Even after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed Renee Good earlier this month, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her closest allies in carrying out President Donald Trump’s cruel purge of immigrants seemed untouchable. Good’s death only prompted a mediocre package of reforms to be included in the bill funding the Department of Homeland Security for the rest of the year, none of which would truly restrain federal officers from carrying out mass deportation efforts.
But the Border Patrol officer who fired round after round into Alex Pretti’s body, the second homicide carried out in less than a month on the streets of Minneapolis, did so one week before the Senate’s deadline to pass that bill.
There’s little room for error or delay to prevent the rot within DHS from metastasizing further.
The Trump administration is now on its back foot, and even Republican lawmakers have raised questions about whether Pretti really deserved to die, as though the first inklings of shame have finally begun creeping back into their bodies. The swiftly shifting political headwinds have left Democratic lawmakers, who had seemed sure to begrudgingly fund DHS later this week, looking to press their advantage.
Given the stakes, and what is likely to be a brief window for action, there’s little room for error or delay to prevent the rot within DHS from metastasizing further.
The Homeland Security funding bill is currently tied together with five other House-passed appropriations bills as an all-or-nothing package. At least seven Democratic votes are needed to ensure passage, but Pretti’s death has made the chance that it will reach Trump’s desk unchanged low at best. Instead, Senate Democrats are now pressing their GOP counterparts to strip the DHS funding from the “minibus” to allow the other bills to pass and prevent a larger partial shutdown. (Senate Republicans are pressing ahead regardless, intending to call a potential bluff and setting the stage for a crucial vote Thursday.)
According to NBC News, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told his caucus on a call Sunday “the message had to be to ‘restrain, reform and restrict ICE.’” It’s more of a mouthful than “abolish ICE,” but it still marks a major departure from a previous reluctance to withhold support from federal law enforcement. The move is backed by a growing number of polls showing Americans swiftly souring on ICE, with almost half of respondents in a recent YouGov poll saying that the agency should be dismantled entirely.
Exactly what Schumer and his fellow Democratic senators intend to propose was still up in the air, though, as of Tuesday evening. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., provided a rough list of potential demands during an interview with The New Republic’s Greg Sargent, including requiring judicial warrants for immigration arrests, effectively ending what Murphy called the “street-by-street sweeps, the ‘show me your papers’ practice, and the home-to-home confrontations.”
Also on the table, according to Murphy, are items requiring federal agents to wear identification and body cameras during enforcement operations, ensuring that states can investigate cases like Good’s and Pretti’s killings when they occur, and restricting ICE and Border Patrol from operating in schools and churches.
Those potential reforms would mostly square with a list the Congressional Progressive Caucus circulated last week, which also included barring the arrest quotas the White House has imposed on ICE and banning federal agents from wearing masks during operations. Notably, neither set of proposals specifically calls for Noem’s resignation, despite a growing swell of support for her removal from atop DHS.
An undue focus on Noem, though, would be an ironic shadow of the conservative ethos Noem herself is an understandable target, given her visibility and callousness when confronted with evidence of DHS agents’ culpability. A resolution calling for her impeachment in the House is racking up signatures, with more than 140 Democrats now on board. Accordingly, despite being in the minority, House Democrats have launched an investigation into Noem’s conduct, laying the groundwork for a future expansion should they take back a majority in this fall’s midterm elections. There’s every chance, in that case, that Noem would see articles of impeachment against her drawn up swiftly next January — if she survives in the job that long. An undue focus on Noem, though, would be an ironic shadow of the conservative ethos, looking to solve problems at the individual level rather than taking on the system. As Republicans ignored as they targeted Noem’s predecessor, Biden administration DHS chief Alejandro Mayorkas, she is dutifully following orders coming from the president. Even in the highly unlikely event of her removal in a Senate trial, there’s no doubt that the overarching deportation policy would remain the same so long as Trump wills it. While two-thirds of the upper chamber voting to show Noem the door would make for a stunning political rebuke, it would be all too easy to confuse that shiny trophy as a true victory. The reforms pushed by Murphy and other Democrats are likewise important but, as Murphy himself recognized, still only scratch the surface of how we reached this point in the first place. True immigration reform has been desperately needed for almost 20 years now. Without a stable pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented people already here, the pendulum remains free to swing back toward the kind of cruelty that Trump unleashed. And simply calling for better training and oversight for ICE and other cogs in the deportation machine fails to recognize that making a squad of unaccountable kidnappers more efficient doesn’t make the country safer. As much as Pretti’s death has rattled the powers that be, the fever gripping the country didn’t suddenly break after a year of Trump’s mass deportation campaign. But opponents of the violence, chaos and cruelty on display now find themselves on more solid footing than what seemed possible only days ago, to begin dismantling a system designed to dehumanize and oppress anyone caught in its crosshairs. It is imperative, then, that the moment not be lost and that the first bricks in ICE’s eventual crypt be laid before the foundation has a chance to crack.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House. 
