If you’re stressed out at work this week, console yourself that you’re handling it a bit better than Justice Department attorney Julie Le, who told a Minnesota federal judge yesterday she’s been so overwhelmed by the immigration-related habeas corpus motions assigned to her that she’d like to be held in contempt just so she could get some sleep. “The system sucks,” she said, according to local news. “This job sucks.” That’s something we can all agree on. Happy Wednesday.

Time to Play Hardball

by Andrew Egger

All last year, conventional wisdom among the Democratic base was that the party’s political leaders are feckless cardboard cutouts unable to mount an effective opposition to Donald Trump’s authoritarian advance.

But as congressional Democrats navigate a spending fight over the Department of Homeland Security this week, the end result is shaping up to be just the opposite—even if the naysaying has persisted. The fight is going about as well as anyone could have hoped.

Yesterday, the House passed a spending bill reopening the government after a few days of partial shutdown. The bill funds the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, State, and Treasury until this fall. The Department of Homeland Security, however, is funded only for an additional two weeks under the package.

To some progressives, even this is an intolerable concession. Speaking ahead of the vote, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) summed up the line of thought: “Not only should ICE receive NO funding, it should be abolished.”

Should ICE be abolished? That’s a policy fight Democrats will get to have among themselves if they’re lucky enough to win unified control of government in the next few years. But the idea that it is an achievable policy aim in the immediate term is a fantasy. Shutting down the government for enormous periods of time might be good for raising public awareness of a given issue, but it doesn’t magically create consensus for your view. Democrats’ shutdown play last year couldn’t even squeeze Republicans into reinstating a status-quo Obamacare subsidy; the idea that they’d have better luck vaporizing ICE is ridiculous. The cherry on top is that even shutting down the government indefinitely wouldn’t starve ICE of funds, given the gobs of cash already appropriated for the agency by last year’s Big Beautiful Bill.

But Democrats do have an advantage they never had with the subsidy fight: widespread squeamishness among elected Republicans about the way DHS is conducting its business. Republican leaders had hoped to whisk DHS funding quickly and unobtrusively into law by pairing it with a host of other 2026 appropriations bills. But thanks to a number of defections within their own party, they were forced to strip DHS out of the package. Democrats, in the end, got about the closest thing to an ideal set up: the appropriations bills they did end up passing include policies that seemed utterly unachievable during the heydays of DOGE. There’s increased funding for NIH, global HIV programs, federal K-12 school programs, and more. There’s also specific funding levels outlined in these bills, which are meant to protect against future administration efforts to claw back the money through executive actions or rescissions.

On top of all that, Democrats will now get the fight they should want: a hardball negotiation over DHS funding alone.

The asks that House and Senate Democrats are making for this fight are not insignificant. Chuck Schumer laid them out last week: They want to see an end to ICE’s most openly lawless enforcement practices, including invading homes without judicial warrants and conducting aimless roving enforcement sweeps. They want a “uniform code of conduct and accountability” enforced by independent investigators. And they want to ban masks and compel body cameras on immigration officers.

If it were up to me, I’d add one more demand: Any DHS deal should allocate a pile of money for new immigration judges. One of the more quietly ridiculous components of this administration’s immigration agenda has been its deliberate refusal to address the immigration-court backlog, the actual source of so many of our preexisting immigration-enforcement problems. Instead of fixing the problem, Republicans have tried to use our shortage of immigration judges as an excuse to cut judges out of the process entirely: “Imagine if we had to go through the process of getting a judicial warrant—an additional warrant—to go and apprehend people who we know are here illegally,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said yesterday. “How much time would that take? We don’t have enough judges. We don’t have enough time.” Well, here, Democrats should say: Let us help you out in this department.

This is not like the last shutdown fight. Democrats aren’t just trying to raise public awareness of this issue, or cultivate some goodwill among their base by demonstrating their willingness to fight, or move the Overton window closer to their ideal ICE legislation for some indeterminate point in the future. ICE is terrorizing America’s streets right now. Democrats have the ability and the leverage to play hardball for some of these reforms right now. A win is right there for the taking—if they don’t decide to call it a loss.

In Springfield, Relief Arrives—but Fear Remains