Democrats’ ICE demands play into Trump’s hands

President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown has featured numerous abuses by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which have led to a rise in opposition and massive protests. Democrats have retained one powerful piece of leverage: Republicans need Democrats in the Senate to vote for government funding and with another government shutdown looming in mid-February, Democrats have been empowered to make demands that could rein in ICE and other Department of Homeland Security agencies. The catch is that some of Democrats’ demands might just stand to further empower the agency.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., enumerated some of the Democrats’ demands in the Senate earlier this week. They want DHS employees, namely ICE and Customs and Border Protection officers, to unmask and wear clear and visible identification. They’re seeking an end to ICE’s “roving patrols,” use of racial profiling and random arrests. And, they’re seeking to ensure DHS honors the Fourth Amendment and that officers obtain a warrant before forcibly entering someone’s home. Durbin also called for accountability for DHS employees when they smash car windows, deploy chemical weapons and shoot at onlookers and protesters.

There are, however, two demands being made by Democrats that critics say potentially plays into the administration’s hands. These demands may even help President Donald Trump to fully realize his vision for ICE: body cameras and cooperation between ICE and local officials.

Body cameras, once sold to the public as an instrument for ensuring police accountability, have since drawn criticism for failing to live up to expectations.

Michael White, a criminology professor at Arizona State University and author of “Cops, Cameras and Crisis,” alongside co-author Aili Malm, told Salon in an interview that body cameras are only a tool in ensuring accountability, and cameras alone have largely not resulted in a reduction in use of force by law enforcement.

White maintains a database of studies related to body cameras for his academic work. Of the 44 studies on the impact of body cameras on use of force incidents, he explained, just 24 showed any reduction in use of force, with the magnitude of this decrease varying significantly between studies.

What this shows, according to White, is that it’s not the body cameras by themselves that change the behavior of officers — it’s the policy of the institution that they’re working for.

“For me, the bottom line is really all about accountability. It’s easy for an agency to either get a grant and buy cameras and have officers start wearing them,” White said. “The heavy lift is developing a policy, making sure officers are trained, and making sure officers are going to be held accountable. Body-worn cameras won’t change behavior if officers believe that they won’t be held to account for what’s captured on the camera.”

White said that, in his opinion, he doesn’t have confidence that DHS or the Trump administration would enforce the rules around accountability required to make something like body cameras effective. For example, body camera footage is considered evidence and would require the agency to maintain a chain of custody and to provide it in court in cases involving officers.

Last year, the federal government demonstrated a willingness to mislead the public in shootings by DHS employees in a case involving the shooting of Marimar Martinez, a Chicago resident shot by a Border Patrol officer last year.

The administration initially claimed that Martinez had rammed the Border Patrol officer’s car, later admitting in court that this hadn’t happened. The government, however, appeared to fail to maintain evidence in the case by allowing the officer in question to drive the car more than 1,000 miles away to Maine, to potentially have the car repaired with the administration’s approval, though the government has refused to address that detail.

Cases like this, alongside the government’s repeated attacks against victims of DHS officer violence, cast doubt on the federal government’s willingness to hold any officers accountable for their violent misconduct.

For example, in the case of the killing of Renee Nicole Good, who was shot and killed by ICE officer Jonathan Ross in January, the administration refused to investigate the killer, but instead elected to investigate the victim, looking into Good for potential ties to activist groups the administration disapproves of, while maintaining that Good was a “domestic terrorist.” Martinez, another victim of a violence by a DHS employee, was also smeared as a “domestic terrorist” by the administration.

The body cameras could also stand to enhance DHS’s ability to build out its facial recognition database, which the administration maintains can accurately identify an individual and their immigration status. Officers are often witnessed taking scans of people they stop, including U.S. citizens. These scans are then used to target individuals later. In once DHS appears to have revoked the Global Entry and PreCheck of Nicole Cleland, a Minnesota resident, after DHS employees scanned her face as she was observing ICE operations.

ICE and CBP officers have also already started wearing body cameras in Minneapolis, with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem saying in a post that “As funding is available, the body camera program will be expanded nationwide.” Former President Joe Biden had already ordered all federal law enforcement officers to wear body cameras as of 2022, an order that the Trump administration rolled back.

Beyond the issue of body cameras, some Democrats have pushed for greater relationship between local officials and immigration enforcement, something Democrats like Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., have been suggesting as a potential solution, at least since Good’s death.

“When you have these ICE agents all over the streets of our cities without any cooperation with local law enforcement and local communities, tragedies, horrible tragedies, killings occur,” Schumer told reporters in the wake of Good’s death.

The depth and nature of the relationship between immigration enforcement and local law enforcement, however, depends on the specific language of the bill. Federal mandates aiming at having local law enforcement cooperate with ICE, have the potential to brush up against local sanctuary jurisdiction laws. It’s also clear that Democrats and Republicans have different ideas about what a working relationship between local officials and federal immigration officers looks like.

For example, Republicans have repeatedly attacked Minnesota as a sanctuary state, despite the fact that state prisons have complied with every custody transfer request from ICE in a two-year period ending in October 2025, as reported by MinnPost. County jail compliance varied more, though often for practical reasons as jails typically only hold people for a short while.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., has also blamed the law enforcement shooting of Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti on a lack of cooperation. As reported by ProPublica, Pretti was shot Jan. 24 by Border Patrol officer Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez multiple times, after a group of officers had already tackled him to the ground.

“What I believe is that what we’re dealing with right now is the enormous mess created by President Biden and Democrats who opened up our border, allowed millions of people to flood in this country, where ICE is doing enforcement actions, just like they’ve always done — under the Obama administration, the Biden administration — where they’re doing these enforcement actions and local police are cooperating,” Johnson told NPR in late January. “There’s no violence, there’s no problem. We’re just enforcing the law. The problem in Minneapolis is we have a governor and a mayor who are resisting.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has also signaled that, rather than reining in ICE and CBP, he hoped to use the funding bill to undermine sanctuary laws and force cooperation between municipalities and states and federal immigration enforcement.

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Matt Cameron, a Massachusetts-based immigration attorney, told Salon in an interview that the distinction between “coordination” and “cooperation” will be important when it comes to Democrats’ demands. “Cooperation,” he said, typically describes a close working relationship “for actually enforcing detainers, which are things that a lot of state laws, including Minnesota and Massachusetts, don’t allow under state law. In many states now, law enforcement is not allowed to pull people on detainers.”

In this context, detainer refers to an “immigration detainer,” which is a request from ICE that asks the authorities to hold and individual whose been picked up by law enforcement up to 48 hours longer than they normally would, so that immigration officers can pick them up. Programs of this sort, created under the Immigration and Nationality Act, hit their peak in terms of funding under former President Barack Obama, have been well litigated, and courts have found that the federal government cannot force local authorities to participate in such programs.

Meanwhile, Cameron said, “coordination” typically refers more to communications about the operations of federal agencies, which he said local officials and enforcement would might appreciate, especially when it comes to circumstances like notifying police of an operation or when officers have left a car with smashed windows on the side of the road.

“I’m not sure exactly what they have in mind, but I certainly know that cooperation is a much more active role where coordination would just be courtesy, basically just keeping in touch,” Cameron said.

Either way, the issue is fast coming to a head. Democrats and Republicans passed a stop-gap funding bill Wednesday to keep DHS open through Feb. 13. After that the department will enter a shutdown, though ICE will be allowed to continue, as Congress gave them tens of billions of dollars over the summer, a substantial financial cushion.

Neither ICE nor CBP responded to a request for comment from Salon.

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