Democrats Lay Out Demands for Funding Homeland Security Department, Including Body Cameras, Mandatory Identification of Agents

Senate Democrats are laying out their demands ahead of a deadline to fund the Department of Homeland Security, which is due to shut down at the end of the day on Friday if no funding deal is reached. The killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at Minneapolis this month have nearly every Democrat opposed to funding DHS and its component agencies, including ICE and Border Patrol. Many lawmakers and activists began calling for a blockade of the DHS funding bill after Good’s death at the beginning of January, but the footage of Pretti — who was surrounded by agents and disarmed at the time of his death — spurred the rest of the party to action. So far, 46 of the Senate’s 47 Democratic Caucus lawmakers say they will not vote to advance DHS funding Thursday without concessions. The Senate minority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer, accused DHS agents of engaging in “state-sanctioned thuggery.”“Under Secretary Noem and Stephen Miller, ICE has been unleashed without guardrails. They violate Constitutional rights all the time, and they are deliberately refusing to coordinate with state and local law enforcement,” Mr. Schumer told reporters on Wednesday afternoon. “This is chaos.”At his press conference, Mr. Schumer laid out three reforms to DHS that must be included in the spending bill in order for Democrats to acquiesce to advancing the bill. Senate rules require 60 votes to end debate and bring spending legislation to the floor for final passage. For the first item on the list, Mr. Schumer said he and his colleagues want an end to roving patrols by agents, new language around the use of warrants for arrests and searches, and a requirement that DHS agents coordinate with state and local officials during their detention and deportation operations. The warrant question has arisen after DHS officials said they were using administrative warrants, not judicial ones, as part of their search and arrest operations. The standard to obtain an administration warrant is far lower than if one were to go to a judge. Coordination with state and local officials has also become a key demand because of how ICE and Border Patrol are operating within certain metro areas. At Minneapolis, local officials complained following Pretti’s death that the agents swiftly left the scene after the shooting, and gave Minnesota officials no real aid in conducting an investigation. The sheriff of Cumberland County, Maine — which is also seeing a surge of DHS agents — similarly complained this week that ICE agents had pulled a man from his car, detained him, left the vehicle unlocked in the street, and then simply left. Democrats’ second demand is the DHS adopted a “uniform code of conduct” for its agents, Mr. Schumer said. Part of that demand includes a requirement that independent investigations take place after any violent incidents. That demand came out of concerns that DHS would investigate its own agents after Pretti’s death, rather than the FBI, which is the agency usually tasked with such investigations. Finally, Mr. Schumer says Democrats want DHS agents to be identifying themselves, which includes agents no longer being able to wear masks, as many of them now do. Democrats also want language in the spending bill that requires all agents to wear body cameras. “No more anonymous agents. No more secret operatives,” Mr. Schumer said. The majority leader, Senator John Thune, expressed an openness to discussing such issues with the Democrats so long as a shutdown is avoided on Friday. The DHS spending bill is tied into one legislative package with five other spending bills, which has led Democrats to demand that the DHS portion be removed so that the other five bills can pass. Mr. Thune says there is a potential deal where the five spending bills are passed to fund those departments for the rest of the year, while a separate bill to keep DHS funded for just the next one or two weeks through a continuing resolution, which is simply a bill that extends funding for certain departments until a set date. “If there are things that Democrats want, that the [Trump] administration can agree with them about, then let’s do that,” he told reporters Wednesday.

Democrats Lay Out Demands for Funding Homeland Security Department, Including Body Cameras, Mandatory Identification of Agents

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