AUSTIN, Texas – Democrats meeting Saturday embraced two competing positions on the future of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, underscoring the party’s broad resistance to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown while also exposing internal divisions ahead of the midterm elections.
At its summer gathering, the Democratic National Committee approved a series of policy resolutions, including one calling for “concrete reforms” to ICE and another urging that the agency be dismantled altogether. The votes placed the party’s immigration debate in sharp focus as ICE remains under intense scrutiny following several deadly encounters.
The push to abolish ICE has been a prominent progressive demand since 2018, during Trump’s first term in office. That call has gained renewed attention among some Democrats after two fatal shootings involving the agency in July.
The resolutions approved Saturday are not binding and do not establish the Democratic Party platform, which will not be formally set until the 2028 convention. Still, the votes offered a clear snapshot of how Democrats are wrestling with one of the country’s most politically charged immigration issues. Individual candidates and elected officials remain free to stake out their own positions.
Michele Johnson, a DNC member from Louisiana who introduced the resolution calling for ICE to be abolished, argued that Democrats should be more direct about where they stand. She pointed to the past breakup of ICE’s predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, as an example of a federal immigration agency being dissolved and replaced.
“I think one of the reasons why people are not trusting the party is because we sound so academic,” Johnson said. “We sound focus group tested, we sound poll tested because we’re worried about saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing and not just like, just stand on business, like take a position.”
But the proposal did not win over every DNC member. Yvonne Reeves-Chong opposed the abolish-ICE measure, warning that while it could energize one segment of the Democratic base, it might also invite political backlash from another group of voters.
“I would strongly suggest we get to the business of winning races so we can make the policies that make a difference,” Reeves-Chong said.
DNC Chairman Ken Martin, who’s from Minnesota, where Renee Good and Alex Pretti were fatally shot amid the immigration crackdown earlier this year, said in an interview that the takeaway is that Democrats find the administration’s handling of immigration, including by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, unacceptable.
“Clearly, the one thing that unites Democrats, regardless of their position on reform versus abolish or whatever other ways to change what’s happening, is people believe that what ICE is doing right now — and CBP and the federal government — should stop,” he said. “There has to be a better way.”
Immigration remained a stronger issue for Trump than the economy or Iran, according to a poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released this month, even after three people were killed in encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the span of under a week in July.
Overall, the survey found that only 39% of U.S. adults approve of his performance on immigration, down from 49% at the beginning of his second term.
