Top Democrats Show Demands for Stealth Amnesty on ICE Operations via DHS Budget Battle

Top Democrats issued more than 4o demands for amnesty-like curbs on ICE operations late on Wednesday, amid negotiations over the 2026 budget for the Department of Homeland Security.

The demands add up to a very unpopular stealth amnesty for tens of millions of illegal migrants because they would entangle ICE officers in bureaucratic handcuffs, Sanctuary City vetoes, deep-pocketed lawsuits, and personal threats to their families.

For example, Democrats want ICE officers to reveal their faces and wear identification tags, even though the Democrats’ street activities have already begun harassing the wives and children of ICE officers.

Democrats want to bar ICE arrests without a judge’s warrant, even where judges are nominated by pro-amnesty Democrats, and even when migrants are fugitives hiding from judges’ orders that they be deported.

Democrats say ICE should not be allowed to arrest migrants in a wide variety of “Sensitive Locations,” so creating many expandable mini-sanctuaries in every town and city.

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Democrats want to block ICE from using ordinary policing skills when identifying illegal migrants by barring officers from considering suspects’ locations, work, foreign language, their accents, or “race and ethnicity.” The policing rule would also ensure that each arrest would be tangled in endless legal claims that officers somehow violated the vague rules when they identified suspects.

Democrats want state and local Democrats to get oversight and veto power over the federal government’s “large-scale operations.” The demand does not define a “large-scale operation.”

The document also calls on Trump to fire DHS chief Kristi Noem.

The demands were released by the top two Democrats in Congress, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY). “These are common-sense solutions that protect constitutional rights and ensure responsible law enforcement,” the two politicians said in their letter.

Negotiations

If the Democrats win, they would anchor President Joe Biden’s 10 million illegal migrants into American society. That would defeat President Donald Trump’s 2024 mandate, show the political value of street violence, and lock American citizens into a downward path of mass poverty, chaotic diversity, expensive housing, migrant crime, ethnic politics, sanctuary city corruption, and elite rule.

Trump is not opposed to migration sought by business, and is now zig-zagging between their political alternatives of mass deportations and mass amnesty.

But he cannot break faith with his 2024 supporters because that would ensure a Democratic victory in 2028 — and ensure many subsequent revenge lawsuits from the Democrats afterwards. On Wednesday, he told NBC News:

[Joe Biden] allowed in our country, I say, 25 million people with an open-border policy for four years under Biden … And we’re getting them out.

“Maybe we could use a little bit of a softer touch — but you still have to be tough,” he said.

Trump’s closure of the border and his deportation of many blue-collar migrants deliver on his election promises — and are also helping reduce the affordability problems created by Biden’s mass-migration policy.

RELATED: Unbelievable — Tim Walz Invokes Anne Frank in Rant Against ICE

The Democrats’ 43 demands are bundled into ten bullet points, giving the Democrats some room to make trivial concessions.

But the Democrats know they have some allies among the business-first faction of the GOP. Several traditional GOP legislators are eager to block ICE from deporting workforce migrants,  even though these migrants lower wages, drive up housing costs, and reduce corporate incentives to invest in Americans’ productivity.

In late 2024, many of those pro-business GOP legislators loudly claimed they had negotiated a supposed border security bill. In reality, those claims were intended to hide the details of the bill, which locked the nation’s border open to mass, wealth-shifting migration. GOP legislators might try a similar bait and switch in the few weeks, for example, by claiming that Democrats had agreed to end sanctuary cities.

Polls

But the negotiations are also a big political opportunity for the GOP. Polls show that the political goal of shutting down immigration enforcement is very popular in the Democratic Party’s base — but is deeply unpopular nationwide.

Many polls show a solid majority of Americans support Trump’s immigration policies, and also that many swing-voters dislike the televised reality of street deportations amid quasi-riots by left-wing radicals.

For example, 73 percent of registered voters support deporting violent migrants, and 52 percent support deporting all illegal migrants, according to a January 28-29 poll of 2,000 registered voters by Harvard CAPS and the Harris Poll. The 52 percent support includes 49 percent of political independents.

“Republicans are positioned to gain voters – not lose them – by drawing a sharp contrast on immigration,” says a poll of 1,004 likely voters conducted by Cygnal on January 27-28.

The Cygnal poll showed that 61 percent of midterm voters support the deportation of illegal migrants, 54 percent support ICE’s deportation efforts, and that 16 percent of swing voters are more likely to support the GOP if their Democrat candidate tries to stop ICE by shutting down the federal government.

The political battle is expected to last many weeks and will likely persuade many swing-voters that the Democrats do not want to protect Americans from migration floods, or from the pocketbook damage of cheap-labor migration.