Forget Congress—the Real Leaders Who Might Stop ICE Are Local

One of Abigail Spanberger’s first moves last month after becoming Virginia’s governor was to withdraw state law enforcement agencies from any formal agreements with federal immigration officials. New York and Maryland Democratic leaders are considering legislation to bar any localities in their states, including small, Trump-friendly counties and towns, from working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, and other local officials are announcing restrictions on where ICE can operate in their cities. Local and state prosecutors such as Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner are warning federal law enforcement officials that they will file charges against them if they violate city or state law. 

We are in the midst of a dramatic shift in the Democrats’ posture toward immigration enforcement. In Washington, Democrats have moved from being scared of what they viewed as one of President Trump’s signature issues to pushing some piecemeal reforms of ICE. The real action, though, is in blue cities and states. Democrats outside of Washington are essentially declaring war against ICE and the broader anti-immigration apparatus that Trump has created. 

This Blue America posture is critical for two reasons. In the short term, it will make it harder for Trump to execute his agenda of deporting as many immigrants as possible and terrorizing others so that they leave on their own. Long term, these blue-state officials’ words and deeds will likely push their counterparts in purple and red states, Democratic congressional candidates, and even the party’s 2028 presidential hopefuls to take stronger stands against immigration law enforcement. 

Some blue cities and states took steps in 2025 (and from 2017 to 2020) to push back against Trump’s anti-immigrant approach. But many blue state officials were worried that seeming too pro-immigrant would result in the Trump administration sending federal law enforcement personnel to their communities as a punishment. The events in Minneapolis over the last month seem to have changed these politicians’ calculations. They now realize Trump will deploy ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and other federal officials whenever and wherever he wants, no matter how cooperative local officials seem. Appeasement won’t work. And liberal activists are so angry about the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti that they are demanding action from their elected officials. 

So we are seeing both new policies and more aggressive rhetoric. New Mexico this week adopted a law that not only bans local law enforcement from working with ICE but also bars immigration detention centers from being created on public lands in the state. New York Attorney General Letitia James’s office is organizing New Yorkers to serve as volunteer monitors, wearing purple vests and recording ICE agents’ behavior on their phones. The New York Democratic Party last week passed a resolution declaring, “ICE has become an agency that operates with violence, impunity, and total disregard for human and civilian life.” The mayors of Chicago and New York City have become perhaps the highest-profile figures urging the abolition of ICE. 

“They’re a rogue agency out of control,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul said of ICE in a recent NPR interview, the latest illustration of a moderate in the party using decidedly non-moderate language to blast ICE. 

Gaby Goldstein, founder of a left-leaning group called State Futures, told me, “State policymakers whose values align with civil rights and liberties are thinking more expansively about state-level power, testing its limits, and getting more creative about how to use it to defend people, communities, and the rule of law itself.” 

And officials in blue states who aren’t sufficiently anti-ICE for activists are being criticized. Governor Maura Healey is under fire for allowing Massachusetts to remain one of the few blue states that continues to have a formal agreement to work with ICE. 

I don’t want to overstate the importance of all of these moves. Some of this is simply political posturing, with Democratic politicians seeing that the wind is blowing against ICE right now and acting accordingly. They might backtrack from these stances, as they did when momentum around police reform dampened a few years ago. Even if local law enforcement agencies in blue states don’t work with ICE and CBP, these agencies have thousands of armed personnel to carry out Trump’s orders. Federal authority generally trumps that of state and local officials, so it will be very difficult for Krasner and other local prosecutors even to file charges against ICE and CBP officials, never mind win convictions. 

That said, policies that even slightly impede ICE, CBP, and Trump’s other goons are worth trying. Perhaps James’s monitors or the threat of Krasner filing charges will make ICE agents pause before shooting someone. After all, tens of millions of Americans live in solidly blue states, so having officials in those areas not collaborate with Trump’s immigration forces matters. 

Also, these blue state officials’ actions will reverberate beyond February 2026. By so aggressively blasting ICE now, they are entrenching skepticism of ICE, CBP, and the broader federal immigration apparatus as Democratic orthodoxy that everyone in the party feels compelled to follow. This is already happening. Even Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, who is positioning himself as a center-left candidate for the 2028 nomination, sharply blasted ICE, in an appearance on The View this week. He called for ICE agents to be withdrawn from every city they are deployed to, the retraining of every ICE agent, the dismissal of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and for ICE “to be reformed from the top down.” I can’t imagine Beshear uttering those words in December 2025, before the events in Minneapolis made the Democrats a more firmly anti-ICE party. 

What’s happening now is different from 2018–2020, when “Abolish ICE” was a mantra of the party’s left wing. Unlike then, more centrist figures like Hochul and Beshear are also bashing ICE. And the party is rolling out ideas, like barring ICE agents from wearing masks, that Democratic pols in red and purple states will feel comfortable supporting. Those officials would never call for abolishing anything, even if that’s the right policy. 

In Washington, the Democrats are unlikely to be able to rein in Trump’s immigration forces much in this latest round of budget negotiations. But all politics isn’t in D.C. In the blue areas that Democrats control, many liberals consider ICE agents akin to, in Krasner’s words, “Nazi wannabes.” And Blue America is fighting back. Thank goodness.