How Local Elected Officials Are Trying to Check ICE

Democrats in Congress may be failing to meaningfully check ICE, but that’s not the story in towns and cities. There progressive and socialist lawmakers are working with local movements to craft ways to push back on the agency’s authoritarianism.

Ice Protest Austin SED

Cities across the United States are figuring out how to slow ICE’s reckless authoritarian roll. (Sara Diggins / The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images)


Ending the collection of vehicle location data. Campaigns to pause evictions. Strict limits on where agents can operate. Restrictions on who can collaborate with them.

As Congress has come under bitter criticism for failing to enact stringent enough restrictions on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents more broadly, these are just a few of the ways immigrant rights groups, elected officials, and other organizers at the local level are moving to insulate their neighborhoods from Donald Trump’s turbocharged deportation program. Those efforts, on both coasts and states in between, include cities hardest hit by ICE’s operations and blue hubs in red states that have been relatively untouched, and have seen anti-ICE activists employ an array of legislative tactics to blunt deportation efforts.

It’s a sign of the intensifying opposition, particularly in liberal-leaning urban areas, to deportation tactics that are simultaneously growing more aggressive and more unpopular, and which most recently in Minneapolis left a gaping hole in the city’s budget and two US citizens dead. But it also marks the latest stage in blue America’s embrace of federalism, and a shift in focus on local organizing in the face of what many Democratic voters view as both a hostile presidential administration and weak opposition to it from their own party leaders.

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