The democrats have to stand on this issue. Why have a budget if all the constitutional rights and laws of our country can just be ignored by the current administration? Hugs
They want guardrails on immigration agents. The issue has risen to the fore ahead of a key Jan. 30 deadline after an ICE officer shot and killed an American woman in Minneapolis.
ICE officers question a man’s status on Lake Street near Karmel Mall in Minneapolis in 2025.Christopher Juhn / Anadolu via Getty Images file
WASHINGTON — Democrats are wrestling with whether to use a key Jan. 30 deadline to demand constraints on President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed an American woman in Minneapolis.
Progressives in the House and Senate are calling on their party to hold firm in opposition to a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security unless it comes with conditions — such as requiring agents to wear identification, limiting Customs and Border Protection agents to the border and requiring judicial warrants to arrest suspects in immigration cases.
They say Trump is using autocratic tactics by deploying masked agents in cities to intimidate Americans who don’t support him.
“Democrats cannot vote for a DHS budget that doesn’t restrain the growing lawlessness of this agency,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., the top Democrat on the Appropriations subcommittee overseeing DHS, wrote on X after the Minneapolis shooting.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus announced Tuesday that its members have formally voted to oppose any bill to fund DHS “unless there are meaningful and significant reforms to immigration enforcement practices.”
The blowback from Democrats to the Minnesota ICE shooting, which Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and the White House have defended, may pose a problem for Republicans in Congress who will need at least some Democratic votes to fund the government — including DHS — before Jan. 31 or risk a shutdown.
Democratic opposition has already frozen a DHS measure that was slated to be added to an appropriations package getting a Senate vote this week. Republicans control Congress and have largely stood by Trump on ICE deployments across the country, but such a bill requires 60 votes to pass the Senate.
Congress may have to fall back on a stopgap bill to prevent a funding lapse for DHS. That’s where things get trickier for Democrats. If House Republicans pass a continuing resolution on their own, which would keep DHS running on autopilot, Senate Democrats would again have to choose between accepting it and forcing a partial shutdown.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., wouldn’t say whether he’s open to guardrails on immigration enforcement when asked Tuesday by NBC News.
But he called on Democrats not to allow another shutdown.
“I think government shutdowns are stupid. I don’t think anybody wins. I hope the Democrats share that view,” he said, while acknowledging that DHS funding is “the hardest one, and it’s possible that if we can’t get agreement, there could be some sort of a CR that funds some of these bills into next year.”
The record-long shutdown last fall, triggered over a health care dispute, yielded no concessions for Democrats. And unlike the Affordable Care Act, a winning issue for Democrats, some in the party are more leery of a standoff over immigration. The center-left group Third Way is encouraging Democrats to steer clear of reviving the “abolish ICE” discourse.
And some Democrats note that the $170 billion infusion of funding for immigration enforcement was approved by Republicans on a party-line basis in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” last summer. That wouldn’t be affected even if DHS funding through the normal appropriations process expires.
One Democratic aide, discussing the sensitive topic on condition of anonymity, noted that a stopgap funding bill for DHS would provide fewer guardrails and more flexibility for Noem to move money around as she sees fit.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., sidestepped questions about whether he favors withholding DHS funding to slap restrictions on ICE, calling it “one of the major issues that appropriators are confronting right now.”
“The appropriators are working on that right now with the four corners and trying to come up with an agreement,” he said.
House Democrats’ strategy on ICE was a major topic of conversation during a closed-door party meeting Tuesday, according to attendees. But the conversation focused more on finding ways to hold the Trump administration accountable, other than withholding money for the agency.
One example of how they plan to do that: Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee will hold a field hearing in the Minneapolis area on Friday, where they plan to highlight the impact of ICE in the community.
“That was a big bulk of what we talked about,” said Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., who plans to attend the hearing. “The plea was to the caucus was that we have to hold people accountable. We have to do oversight when our colleagues won’t do it.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., the ranking member of the House Judiciary subcommittee overseeing immigration and former Progressive Caucus chair, said that if Democrats wait until next year, “a lot of people are going to die between now and then, because this is now a federalized military force that’s being unleashed.”
“Obviously, the Senate has more leverage than the House, but I do think it’s also critically important for us to be on the record against this amount of funding, number one, and funding without any accountability or guardrails,” she said. “So we have a list of guardrails that we have been working with our leadership and the Senate.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., slammed ICE and Noem as “totally out of control” and in need of “commonsense” restraints that reflect law enforcement conduct.
“What’s in front of us right now is a spending bill that will go either one of two ways,” he told reporters. “Either Republicans will continue their ‘my way or the highway’ approach as it relates to the Homeland Security bill, and if that happens, then it’s going to be on them to figure out a path forward.”
Before the Minneapolis shooting, a national poll by The Associated Press found last month that just 38% of U.S. adults approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, while 60% disapprove.
A YouGov/Economist poll taken Jan. 9-12, after the Minneapolis shooting, found that 69% of American adults said they saw video of it, while another 22% said they had heard about it. Seventy-three percent said ICE agents should wear uniforms during arrests, and 56% said they shouldn’t be allowed to wear masks while arresting people. A plurality said ICE was making the U.S. “less safe.” And respondents said 46%-43% they support “abolishing ICE,” within the survey’s margin of error.
