Bulwark Takes - Democratic Memo Warns That “Abolish ICE” Is Politically Toxic

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

Sam Stein talks with Lauren Egan about her scoop on a new Democratic memo warning lawmakers to steer clear of “Abolish ICE.” They give their takes on the latest polling on ICE, political fear from voters, and why Democrats seem unwilling to use funding leverage even as public opinion shifts. Dems Are Begging Their Own to Drop ‘Abolish ICE’https://www.thebulwark.com/p/democrats-abolish-ice-reform-searchlight-memoHalf of Americans think ICE is making American cities less safe, CNN poll findshttps://www.cnn.com/2026/01/14/politics/ice-minnesota-cnn-pollMore Americans view the ICE shooting in Minnesota as unjustified than say it is justifiedhttps://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/53878-more-americans-view-ice-shooting-minnesota-unjustified-than-justified-january-9-12-2026-economist-yougov-poll‘Disgusting’: Minnesota Senate Race Gets Hostile After ICE Shootinghttps://www.huffpost.com/entry/minnesota-ice-senate-race_n_6967c68ee4b0141cc9b1e8ac

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hey, everyone, it's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bullwark. I'm here with Lauren Egan, author of the opposition newsletter, which everyone obviously is already subscribing to, but if you are not do it, this is a Bullwark take. We're going to be talking about her new newsletter, but also the larger debate now roiling Democrats over what the hell to do about ICE in the wake of the Renee good shooting in Minneapolis and really the sort of invasion of the city by ICE. Lauren, you wrote a piece.

It had a scoop, a memo from this new upstart Democratic think tank called Searchlight, a bunch of moderate-minded people, I would say. You know, they have a more nuanced position on what to do about ice. First of all, tell us about it. Secondly, explain how cool that hat is and where we can get it. And third, I don't want to reveal too much, but you seem to be, persuaded or not one over, but persuaded by their argument for what to do about ICE in the writing of this. Can you explain why you think they have the right touch or maybe you don't think that?

Sure. You've thrown a lot at me there, Sam. You can ignore the second question. So this new think tank sent out this memo to lawmakers in the House and the Senate this morning. And basically they're arguing, which we've heard over the course of the past few days, stay away from abolish ice. They basically describe it as playing into Republicans' trap. They say it's incredibly toxic and that all you do is communicate that you're not willing to

enforce laws. And instead, they're saying you should lean into proposing reforms, you know, whether it's weeding out bad apples that the Trump administration has recruited to be in ICE, revamping training processes, things like that. So it's, their whole is, yeah, we need to get away from abolish ice, but then what? Like, we have to propose something. We have to give our voters something to show that we're like seriously trying to come up with solutions to this and acknowledge that this is a really tough problem. I am kind of persuaded by it. Thank you for asking. Because their whole thing is, look, Democrats made really bad mistakes

in 2018 and 2020 with defund the police with abolished ice back in 2018. And we paid a political price for it, right? Like, this was such a huge problem in the beginning of the Biden administration. In some ways, they really have not escaped the shadow of this yet. And the thinking here is like, okay, let's take a deep breath. Sure, there are some flash polls that are showing some support for abolish ice, but like, you know, it's just been a couple days. These things have a long runway. Let's all, like, you know, not overreact, essentially or get too far out ahead of our skis and say things now or take policy positions now that and maybe just a couple of months might actually not be super palatable to the average moderate voter who you need to win in order to win the Senate and to win the House.

Okay. I can understand it. Let me play the devil's advocate here. Let me just get the other side of the position. And you can tell me if it makes sense. This is not normal politics. This is not a normal political debate. You have a kind of quasi-paramilitary force of people who aren't particularly well-trained, who have not really gone through great clearances, who have demonstrated on camera repeatedly a flagrant violation of law and disregard for even U.S. citizens. And they're descending and terrorizing U.S. cities. And if you don't have the moral clarity to say, this has to stop right now and use whatever limited leverage points you have, then what do you actually stand for?

