ICE Out

Congress must awaken and respond to the overreaching, unlawful, and cruel tactics used by ICE in Minneapolis and around the country. ICE should step back and deescalate, which is the will of the American people as reflected in numerous polls and the massive protests in Minneapolis — included hundreds of clergy from around the country.

Individual members of Congress should speak out and Congressional committees should hold hearings. Legislatively, Congress should cut ICE’s funding. With a FY26 budget more than CBP’s and the FBI’s, ICE is creating an unaccountable secret police where so many of its public justifications are provably false and racist. Unconscionable and un-American.

It’s long past the time for Congress to develop a rational immigration policy:

• ICE agents should not be allowed to wear masks.
• Per the Due Process clause of the Fifth Amendment, people must be presumed innocent until proven guilty, given due process rather than immediately “disappeared” to a detention facility for deportation. Anyone detained must be afforded full due process before being deported.
• Detention facilities must provide respectful treatment, with adequate food, water, and medical care. Agents who abuse detainees should be prosecuted.
• Immigrants who have applied for asylum or otherwise have their cases being reviewed by the courts should remain in the U.S. without detention until their cases are adjudicated. To speed adjudication, hire more judges to evaluate cases, not more ICE police.
• Immigrants who have established lives in the U.S. and have been here for — say 5, 10, or 15 years — should be eligible to legally remain in the country with a path to citizenship.
• Those who are registered under the DACA program should have a path to citizenship.
• So-called “dangerous criminals” should be deported. However, that does not mean someone in the U.S. simply without proper authorization, or with a traffic violation, or exercising their free speech rights. Truly, someone convicted of a serious crime.

As Jamelle Bouie recently wrote in The New York Times:

It is worth remembering that immigration enforcement is a civil procedure and that most people detained by ICE do not have criminal records. In the main, these are not violent people threatening the safety and integrity of the nation; they are ordinary men, women and children who have been caught in an authoritarian dragnet. Their treatment is less a necessary part of immigration detention than it is a punishment — deliberate pain inflicted on migrants in order to force them out of the country, whether or not they have a legal right to be here.

Masked ICE agents swarming cities, haunting neighborhoods, going door to door, separating young children from their parents, and attacking peaceful protesters are desecrating our American values, much like the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II. ICE is creating a travesty eerily similar to the horrors of the secret police rounding up the Jews in Nazi Germany.

Will you be complicit in this tyranny or raise your voice for “the least of these brothers and sisters of mine?”

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Sent to my Congressional representatives on Saturday, January 24, 2026: Rep. Mike Rogers, Sen. Katie Britt, and Sen. Tommy Tubberville.