when disasters are coming our way, then we’re leaving populations of people vulnerable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Erin Doherty and Calen Razor contributed to this report.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

House Democrats voted overwhelmingly Thursday to block additional funding for ICE, a remarkable shift from when dozens of them voted to expand the Trump administration\u2019s immigration enforcement authority just one year ago \u2014 and a sign of how quickly the political ground has moved since President Donald Trump returned to the White House. Just seven […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18078\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}