American People Firmly Behind Drive To Rein In ICE, On The Hill Powerful Stories of ICE's Violence, Greater Focus Needed On The Detention Centers
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Morning all. Yesterday Senator Blumenthal and Rep. Robert Garcia held an extraordinary shadow hearing on the Hill, one focusing on the lawless violence ICE has brought to our communities. Many of you watched parts of it live. Below is a link to the full hearing and testimony. The video above is the deeply emotional testimony of Luke Granger, one of Renee Good’s brothers.
Sit down and steady yourself before watching.
This hearing represents a dramatic evolution in how Democrats can bring the harms of Trumpism to the American people. It is the second hearing organized by Senator Blumenthal and Rep. Robert Garcia on the abuses of DHS/ICE/CBP. It took place in a formal Senate hearing room. It had compelling witnesses and searing testimony. It got coverage in the mainstream media and was widely covered by our emerging pro-democracy media ecosystem, including Hopium yesterday. Simply, it was powerful and it broke through. It needs to become a model for how we, despite not controlling Congress, use our bicameral Congressional convening power to bring the harms of Trumpism to the American people this year. It is an example of the how we must innovate, “come together,” and organize ourselves differently and more effectively to meet the moment in year two of Trump’s second term.
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Four months passed the legal deadline for adopting the fiscal 2026 budget this terrible MAGA Congress yesterday finally got 10 appropriations bills to Trump’s desk. Most of the government is now funded through September 30th and re-opened - with the exception of DHS. DHS is now operating on a Continuing Resolution (CR) which expires next Friday. If no deal is reached by then DHS will run out of our money and operations across the Department - including TSA, the Coast Guard, FEMA - will slow or cease.
Leader Schumer posted this yesterday:
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While the words may be simple “abide by the same rules as local police” would fundamentally change how ICE operates across the US. It’s an intriguing new formulation - simple, common sense, hard to criticize. Based on that comprehensive YouGov polling we reviewed last week, and some new polling we’ve received this morning, the public is firmly behind such an approach. The polling also shows how badly Trump-Vance-Miller have lost the big arguments driving their terror campaign.
As we will see in this new data from the pro-democracy consortium, Navigator, Democrats enter the fight over reining in ICE on very, very firm ground:
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ICE’s favorability is -22 with the overall public, -37 with independents.
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A majority want Miller gone:
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Only 24% want to keep ICE as it is. 70% want ICE fundamentally overhauled. Democrats are on very, very firm ground right now.
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Democrats are on very, very firm ground right now.
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Democrats are on very, very firm ground right now:
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Leaders Schumer and Jeffries are having a joint press conference this morning at 1115am where we assume they will be laying their game plan for the next few weeks. You can watch it here.
And while I am content with the current direction of this critical fight, there is one area I think Democrats need to develop more fully, that, for example, you don’t see in any of this Navigator polling - we simply must take on the detention centers, both their current inhumanity and their planned $40b expansion.
I wrote a long piece about this a few days ago, but here’s a recap - if the goal of Trump’s policies are to remove criminal migrants, numbering perhaps between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people, we do not need a vast expansion of detention capacity. What is the purpose of the expansion of detention capacity? Who is going to go in there? Who is the regime actually targeting for removal? For right now they are already targeting millions of LEGAL immigrants for removal, and they have started detaining journalists and people perceived as their political enemies.
Here’s a rough breakdown of the immigrant population in the US today:
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While we need more granular polling on how the public feels about removing legal migrants, look at how Americans feel about removing long-settled undocumented immigrants - 65% oppose, only 22% support.
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Trump-Vance-Miller are using the false cover story that they are ONLY targeting criminal migrants to create a vast, violent, and dangerous mass deportation regime and domestic American gulags. Simply, we cannot let this happen. There is no support for this in the public, and it must become a goal of our campaign to not just rein in ICE but to roll back the funding of the vast ICE detention expansion, perhaps using that money to replenish SNAP and the ACA subsides Republicans have cut.
The urgency of this part of our fight against ICE became clearer last week when the regime arrested and detained five journalists. If these detention centers get built they will get filled, by migrants, by opponents of the regime, by journalists, by uppity entertainers - by us.
