ICE Storm
Senate Democrats chose action in the wake of another death in Minneapolis. But how will Congress as a whole respond?
As I write this, multiple Democratic senators, including lead appropriator Patty Murray, have announced that they will not support the DHS funding bill unless additional controls are placed on ICE after the killing of Alex Pretti. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is calling for it to be split off from the other five bills of the minibus passed by the House last week. Doing so will be challenging as a rule tied them together. The House is out of session this week, so if Democrats follow through with the threat, another partial shutdown is at hand.
Before the shooting, congressional Democrats had tried to thread the needle between keeping FY2026 appropriations on track, remaining focused on affordability they saw as a better political issue, and also acknowledging the anger within the base over ICE’s uncontrolled conduct. Along the way, they restored Rep. Henry Cuellar, ICE’s largest champion within the caucus, to his ranking member position on the DHS Appropriations Subcommittee. Democratic leaders then offered perfunctory opposition to the DHS funding bill last week as seven members, including Cuellar, voted for it. As Pablo Manríquez uncovered in bill tables, Senate Democrats’ claims that they cut ICE’s budget in subcommittee masked actual spending increases for the agency for removal operations.
After Pretti’s shocking death, Democratic leadership’s plan has been overcome by events. The modest demands Leader Hakeem Jeffries made of Republicans last week like a body camera mandate sound insufficient. Democrats have yet to push to follow the weak accountability measures already on the books, as ICE hasn’t contributed to the voluntary national use-of-force database since 2024.
It feels crass to offer this analysis with two people now shot to death, but the public blowback on ICE conduct in Minneapolis has just started and is expanding the range of political questions ahead. The last time Democrats decided to trigger a shutdown, they did so for a single policy demand – the extension of health insurance subsidies – and mostly scored political damage. This time, what to do with ICE is an open question in the caucus, the spectrum stretching from abolition to Obama-era-style policing reform. And they need to change something about how ICE is conducting itself.
But what do Democratic lawmakers now mean by additional “guardrails” and accountability measures? Do they functionally shut down ICE instead by taking away some of its core authorities and operational capacities in pursuing mass arrests? Defund arrest, detention, and surveillance activities? Prevent funding transfers adequately within the DHS budget to make it stick? Limit ICE jurisdiction closer to physical borders?
ICE as currently configured is a tool of specific administration leaders attempting to use its policing power to reconfigure the country’s demographic composition. With that in mind, Democrats could push even further and attempt to break off FSGG to block funds to the Executive Office of the President until ICE is satisfactorily limited. They could demand officials like Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem resign.
Democrats potentially are giving up some leverage by asking to detach DHS funding. They relinquish more in separating ICE from the rest of DHS. Even if they make a deal in the Senate, does Speaker Mike Johnson just repeat his dissolution of the House like last shutdown to protect the administration?
Enough core issues are at stake here for Democrats to hold space for Republicans to join these conversations about how to deconstruct what ICE has become. The administration’s attempts to justify Pretti’s shooting because he might have been armed runs headlong into the party’s position on the 2nd Amendment. Federal officials are actively blocking state and city investigations and lying about what is evident from on grisly videos. Administration leaders and some in Congress are justifying the violence as the unfortunate outcome of Americans not accepting the deportation of at least 10 million people. Are all congressional Republicans on board with that project?
If Democratic leadership hoped to address ICE in the next Congress, the agency has accelerated the need for a plan dramatically through its responses to arbitrary arrest quotas and nonviolent civilian resistance. There is a rough parallel here with the firehoses of Birmingham in 1963 creating a greater sense of urgency among lawmakers to draft civil rights legislation. The astonishing scale of violence and civil rights abuses against peaceful protestors in Minnesota should inspire all of Congress to objectively consider the threat ICE poses to Americans’ freedoms and determine the most effective solution in mitigating the threat. This process is starting already as on Saturday, House Homeland Security Committee Chair Andrew Garabino has requested testimony from the heads of ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for an upcoming oversight hearing. It’s a hopeful sign that more Republicans may try to crawl out of this political shadow and start to separate themselves from the administration. They’ll need some space to do so.
