The DHS Funding Fight Shows That Trump Thinks Basic Rights Are a Bargaining Tool
Democrats are no bold reformers for asking him to uphold the Constitution as he pledged to do
Funding for the Department of Homeland Security expired last Friday. The country’s third largest federal agency—and most powerful domestic agency—is now in a partial shutdown. The point of contention is a list of 10 demands Democrats have made to rein in Trump’s surge of deportation forces into U.S. cities.
The shutdown does not mean ICE and Border Patrol will cease operations. They’re amply funded through the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. It does mean that the TSA, Coast Guard, and other DHS staff are now working with no pay.
On one hand, it’s encouraging to see Democrats finally putting up a fight. Manipulating Congress’s complex budget rules to exercise the power of the purse is one of the few weapons they currently have. It’s not exactly a profile in courage—their actions come only after polls have shown overwhelming anger over Trump’s “reckoning and retribution” in Minneapolis and other cities. But it’s a start.
The Democrats’ demands aren’t “common sense reforms,” as Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer described them. All but a few are already law—and most of the others are either longstanding norms in U.S. policing or foundational principles of any free society. The “demands” are really just restatements of what has long been taken for granted in democratic government: No secret police; immigration officers shouldn’t arrest and incarcerate U.S. citizens; cops can’t threaten, beat, and arrest people for exercising their First Amendment rights; cops can’t kill people with impunity.
Republican leaders have sunk so far into Trump’s authoritarian abyss that they’ve declared these demands “nonstarters.” We now have video of GOP politicians defending the indefensible. Those will make for great campaign ads.
The downside is that the budget impasse has made police state tactics a point of negotiation, giving the impression that basic constitutional rights dating back to the Founding are a bargaining chip. Before that happens, it’s worth looking at the demands themselves.
1. Targeted Enforcement
DHS officers cannot enter private property without a judicial warrant. End indiscriminate arrests and improve warrant procedures and standards. Require verification that a person is not a U.S. citizen before holding them in immigration detention.
The first sentence captures the urgency of this entire discussion. Fear of armed government agents raiding private homes gave us the Fourth Amendment. It’s the cornerstone of the Castle Doctrine, the centuries-old principle that the home is a sanctuary, and therefore the government cannot forcibly enter without a warrant independently reviewed and approved by a judge. Democrats included this demand as a condition for DHS funding because we recently learned that DHS has been operating on a secret memo from the Office of Legal Counsel claiming that immigration officers can enter private homes on nothing more than an “administrative warrant.”
An administrative warrant isn’t a warrant at all. It’s a piece of paper signed by a law enforcement officer (or, in the immigration context, possibly an immigration “judge,” though they aren’t really judges, and this administration has systematically destroyed whatever independence they may have once had.) The Fourth Amendment exists to prevent police from conducting invasive searches based merely on a hunch. An administrative warrant is just a way for an officer to memorialize a hunch on paper. Serious constitutional scholars have roundly condemned the memo.
The British crown’s broad authorization allowing soldiers to break into private homes to look for illegally imported goods is why we have a Fourth Amendment. If you can simply wish away the Fourth Amendment by calling armed intrusions into private homes “administrative,” the Fourth Amendment doesn’t really exist.
This is the Democrats’ first of 10 demands and not only is it already the law, it’s literally one of the bedrock principles upon which the U.S. was founded. These are rights that Republicans have traditionally championed, albeit inconsistently. And yet Republicans have singled out this demand as the biggest nonstarter of all, falsely claiming that Democrats are demanding judicial warrants before any immigration arrest. That’s a mischaracterization. This isn’t about arrests in public spaces. It’s about forcibly entering private homes and businesses.
2. No Masks
Prohibit ICE and immigration enforcement agents from wearing masks and other face coverings.
“We’ve had police here for two centuries,” said George Pappas, an immigration judge whom Trump’s Justice Department fired in July. “They didn’t need masks. You use masks when you’re looking to carry out an illegal, extrajudicial operation. This is straight from the fascist playbook.”
