WASHINGTON, D.C. – Advocates are calling on U.S. lawmakers to undermine public support for President Donald Trump’s push for aggressive immigration enforcement, as anger continues to grow over the killing of a U.S. citizen by immigration agents in Minnesota.
At a news conference Wednesday, immigration experts said lawmakers have a unique opportunity to pass reforms as public opinion turns against President Trump’s promise of mass deportations. This pledge was a key issue in advancing the president to a second term in the 2024 election.
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They said the events in Minnesota highlighted the bleak future of unchecked U.S. immigration enforcement, especially given last year’s huge injection of funds into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“I think we’re really at a tipping point here,” said Kate Vogt, senior policy adviser at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
“We’ve seen an upsurge in grassroots action in recent weeks. More people see ICE as dangerous, violent, and operating with impunity. More people are angry, afraid, and motivated, and more people are demanding action from their legislators.”
Indeed, turning around remains a daunting task, observers say.
President Trump’s tax bill, which the Republican-controlled Congress passed last year and which the president called “a beautiful, big bill,” included a massive $170 billion in funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Approximately $75 billion of this was allocated to ICE over the next four years, with $45 billion dedicated to expanding detention capacity and $30 billion to increasing enforcement operations. This will be added to ICE’s annual operating budget, which has hovered around $10 billion in recent years, and must be approved by Congress.
The additional funding has been described by critics as a “slush fund” with little oversight.
This makes ICE the most heavily funded federal law enforcement agency, funding what the Brennan Center for Justice calls the new “deportation industrial complex.”
changes in public opinion
As President Trump enters the second year of his second term, his administration is managing an ICE force that has doubled in size in recent months and now numbers more than 22,000 people. They are tasked with meeting an inflated daily detention goal of 100,000 people, nearly three times the normal rate, and a goal of deporting 1 million people a year, far more than the 605,000 the administration reported in its first year in office.
Advocates say U.S. residents are beginning to understand what these numbers portend.
Video of the Jan. 7 killing of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in a Minneapolis suburb flash flooded social media, calling into question, if not outright contradicting, the Trump administration’s immediate assertion that Good was trying to run over an immigration officer when she opened fire.
Within minutes, Trump officials labeled Goode a “domestic terrorist,” and the federal government quickly rejected local authorities’ participation in the investigation and rejected calls for a customary civil rights investigation.
The administration then dispatched hundreds more federal agents to the state, bringing the total to 3,000, attributing the protests that have spread to hundreds of cities across the country to “agitators” and “insurrectionists.” The Justice Department then opened an investigation into two of the most vocal critics of the administration’s actions, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Governor Tim Walz, for conspiracy to obstruct immigration enforcement.
The state of Minnesota, the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul have filed lawsuits alleging that ICE agents regularly violate the civil liberties of their residents. Images and videos of sometimes violent clashes between immigration officials and state residents have been circulating on social media, and there have been several instances of Americans being harassed and detained.
Local law enforcement officials in the state also said at a news conference Tuesday that they have been flooded with reports of ICE agents trampling on residents’ rights.
Mark Bruley, police chief in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park, said residents are routinely “stopped for no reason and forced to provide documentation to verify they are legally here.”
“We started hearing the same complaints from our officers that they had been victimized while off-duty,” Bruley added. “Everyone this has happened to is a person of color.”
In a briefing Wednesday, Heidi Altman, deputy director for policy at the National Immigration Law Center, said recent events show that “ICE and Border Patrol agents are not using taxpayer dollars for immigration enforcement purposes.”
“They are using this information to protect and project the absolute power and executive power of the President of the United States,” Altman said.
This perception appears to be supported by public opinion polls. A recent poll conducted by CBS News and YouGov from January 14th to 16th found that while Americans are evenly divided on President Trump’s immigration promises, there is growing dissatisfaction with how they are being carried out. About 52% feel that ICE makes the community less safe, and 61% said ICE’s tactics are “too harsh.”
Another poll conducted by the ACLU found that 55% of voters supported an end to large-scale ICE raids targeting immigrants, and a whopping 84% supported the right of people to “safely observe, record, and document ICE operations.”
According to a poll by The Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, as of March 2025, voters were broadly divided in their approval of President Trump on immigration, ranging from 50% to 49%, but the disapproval rate had risen to 61% as of mid-January.
President Trump, meanwhile, blamed unfair media coverage for the shift in the tide and called on DHS and ICE to better publicize the 3,000 “violent criminals” targeted in the 3,000 arrests his administration says immigration agents made in Minnesota.
“Show us the numbers, names and faces of violent criminals, and show them now,” President Trump said in a recent post on his Truth social account.
“People will start supporting ICE patriots instead of high-paid troublemakers, anarchists, and agitators!”
“Business as usual”
The U.S. Congress, which holds so-called “power of the purse” in budgetary discretion, remains narrowly controlled by Republicans, who have shown little appetite for opposing one of President Trump’s key policy pillars.
Democrats introduced a series of legislative measures to siphon funding from ICE, curb detentions, force ICE officers to remove masks, and even impeach DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, all of which proved fruitless.
More broadly, the party remains divided over its approach, with some political strategists warning of continued perceived weakness on immigration, seen as an Achilles heel for Democrats’ defeat in the 2024 election.
Meanwhile, advocates speaking Wednesday said they have an opportunity soon to send a message as lawmakers negotiate a bill to allocate annual funding to DHS.
The current bill would increase ICE’s annual detention budget by $400 million over last year, while also increasing its enforcement budget by more than $300 million. This is on top of the billions already allocated last year, but advocates say it does little to promote best-practice reforms or oversight.
“It’s insane to me to think that anyone would vote to provide more funding to an already bloated government agency,” said Beatriz López, founder and director of the Democracy Power Project, calling the bill an important opportunity to “check” ICE.
Amy Fisher, Director of Refugee and Immigrant Rights at Amnesty International USA, added: “Democrats and Republicans came to the table as if it was business as usual, as if we had another year to put this bill together.”
“What we’re trying to get across here is that we can’t really have business as usual anymore when we have a hyper-militarized government agency in our country committing lawless acts and killing American citizens,” she said. “What we’re asking members of Congress to do is actually stop this agency and stop this illegal activity.”