We must also demand oversight, accountability, and a raising of standards in the make shift detention centers already in use. Listen to this testimony from Aliya Rahman in the ICE hearing yesterday. Not only will you be shocked by the story of her arrest, but listen to her describe how detainees were treated in the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis. ICE has descended into a dangerous inhumanity, an othering, that we know from history will only bring about greater atrocities. Steady yourself, and watch, listen:
Greg Sargent has a terrific new column in the New Republic this morning, Trump’s New “Prison Camp” Unleashes Fury Even In MAGA Country. Here’s an extended excerpt:
The public backlash unleashed by Trump’s immigration agenda runs far deeper than revulsion at imagery of ICE violence. It’s now seemingly coalescing against the goal of mass removals as a broader ideological project.
We’re now learning that this year, ICE plans to retrofit around two dozen vast new facilities. In keeping with Trump-Miller’s visions, ICE vows to detain an additional 80,000 people in them. Some will reportedly hold up to 10,000 detainees apiece. In other words, the Trump-Miller threat to create a system of new detention camps is just getting underway in earnest.
To put a ghoulish twist on the oft-discussed ideal of bureaucratic “capacity,” this will allow Trump and Miller to imprison and then deport vastly more people a whole lot faster. Right now, more than 70,000 migrants are languishing in detention—a record—but the administration is running out of space. Add another 80,000 beds and it would supercharge expulsion capacity.
Yet these detention dreams are hitting stiff opposition. ICE wants to buy a warehouse in Virginia’s Hanover County, which went for Trump by 26 points in 2024 and combines rural territory with Richmond’s northern suburbs. Residents recently turned out in force and angrily condemned the proposed sale, with local reports suggesting only a “handful” backed it. The GOP-heavy Board of Supervisors opposed the transaction. The warehouse owner canceled the sale.
Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the Republican-dominated Roxbury Township Council, in slightly-Trump-leaning Morris County, recently voted unanimously to oppose ICE’s plans to buy a warehouse there, with some locals sharply protesting the scheme for humanitarian reasons. The Republican mayor of Oklahoma City came out against a proposed ICE warehouse, with the owner also nixing the sale. Officials in places like Kansas City, Missouri and Salt Lake City, Utah are also dead set against plans for ICE camps in their locales.
Guess what: The opposition is only getting started. As MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow noted in a useful overview of the opposition Monday night, we’re already seeing mass protests outside existing facilities. Those are smaller than some of the gargantuan new camps ICE hopes to create, yet migrant deaths are already soaring in the current facilities, and the bigger ones will be even worse. “If they build them, they will fill them,” Maddow said, labeling them “prison camps.” She added: “How do you think those facilities are going to be run?”
The pushback has come together surprisingly quickly. What explains this? A bizarrely overlooked finding in a recent Pew Research poll sheds some light: It finds that a huge majority of Americans oppose mass immigrant detention. The wording is critical here:
Do you favor or oppose keeping large numbers of immigrants in detention centers while their cases are decided?
Favor: 35 percent
Oppose: 64 percent
Note that huge majorities are against keeping immigrants in detention while their cases are being decided. This is a decisive repudiation of a key pillar of MAGA ideology. Trump and Miller have long treated the release of immigrants awaiting court dates as something akin to profound national humiliation, even a harbinger of cultural decay and civilizational decline.
But the broad American mainstream—including 59 percent of white voters in the Pew poll—appears to oppose detaining them. With majorities also opposing deporting non-criminal undocumented immigrants and longtime residents, that MAGA understanding is just not widely shared. For Trumpworld, mass detention isn’t merely about facilitating deportations. It’s also supposed to correct the grievous national wound that previous presidents inflicted by releasing migrants into the interior. Is it really possible that majorities are actually okay with such a horror? Apparently it is.
Paid Hopium subscribers will getting together to talk about all this tonight at 7pm EST (register here). And today I am only recommending one action - contact your Senators, your House Member, your Governor, your AG, you state legislative leaders and demand that they fight to rein in ICE (if you want to support our candidates and party committees please head back to yesterday’s post).
However we got here this has become a defining moment not just in reining in ICE and DHS, but in reining in Trump. The Europeans got him to retreat a few weeks ago. It is our turn now. Let’s get to work people and good luck everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - Simon