That’s from my dive into Trump’s anti-immigration operation in The New Republic last month. I documented how the reports of masked agents caused alarm among law enforcement and legal circles.
DHS officials say masking is necessary to prevent activists from “doxing” immigration officers and cite a surge in assaults on those officers. In June, they put the increase in assaults at 413%; by July, it was over 700%; and by October, it was over 1,000%. Last I saw, it was up to 1,300%. More ridiculous still, DHS has also claimed that “threats” against ICE officers have increased ... by 8,000%!
These numbers are false. The 2024 baseline, according to Fox News, is 10 assaults on ICE officers in the first half of that year. There were 79 in 2025—during a period when the number of federal agents participating in deportations swelled from 6,000 to over 30,000. The assault rate on federal immigration officials (0.23 per 100) is exponentially lower than the assault rate on police officers generally (13.5). The Cato Institute has released data showing that 2025 was the second safest year in the history of the agency.
The chance of an ICE officer or Border Patrol agent being murdered in the line of duty is about one in 94,549 per year, about 5.5 times less likely than a civilian being murdered. Less than 10% of all Border Patrol agents and ICE officers who died in the line of duty were murdered. What’s more, “[t]he last time there was even a non-COVID death on duty was 2016, when an officer had a heart attack during a foot pursuit,” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council. “Before that, a training accident in 2003, then a fall down an elevator shaft at a jail in 1975.”
In other words, the landscapers and groundskeepers targeted by ICE are far more likely to face injury and death on the job than the ICE officers wrestling them to the ground. And yet day after day, ICE officers and CBP agents charge into American cities dressed as if they’re going into Fallujah or elite special forces storming a Taliban stronghold. In fact, given that retail workers across America faced 94 workplace homicides in 2023, it would be more fitting for clerks at Home Depot to wear tactical gear as opposed to CBP agents and ICE officers scouring its parking lot to roust day-laborers.
3. Require IDs on Agents
Require DHS officers conducting immigration enforcement to display their agency, unique ID number and last name. Require them to verbalize their ID number and last name if asked.
You can’t hold abusive cops accountable if you can’t identify them. Without a name or badge number, you can’t file a complaint. Prosecutors can’t charge them—and you can’t sue them.
The shooting of Marimar Martinez illustrates just how far this administration has gone. Federal agents in Chicago boxed Martinez in with their cars, confronted her, shot her numerous times, and arrested and charged her with assaulting a federal officer, claiming she intentionally rammed their vehicle and pulled a weapon to kill them. DHS called her a “domestic terrorist.”
Border Patrol agent Charles Exum, who shot Martinez five times, boasted in a text to his pals that his five bullets managed to tear seven holes in her body. Fellow agents responded by calling Exum a “legend.” Some offered to buy him beers. Greg Bovino emailed Exum to praise him.
They were lying about all of it. As with Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Trump’s thugs shot an innocent person, then slandered the victim while celebrating their violence. The charges against Martinez were eventually dropped with prejudice. When Martinez’s lawyers asked a federal court to release Exum’s texts, emails, and body camera footage, the DOJ argued—after telling the world that Martinez had tried to murder federal law enforcement—that releasing that information would “sully” Exum’s reputation. The judge rejected that argument and ordered the footage released. It showed that Exum rammed into Martinez, not the other way around. It showed that the agents then immediately drew their weapons, with one threatening, “It’s time to get aggressive.” They shot Martinez within seconds. Her gun, which she owned and carried legally, never left her purse.
This administration believes that officers entrusted with the power to detain, arrest, and kill should have complete anonymity, even as they demand private citizens carry identification and proof of citizenship with them at all times. In its view, not only do armed agents of the state have a more compelling right to privacy and anonymity while on the job than private citizens and residents, those agents are also free to target anyone who threatens their “privacy.” It is hard to think of a clearer description of authoritarianism.
4. Protect Sensitive Locations from Enforcement Action
Prohibit funds from being used to conduct enforcement near sensitive locations, including medical facilities, schools, childcare facilities, churches, polling places, courts, etc.
If you want immigrants to show up for their hearings, you don’t make courthouses a place they fear. You don’t want to make immigrants afraid to seek medical care, for themselves or their children. This administration has abandoned these norms.
