Schumer’s ICE strategy comes into focus
Plus: Trump promotes child investment accounts, Durbin receives Head Start award, state legislatures introduce 198 anti-abortion bills this month alone.
First Things First
👋🏾 Hi, hey, hello! Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) emerged from Senate Democrats’ weekly lunch this afternoon with an outline of the caucus’s three proposals to rein in the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this month by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol agents.
The proposed reforms include ending roving patrols and tightening rules governing the use of warrants, enforcing accountability through a uniform code of conduct and requiring federal agents to wear body cameras and carry proper identification.
“These are common-sense reforms, ones that Americans know and expect from law enforcement,” Schumer told reporters after the lunch. “If Republicans refuse to support them, they are choosing chaos over order, plain and simple.”
Schumer suggested the proposals were a starting point for compromise, not a red line: “What we want to do is negotiate with the Republicans, come up with a proposal that, again, reins in ICE, ends the violence.”
He also reiterated that Democrats would support the House-passed minibus, which includes labor, healthcare, education, military, transportation, and housing priorities they helped craft, if the Homeland Security funding bill were separated out and updated to reflect their demands.
Some Senate Republicans have publicly backed stripping the DHS funding bill from the minibus, passing the five non-DHS bills and a continuing resolution to maintain current appropriations for the agency, while the two sides negotiate a path forward on ICE.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) didn’t foreclose the possibility, but said he wanted to keep all options available until Democrats publicized their demands and emphasized his preference is to enact the minibus without alterations.
“There are potentially, obviously, lots of different things that could happen,” he said. “But the best thing to happen is the thing that we should do right now and that is pick up the six-bill package passed by the House of Representatives by an overwhelming majority and send it to the president for his signature.”