UNLOCKING GPO’S HISTORICAL ROLE
Daniel wrote this reflection on the deeper history of how the public has learned what Congress is doing after the latest oversight hearing for the Government Publishing Office.
Thursday, I attended the House Administration Committee’s oversight hearing of the Government Publishing Office. Compared to last week’s markup of legislation to congressional stock trading, which featured a partisan clash over who was most serious about corruption, this hearing was collegial and very much a traditional oversight hearing. If last week’s markup was the congressional version of professional wrestling, this week was synchronized swimming.
The sole witness was GPO Director Hugh Halpern. In years past, his title would be that of public printer. That title, along with the agency’s name, was changed to emphasize that the agency’s focus was on publishing government information, not merely printing it. Halpern’s testimony made that point: most of GPO’s work is document conversion: transforming paper documents (or less structured digital documents) into easily accessible electronic files, often in structured data formats, for digital and print distribution. Our friends at the House Clerk’s Office routinely remind us that it is the paper copy of any passed legislation or resolution that is the official version.
GPO serves all three branches of government, with about 1,600 employees and about $1.3 billion in revenue. About 90% of its costs are covered through charging other federal agencies for its work. Accordingly, its need for appropriate funds is small, although most of its work for Congress is drawn from appropriations.
This all sounds straightforward, right? GPO is responsible for printing your blank passports, for printing the Congressional Record, and for making millions (billions?) of digital documents available on GovInfo.gov. Moreover, Halpern is a competent manager and a well-liked old hand on Capitol Hill.
It’s not surprising that there was no press in the room to cover the hearing. Truth be told, I was the only non-congressional person in the room. That’s too bad, because the history of public printing and the press is closely caught up in one another. It’s true that the press rarely attends oversight hearings of the legislative branch offices, with the general exception of Roll Call and Politico, but there’s a spicy history to be told.
GPO wasn’t created until 1860. Prior to that, the House and Senate had their own public printers, which were elected by each chamber. They were political spoils jobs, and the public printer for each chamber owned a printing press. They would publish public notices and government information in their newspapers and in other publications and take a hefty fee for their work. For some publications they would earn 20% over cost, 30%, sometimes more.
In those days, newspapers were highly partisan. Getting a job as the public printer was in effect a subsidy to the newspaper, many of which could not survive by subscriptions and advertising alone. There was a system where the cost of sending newspapers by mail was subsidized by the federal government and newspapers could be sent to other publishers at no cost.
And the first journalists? They were called correspondents, because they wrote letters to their newspapers, i.e. correspondence. Many of them also worked as clerks for various committees and some of them worked as lobbyists. It was not unknown for them to engage in economic speculation (i.e. buying and selling securities) based on information gained through their jobs. One of the major instigation points for the formation of the official congressional press corps was a prohibition on the journalists from also working as lobbyists.
Journalism in the mid-19th century was very different from today. Reporting on Congress would often lead to fights in Congress, including physical ones. The early Congress didn’t have a system of stenographers, so the reports of the journalists who sat in the chamber, who published selected summaries of what was discussed, was both highly popular and highly combustible, especially around issues of slavery. They weren’t always great note takers, so members would often go to their offices and give them copies of their speeches, which were fixed up to make the members sound more erudite and learned.
The chambers were also a lot more secretive in that era, at least officially. Members would routinely leak “secret” bills and reports to journalists, who would publish them. The first person held in contempt of Congress was a journalist – although he simply left the chamber and didn’t come back. Another journalist, threatened with a contempt citation, threatened to reveal how many members were sources. That was the end of that.
This old spoils system routinely fleeced taxpayers. It eventually became untenable, especially with the routine hiring and firing of each chamber’s public printer, and this helped lead to GPO’s creation. This wasn’t the only reason, but I’m not trying to write a book.