The result: Fewer immigrants show up for court—including as witnesses in criminal cases. Fewer immigrants are reporting domestic violence or cooperating with investigations. Immigrants are foregoing medical appointments and medical care, and they’re afraid to take even desperately sick children to the hospital. They’re keeping kids home from school. Immigrants are also no longer attending religious services.
5. Stop Racial Profiling
Prohibit DHS officers from conducting stops, questioning and searches based on an individual’s presence at certain locations, their job, their spoken language and accent, or their race or ethnicity.
This, also, is already the law—although ICE seems to think it is not based on a single ambiguous and misguided Supreme Court shadow docket decision that overturned a lower court barring racial profiling without any explanation. Yet migration officers behave as if they can now stop and question people based on a combination of the factors above, even though none of those factors is a crime. People are stopped and questioned solely because of how they look. Residents of Minneapolis and other cities say federal agents have demanded to know specifically where their “Hmong,” “Somali,” and “Asian” neighbors live.
6. Uphold Use-of-Force Standards
Place into law a reasonable use-of-force policy, expand training and require certification of officers. In the case of an incident, the officer must be removed from the field until an investigation is concluded.
This administration doesn’t even pay lip service to the idea of proper training or unbiased investigations of misconduct. When the president explicitly says he’s sending federal forces into a city for “reckoning and retribution,” when the people targeted are accused of “poisoning the blood of the country,” when protesters and monitors are smeared as domestic terrorists paid to assault officers with their cars, and when new recruits are summoned with explicitly white nationalist ads, the message is not that “we’re protecting and serving,” it’s “we’re targeting and terrorizing.”
After nearly every allegation of excessive force, the White House, DOJ, and DHS immediately vindicated their agents in statements that celebrated their violence and denigrated the people who were abused or killed.
Proper training, restraint in the use of force, and proper certification all conflict with Trump’s stated goals of “unleashing” or “taking the handcuffs off” of immigration officers to wreak havoc and terrorize. If you have proper measures in place, that means you have to punish officers when they violate their training and agency policy. And Trump has made clear that he has no intention of punishing federal law enforcement officers for much of anything—save for failing to remove their shoes before entering his home.
7. Ensure State and Local Consent, Oversight and Investigation
Preserve the ability of state and local jurisdictions to investigate and prosecute potential crimes and use-of-excessive-force incidents. Require that evidence is preserved and shared with jurisdictions. Require the consent of states and localities to conduct large-scale operations outside of targeted immigration enforcement.
There have always been rifts when it comes to how state law applies to federal law enforcement. But what’s happening now is different.
Trump is openly refusing to distribute federal funding to states that didn’t vote for him. He has made clear that part of his motivation for surging federal forces into these cities is retributive and political. The DOJ isn’t cooperating with local police and investigators in the Good and Pretti shootings because it doesn’t believe the people of Minneapolis have any right to hold accountable the agents who murdered two of their neighbors. After Good was killed, the acting U.S. attorney for the city—a career prosecutor, not a political one—vowed to cooperate with local officials. So did the FBI field director. They were both overruled when Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen—who has no prosecutorial experience—returned from a trip, heard about the cooperation plan, and intervened to stop it.
8. Demand Compliance with Basic Detention Standards and Oversight of Facilities
Make clear that all buildings where people are detained must abide by the same basic detention standards that require immediate access to a person’s attorney to prevent citizen arrests or detention. Allow states to sue the DHS for violations of all requirements. Prohibit limitations on member visits to ICE facilities regardless of how those facilities are funded.
Incarceration facilities are required by law to be humane and hygienic. DHS has gotten around these requirements in a couple ways. First, immigration facilities are only supposed to house people for hours at a time. So they aren’t subject to the same requirements about conditions that jails or prisons are. But DHS is holding people at these facilities for days, weeks, and sometimes months. We now have a growing pile of reports from attorneys, journalists, human rights groups, judges, and others about shocking, inhumane conditions at facilities around the country.