I am both tired and ashamed that this even needs to be written, said, or posted. It is worse that some believe the old lies of meritocracy when it is so clear that most wealth in this country is inherited wealth, money passed down from older people to younger always increasing each time because the wealthy call estate tax a death tax and claim it hurts poor people. Poor people do not have such a problem as the inheritance tax is only activated when the inheritance is in the upper millions. Hugs.
Starbucks Workers United baristas and supporters rally for a fair union contract outside Starbucks East Coast distribution center on Nov. 19, 2025, in York, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Lisa Lake/Getty Images for Starbucks Workers United)
An editorial titled “Billionaires are not to blame for poverty” that appeared recently in The Morning Call is another example of victim shaming and proof that some academics do live in ivory towers with no knowledge of how the real world works or perhaps refuse to acknowledge the realities of the world.
The author’s premise is that people are poor because of poor individual choices. He cites the “success sequence” as a guideline to follow. For those who don’t know the success sequence, it has three basic steps. 1) Graduate from High School. 2) Get a steady job. 3) Do not have kids until you are married. He also provides two examples from his childhood of people he knew who made poor choices by not following the success sequence with one resulting in his early demise. He then uses himself as an example of what happens when you do make good choices and then succeed in life. Good for him!
However, he did not have the cultural and political systems working against him. And that, by his own admission, in his opinion piece, is the major weakness of the “success sequence.” Additionally, the analysis he mentioned done by Wang and Wilcox did not take into consideration families with disabled members, families with an elderly member, or families where all members are under the age of 25, thus biasing the sample to begin with.
Plus, the original work did not look at the success rate over time. According to Matt Bruenig of the Jacobin Magazine, the success rate dropped 17% after just 1 year. Matt Bruenig goes on to say that the “success sequence” is just being used to push the blame on individuals without acknowledging the impact of social and cultural structures and the vagaries of life such as job loss, family emergencies, divorce, etc.
But to then say billionaires like Jeff Bezos are not responsible for poverty?
It is no secret that some companies that earn billions of dollars a year in profits, benefit greatly from not having to pay many of their employees a living wage, a wage that allows them to live without relying on government subsidies for food or health care. This is not because of some poor choice on the part of the employee; our economic system is set up to maximize earnings, not to provide a living wage for every working person. Additionally, corporations, aided by willing politicians, strive to depress wages through anti-union efforts and favorable tax policies for wealthy individuals and corporations. Keep in mind that between 50% to 70% of people on these government programs have full and/or part time jobs.
The 2025 poverty levels set by the U.S. government are, for an individual, $15,650 a year: for a family of four, $32,150. Should we adopt across the country a minimum wage of $15 per hour, it would result in gross earnings of $31,200 for one individual working 40 hours a week for 52 weeks, not enough for a family of four to meet the federal poverty level.
A July 2024 analysis by Forbes Advisor listed the cost of essential expenditures, including housing costs, transportation, health care, food, and income taxes in all 50 states. The cheapest state to live in was Mississippi with a cost of living of $32,336 per year. The most expensive was Hawaii at over $55,000 a year.
The overall question one must ask oneself then is, “What is the purpose of society?”
Is society’s purpose to generate wealth so that a very few can live extravagantly and wield incredible power over those less wealthy or fortunate?
Or is the purpose of society to create and foster an environment where people can live, work and play without the fear of living off the crumbs discarded by the well-to-do?
Is the purpose of society to define winners and losers and to then treat them politically and culturally according to their perceived “status?” Or is the purpose of society to aid and assist everyone in their fulfillment as an individual and as communities living in relative peace and harmony with their neighbors?
One of the most basic and effective ways to reduce crime and poverty is to give people the means to live their lives without fear of continual economic crises. Yet, our current system is set up to do the opposite.
Jeff Bezos and most other billionaires are not singularly responsible for poverty, but they sure are not doing much to help alleviate it.
This is a contributed opinion column. John Sise is a resident of Hanover Township, Northampton County. The views expressed in this piece are those of its individual author, and should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of this publication. Do you have a perspective to share? Learn more about how we handle guest opinion submissions at themorningcall.com/opinions.
My editor proposed two stories for me to cover last week, and I chose both. The first was on cuts to Friends of the Rappahannock. The other was on cuts to the Fredericksburg Food Bank. Both stories are important to this area, and as it turns out, one of them is important nationwide.
Think of all the government workers Elon has laid off who can’t afford groceries because of Trump’s recession and inflation, and now they can’t get any assistance from the food banks.
It’s not all bad news. There’s still enough money in the budget for Donald Trump’s golf trips, asshole billionaires and trust-fund babies will still get another huge tax cut, Elon will continue scoring government contracts to add to the $38 billion he’s already got from the government.
I’m so glad I got to experience the Hands-Off protest yesterday. A blog for that is coming later today.
Creative note: I drew this at Starbucks on Friday night. I wanted to complete this week’s cartoon for the Advance so I could focus on covering the DOGE protest in Washington, DC.
Now, I’m writing this blog on the train home.
Music note: I listened to Pete Yorn while coloring.
Scottie's Playtime 