If the 19th century history that led to the GPO’s creation has a bit of spice, there were some spicy elements to this week’s hearing. For example, the number of passports GPO is creating is going up. What is driving that demand? It wasn’t discussed at the hearing, but I would bet that one thing that will continue to drive up demand is people’s interest in having passports in an effort to prove U.S. citizenship when ICE comes calling. If you don’t have a license-sized passport, you should consider it. Here’s how you get a passport card. Yes, we’ve become the kind of country where a government official can demand your papers.
Director Halpern was also asked about legislation to change his appointment to being made by Congress instead of by this president. This change, and other similar legislative changes, are long overdue. They are rooted in part because of executive branch assertions that GPO is part of the executive branch, a line of argument that started in the mid-80s to undermine congressional control over GPO. This testimony from the public printer in 1997 tells the story of what the executive branch is trying to do and why it is undesirable.
THE PRESIDENT’S SPEAKER
Speaker Mike Johnson has endorsed the impeachment of two federal judges not for misconduct but for ruling against the administration, noting that “extreme times call for extreme measures.” Republicans are aiming to impeach U.S. District Court judge for DC James Boasberg for issuing a nondisclosure order that kept Justice Department subpoenas of members of Congress’ phone records secret for a year and Maryland District Court judge Deborah Boardman for ruling against deporting migrants to El Salvador under the Enemy Aliens Act.
For context, Congress has impeached federal judges only 15 times in the nation’s history, with eight Senate convictions. The one not involving personal misconduct or corruption was in 1862, when the Senate removed a judge in Tennessee who had joined the Confederacy.
Johnson backtracked, however, on sustaining a rule that would prevent members from debating measures cancelling national emergency declarations that the Trump Administration has used in setting tariffs. The rule expires on Jan. 31 and several non-MAGA members successfully rebelled against its extension.
READINGS
Soren Dayton and James Wallner have released their report for the Foundation for American Innovation on the productive roles that ideological factions have and can play in House and Senate deliberations. They assert that “Congress’s dysfunction is not primarily a failure of expertise or goodwill, but a failure of internal organization,” noting that factions are one of the few effective tools available to address that failure immediately. The paper offers guidance to members and staff and donors looking to boost congressional function. It’s very much our music.
For Lawfare, Emory University Law Professor Matthew Lawrence urges Congress to maintain institutional independence during the selection process of the next comptroller general either by passing legislation bringing the nomination process fully inside the legislative branch or by rejecting any nominee who would undermine GAO.
ODDS & ENDS
Stonks. On the heels of the recent CHA markup of the GOP stock trading bill, several Democrats including Leader Jeffries have signed a discharge petition for Rep. Seth Magaziner’s leadership-endorsed bill banning stock trades by Congress and the president and vice president.
The Senate is the enemy. That DHS bill contains a spicy interchamber nugget: a repeal of the ability for senators to sue the Department of Justice for significant monetary damages over surveillance actions during Arctic Frost.
Press freedom. A federal judge blocked the FBI from searching computers and devices seized from a Washington Post reporter during the investigation of a leak of classified documents.
Putting out fire with gasoline. Congressional Democrats think if the winner of the 2028 presidential election is one of their own, they should use many of the same executive powers the Trump Administration has employed, too. This is a very bad idea.
USCP report. The inspector general’s office for the U.S. Capitol Police has released a report on the top management challenges facing the department in FY2025. The top two related to campus and member security. The others noted include stronger internal control systems for monitoring managers’ performance and compliance, effective officer training, and recruitment and retention.
Golden. “Due to insufficient budgetary information,” the House and Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittees were “unable to effectively assess resources available to specific program elements and to conduct oversight of planned programs and projects for the fiscal year” in regards to the “golden dome” missile defense program.
Calendaring
The Association of Public Data Users and dataindex.us will mark the one-year anniversary of the takedown of thousands of federal datasets and websites with a discussion of the current state of data availability and insights from civil society monitoring efforts. The event is from 2:00 to 3:00 ET January 29 at this zoom link.
House Oversight will depose Ghislaine Maxwell on February 9.
Oral arguments in the members’ back-pay case (Davis v United States) will be held on February 20 at 10:00 AM at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.