Washington, DC – Advocates have called on US lawmakers to withdraw public approval of President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement campaign as outrage over it grows. murder A United States citizen through an immigration agent in Minnesota.
During a press conference Wednesday, several immigration experts said lawmakers had a unique opportunity to enact reform during the 2024 election, an issue that could help propel the president to a second term in office as Trump’s pledge to end mass deportations.
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The events in Minnesota, he said, underscored the unruly future of US immigration enforcement, especially in light of last year’s massive cash-in on the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.
“I think we’re really at an inflection point here,” said Kate Vogt, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
“We’ve seen grassroots action over the past few weeks. More people are seeing that ICE is dangerous, violent, operating with impunity. More people are angry, scared, inspired, and more people are looking to their members of Congress for action.”
According to observers, the change in direction is a major undertaking.
Trump’s tax bill, passed by the Republican-controlled Congress last year, is pres Dubbed His “Big Beautiful Bill” included a massive $170 billion windfall for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
About $75bn of that was allocated to ICE over the next four years – $45bn to increase detention capacity and $30bn to boost enforcement operations. This is on top of ICE’s annual operating budget, which has been around $10bn in recent years, and is subject to congressional approval.
Additional funds have been provided is described Critics dismissed it as a bit of a “slush fund”.
In providing what the Brennan Center for Justice has, it makes ICE the most funded federal law enforcement agency by miles. is called A new “exile industrial complex”.
Changing public opinion
As Trump enters the second year of his second term, his administration controls the ICE force Double in size In recent months, there are now 22,000 agents on board. He is tasked with reaching a ballooning daily arrest goal of 100,000, nearly triple the typical rate, as well as a goal of 1 million deportations a year, well beyond the 605,000 reported by the administration during Trump’s first year in office.
Advocates say U.S. residents are beginning to understand what those numbers represent.
A video recording of the killing of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Goode in suburban Minneapolis on January 7 flashflooded social media, casting doubt on, though not entirely contradicting, the Trump administration’s immediate claim that Goode was trying to run over an immigration officer when he opened fire.
Within minutes, Trump officials labeled Goode a “domestic terrorist,” the federal government soon removed local officials from participating in the investigation and rejected the customary appeal. Civil Rights Inquiry.
The administration then sent hundreds more federal agents into the state, bringing the total to 3,000, as it portrayed the protests that spread across hundreds of US cities as the work of “protesters” and “rebels”. The Department of Justice has since Investigation opened Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and state Governor Tim Walz, the most vocal critics of the administration’s actions, accused him of conspiring to obstruct immigration enforcement.
The state of Minnesota, as well as the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, have filed a lawsuit alleging that ICE agents routinely infringe on residents’ civil liberties. Images and videos of Sometimes violent Clashes between immigration agents and state residents have spilled over into social media, with several incidents of US citizens being harassed or detained.
During a news conference Tuesday, local police officials in the state also said they had received a deluge of reports of ICE agents trampling on residents’ rights.
Mark Bruley, the police chief for the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park, said residents were routinely “stopped for no reason and forced to produce documents to determine whether they were here legally”.
“We started hearing the same complaints from our police officers because they were victims of this while on duty,” Bruley added. “Every person that this has happened to is a person of color.”
Speaking at a briefing Wednesday, Heidi Altman, vice president for policy at the National Immigration Law Center, said recent incidents showed “ICE and Border Patrol agents are not using taxpayer dollars for immigration enforcement purposes.”
“They are using it for the purpose of protecting and projecting the absolute power of the president of the United States and the executive branch,” Altman said.
This understanding is reflected in public opinion polls. A recent CBS News/YouGov poll conducted between January 14 and 16 found an even split on Trump’s immigration pledges, but growing dismay over how they are being implemented. About 52 percent thought ICE was making communities less safe, while 61 percent said the agency’s tactics were “too tough.”
Another poll conducted by the ACLU found that 55 percent of voters support ending mass ICE raids targeting immigrants, while a whopping 84 percent support the public’s right to “securely monitor, record and document ICE activities.”
An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that Trump’s approval on immigration was split 50 to 49 percent among voters in March 2025, while disapproval had risen to 61 percent by mid-January.
For his part, Trump has blamed the changing tide on inaccurate media coverage, calling on DHS and ICE to better publicize the “violent criminals” targeted in the 3,000 arrests made by immigration agents in Minnesota.
In a recent post on the Truth social account, Trump said, “Show the numbers, names and faces of violent criminals and show them now.
“People will start supporting ICE’s patriots instead of overpaid troublemakers, anarchists and protestors!”
‘business as usual’
The US Congress, which controls the so-called “purse of power” over its budgetary discretion, remains less controlled by Republicans, who have shown little appetite to contradict Trump on one of his policy pillars.
Democrats have introduced a slate of legislative actions to defund ICE, limit detention, force ICE officials to unmask and impeach DHS Secretary Kristy Noem, but all have proven non-starters.
More broadly, the party remains divided over its approach, with some political strategists warning of continued weakness on immigration, seen as an Achilles’ heel in the Democrats’ defeat in the 2024 election.
Meanwhile, advocates who spoke Wednesday said there is an immediate opportunity to send a message to lawmakers as they negotiate a bill to allocate annual funding to DHS.
The current bill would increase ICE’s annual detention budget by $400m over last year, while increasing its enforcement budget by $300m. This is on top of the billions of dollars already allocated last year, while offering little in the way of best practice reform or oversight, advocates said.
“It’s crazy to me to think that anyone would vote to give more money to an already bloated agency,” said Beatriz Lopez, founder and director of the Democracy Power Project, who called the bill an important opportunity to “check” ICE.
Amy Fisher, director for refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International USA, added: “Democrats and Republicans came to the table to pull the bill together, as if it were business as usual, as if it were another year”.
“What we’re trying to communicate here is that we can’t actually do business as usual when we have an over-militarized agency operating illegally in our country, killing U.S. citizens,” she said. “What we’re asking members of Congress to do is hold this agency back, stop the chaos.”