Second, the Trump administration has gutted the internal offices at DHS that are supposed to maintain standards and investigate complaints. As one former high-ranking DHS official told me, the plan is to deny people access to lawyers and squeeze detainees until they’re so miserable they give up their rights.
DHS has also straight-up denied members of Congress access to detention facilities, a clear violation of federal law. They’ve continued to do so even after ordered by federal courts to let them in.
9. Require Body Cameras for Accountability and Prohibit Tracking of Protesters
Require use of body-worn cameras when interacting with the public and mandate requirements for the storage and access of footage. Prohibit tracking, creating or maintaining databases of individuals participating in First Amendment activities.
Outfitting all immigration officers with body cameras has emerged as one of the few areas of bipartisan agreement. If you’re surprised to hear that Republicans support body cameras, the second part of this demand offers a clue. ICE is reportedly using facial recognition tech to build a database of immigration protesters and ICE watchers and match them to images scraped form the internet. Body cameras may help populate that database with a lot of faces.
All else being equal, body cameras are good idea. But they’re only as effective as the policies used to implement them. If a police agency can release exculpatory footage while withholding incriminating footage, that’s the opposite of transparency. It’s worse than not having body cameras at all.
10. No Paramilitary Police
Regulate and standardize the type of uniforms and equipment DHS officers employ during enforcement operations to bring them in line with civil enforcement.
Police uniforms and gear have grown increasingly militaristic at all levels of law enforcement for a long time now. What we’re seeing with Trump’s motley crew of deportation cops isn’t really militarization so much as de-professionalization. Federal officers should have easily identifiable uniforms with names and badge numbers. They should not be masked. If you see them approaching, it should be clear whether you’re about to be arrested—or mugged.
Current federal policy already requires an agent to “identify himself or herself as an immigration officer who is authorized to execute an arrest” at the time of the arrest “as soon as it is practical and safe to do so.” The Trump administration has simply chosen to ignore that policy.
These Aren’t ‘Reforms’—These Are Existing Laws
My problem with this list is that Trump’s immigration forces are already violating the policies, norms, laws, and the Constitution. They’re doing it every day. They’re ignoring court orders. They’re racially profiling. They’re denying detainees access to their attorneys, and shuffling them around the country to prevent them from challenging their detention. They’re surveilling, threatening, beating, and arresting people for recording them, protesting them, and other First Amendment-protected activity. They’re beating, arresting, and detaining people who are merely going about their daily business, like trying to take their kid to the hospital. They appear to be erasing or “losing” surveillance video when they’re compelled by a court to produce it. And when officers do clearly commit crimes—beatings, illegal arrests, lying on police reports—the administration has made no effort to hold them accountable.
Will issuing a set of laws, policies, and regulations—most of which are already in place—help with an administration that has already shown it is perfectly willing to ignore them?
Sure, there is some value in Democrats making these demands. Public support for Trump’s immigration policy has dropped through the floor. Getting Republicans on record defending reckless, lawless police tactics makes sense. But we need to be clear that these are not reforms—and they certainly aren’t the “dramatic changes” that Democrats and media outlets have characterized them to be. All but a couple are nothing more than insisting that the Trump administration stop violating existing law. That isn’t something we should have to demand of the government in the first place.
To stop this assault on the rule of law and our fellow citizens and neighbors, we need to stop playing defense. We need to make clear that there will be consequences for lawlessness. Then we can move on to actual reforms.
An earlier version of this article was first published in the author’s newsletter, The Watch.
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.
 | A guest post by
|
This sort of thing illustrates why it's become impossible to actually discuss issues with supporters of these actions. They just recite "but immigrants break the law" as a mantra. If they had an interest in law, they'd care whether the enforcers are following the law, but they show no interest in that question. It's just a word they like to use to justify violence against those they hate.
Arresting and imprisioning US citizens? Shooting citizens with impunity?
All arrests of citizens were for interference with a law enforcement operation or refusing to ID themselves during a LE operation. Both established law.
Killing with impunity? Good assaulted a LE officer with a deadly weapon.
Anyways, it was interesting to see your anti- justice system rant.