ICE Has Taken Over Democratic Primaries

Democrats started the year bracing for dozens of tumultuous primaries they expected would focus on healthcare, cost-of-living issues and resistance to President Donald Trump.

Then violence erupted in Minnesota.

Federal immigration officers’ killing of two people in the city has irrevocably changed the Democratic Party’s primaries this year, according to interviews with party strategists, candidates and activist leaders. Primaries across the country are now infused with a contentious debate about support for the government agencies responsible for deportation that has become a top issue for many voters.

With the year’s first primaries less than a month away, party strategists said they’ve had to recalibrate some candidates’ entire political strategy, devising not just a new position about Immigration and Customs Enforcement but a broader message that excites a Democratic base hungrier than ever for leaders who promise to fight the Trump administration.

“Everything changed,” said Daniel Biss, the mayor of Evanston and a Democratic candidate in Illinois’ 9th Congressional District primary on March 17. “And, of course, therefore the campaign changed. And the people of this community want to see someone who gets it, who understands the emergency that we’re in, that we need new tactics and new approaches and that we cannot have a business-as-usual approach to dealing with a crisis like this.”

Biss, who said he has supported abolishing ICE since the first Trump administration, said voters in his district changed after Trump’s immigration enforcement action in the Chicago-area late last year, which he described as a de facto occupation by a hostile armed force. But the wide distribution of videos showing the killing of Minnesota residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January affected primaries almost everywhere.

In Maine, for instance, Gov. Janet Mills’ first TV ad in her primary against oyster farmer Graham Platner focused on ICE. In a special primary for a House seat in New Jersey this month, the front-running candidate lost after an ad blitz from an outside group emphasized the former congressman’s past support for funding ICE.

At a forum for the Michigan Senate Democratic primary last week, Abdul El-Sayed went out of his way to talk about the danger posed by ICE during an event ostensibly focused on labor issues. In Illinois, votes taken to fund ICE during George W. Bush’s presidency have become an issue in at least one House race. A super PAC supporting James Talarico’s Senate bid in Texas, meanwhile, released an ad this week touting his support for the impeachment of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and the prosecution of ICE agents found to engage in wrongdoing.

And back in Minnesota, the liberal grassroots activist group Indivisible endorsed Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan in her Senate primary against Rep. Angie Craig, citing the congresswoman’s past support for funding ICE.

Party strategists expect the issue to be explicitly mentioned even more in the coming weeks and months, as more primaries approach.

“This event has broken through in a way that is so hard to do anymore,” said Tim Persico, former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Particularly after the Pretti shooting, holy smokes, everybody was talking about it. Regardless of the sector of sports and entertainment spectrum they were on, everyone is talking about this and speaking about it in largely the same way. That’s pretty rare.”

“You’ve definitely seen it become more salient,” he continued. “You’ve definitely seen it show up in ads more. You have seen it show up in attack ads as well.”

The increase in attention is the latest turn in the Democratic Party’s long-running debate over immigration enforcement. The debate is again pushing the party to take a more confrontational stand against Trump after a year in which some of the party’s more centrist factions argued it needed to moderate on the issue to win back independent voters.

It’s also giving some progressive activists reason to think the party’s rank-and-file voters are more eager than ever to support candidates who embrace a broader vision of resistance to Trump, with many Democratic voters convinced the White House is pushing an unprecedentedly lawless agenda on issues beyond immigration. These voters’ opposition to Trump is “deeper than ICE,” said Ezra Levin, cofounder of Indivisible.

“People in the Democratic Party are not suddenly, after Alex Pretti or Renee Good’s murder, just focused on ICE,” Levin said. “The intensity of which they want the Democratic Party to fight back has increased.”

In deep blue House seats, that push could ultimately affect who represents Democrats in the next Congress. And in swing districts, it could nudge the party to nominate more liberal candidates, with positions less amenable to moderate voters. Republicans are counting on a series of contentious, messy Democratic primaries in the House and Senate to help keep their majorities in both chambers.

Democrats need to gain four seats in the Senate for a majority. In the House, they trail Republicans by a slim margin in a map still being shaped by ongoing redistricting processes in some states.

Some Democratic strategists said the party’s unified outrage at the Trump administration’s actions in Minnesota makes it easier for candidates of all kinds to respond because the aggressive deportation campaign is so unpopular among even middle-of-the-road voters that there’s no political risk to speaking out about it.

“Democrats across the board think this is not how we should be running our government,” said Margie Omero, a Democratic pollster. “This is a Trump administration who has run amok and is putting people’s lives at risk.

“Democrats all agree on that,” she continued. “I don’t see a lot of differentiation on that.”

An overwhelming majority of Democratic voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration, and discontent is growing among independents. The president’s immigration approval rating declined by 23 points among independents since June, according to a poll from the Democratic firm Navigator Research.

In some blue and swing districts, candidates are not diverging widely from their challengers on immigration policy.

In a North Carolina Democratic primary that’s pitting a younger, more outspoken populist against an older progressive incumbent in a solidly Democratic district home to many immigrants, both candidates are pushing to end ICE in its current form and said they constantly hear about ICE from voters.

“It absolutely is something that we’re hearing about every single day, every single event,” said Max Oget, a spokesperson for Rep. Valerie Foushee, the incumbent running for the seat.

Nida Allam, a Durham County commissioner, said she is the only candidate in the race calling for ICE to be abolished. Foushee’s office points to legislation she cosponsored that would “defund and dismantle” ICE.

“Her votes and legislation cosponsored align similarly to some of those views, but she has not said the words ‘abolish ICE’ publicly,” Oget said. “She says ‘dismantle ICE,’ and the opponent says ‘abolish ICE.’ But the congresswoman’s actually signed on to a legislative framework that would dismantle ICE.”

Regardless of rhetoric, both candidates said the agency needs more than reform. But other camps within the party disagree.

The centrist Democratic think tank Third Way is urging Democratic candidates to not campaign with “abolish ICE,” calling the position confusing and unpopular. It’s a position the group has held for years, dating back to when “abolish ICE” briefly roiled the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.

“There’s no reason that we need to introduce this confusing bumper sticker to this situation right now when we do have unanimity in what we’re calling for in terms of reforms and overhauling what the actions are that these folks are taking against American citizens and against other folks that are in the country,” said Lanae Erickson, the group’s senior vice president for social policy, education and politics.

She compared Democrats’ calls to abolish ICE to pleas in 2020 to defund the police. “It is such a clear parallel where a slogan that sounded pithy gets picked up by a handful of people and then pasted to every Democrat in America, and it turned something that was a real opportunity to address the real injustices and issues into a politically toxic conversation that hurt Democrats electorally,” Erickson said.

In Nebraska’s Second District, where Democrats’ odds of flipping a seat are high, the top candidates have all called for ICE to be reformed but not eliminated. The recent ICE shootings have energized voters, said State Sen. John Cavanaugh who’s running for the seat. “After the horrific videos out of Minneapolis, I began getting more questions at events about how we stop this,” he said.

In an environment where even seemingly important issues can quickly and quietly fade away, activists said, the concern about Trump’s immigration enforcement actions are likely here to stay.

“Even if ICE doesn’t murder another American citizen for the next 10 months, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti’s killings will not simply be forgotten,” said Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for Justice Democrats. “Families have had to bury their loved ones, and every district, every community has their own ICE story, which will continue to be a focus in Democratic primaries.”