Right? Like, how can you let ICE continue in this current incarnation? How can you just say, you know, we're going to reform ice around the edges when you know fully well that any reform you put in place would have to be implemented by Christine Ome or Stephen Miller or Donald Trump himself, and they've shown no inclination whatsoever

to sand down the rough edges? If anything, they've tried to ask you. in the aftermath of the Renee Good killing. I think the reality of this is that there's almost an acknowledgement that there's not a ton they can do unless they win elections, right? Like this memo, like my read on a lot of this is like, this is what our candidates who are running in midterms who are running, thinking about running for president in 2028 should be saying.

Like, I don't think that they feel like there's actually a lot of levers that they can pull right now. Well, one of them is the government funding fight, right? So you have this end of January deadline. Government's going to run out money. This was, you know, the deal they cut at the, what was the end of the year where they, oh, sorry, the end of September where they could fund the government for a couple months. Now they have to do it again.

Democrats last time used Obamacare subsidies as leverage. They said, we're not going to fund the government unless you continue these extended Obamacare subsidies. They didn't do that, but they did elevate the issue of Obamacare subsidies into the zeitgeist. And now you're seeing some real progress on it. So why not just do the same with, hey, you know, ICE got $75 billion from the big, beautiful bill. That's too much. You know, you should take some of that money away from the agency and devote it to something like immigration judges.

Why not just do something like that? Forget Abolish ICE because you're not going to end ICE probably. But why not even do that? The memo doesn't even suggest necessarily doing that. It says reorient some of the money. It doesn't say take the money away. Well, yeah, it says reorient some of the money. And like, what is the Catherine, Cordes Massa from Nevada is out this one.

morning saying that proposing that the Democrats should do that and kind of direct some the money to local law enforcement agencies, which I think is an okay way to do it. I mean, are you confident that if Democrats were to really try and force some shutdown conversation? Like, do you think that that would go well for them? Because the problem is, is like, they have not shown a lot of skill or confidence in being able to have a compelling and persuasive conversation about immigration. Like, I don't know if that would be. go well for them and an end in a good place. Well, I guess the case for why it could go well is in the polling data, right?

So I'm just going to read a few bullet points here. So CNN had a poll today. 26% of Americans say they view an immigration officer's fatal shooting in Minneapolis resident Renee Good as an appropriate use of force. 56% call it an inappropriate use of force. Americans 51 to 31% say that ICE enforcement actions are making cities less safe rather than safer. opinion has shifted against Trump's handling of immigration over the past year.

52% now say Trump's deportations efforts have gone too far up from 45% in February, or last February, I should say. Then you get this U.Gov economist poll, which says that 46% of U.S. adult citizens strongly or somewhat support abolishing ice, 46% compared to 43% who strongly or somewhat oppose abolishing ice. So a slim majority there want to abolish ice. Even independents, that's 47% support it, 35% oppose abolishing ice. So it's not like there's zero appetite for abolishing ice.

I guess the question is, is it a slogan that they're going for or is it actual tangible policy that they want? And that's where the rubber meets the road. That what, the searchlight folks want or voters? No, no, that these voters want. where it's like, yeah, I can get behind abolishing us. But then when they see, oh, wait, we don't have immigration and customs enforcement, you know, enforcing our immigration laws, maybe I don't like that.

Maybe they're just reading a slogan. They're like, oh, that seems pretty reasonable versus getting information. I just think these things are like pretty nuanced. And just because people feel that way right now does not necessarily mean that they're down for the government to shut down over this. Like, you know, I think that there's a lot of layers to it. And yeah, I think once you start talking to people like, oh, but should we enforce our, like, do we need law enforcement?

Like, do we need, do we need an age someone doing this job? Like, people think that the answer is yes. Let me ask you, when you talk to people like in the Democratic operative class and democratic lawmakers, is there like a gulf between how they privately feel about this and how they feel like the politics should go? I think they feel a lot of pressure right now from the Democratic base voters. I mean, I've talked to a ton of staffers that have been like, Our phones are just ringing off the hooks in the past week with people just kind of like shitting on us and yelling at us about like, why aren't you doing more?

Like, why aren't you standing up? Why aren't you taking a moral stance? But I think like people feel really burned from the first Trump administration and how they handle immigration in the past. So I think they just feel like really caught in between a rock and a hard place, quite frankly. Like, I think it's as simple as that. There is obviously some residual angst from what happened around abolish ICE. And I think the lesson that a lot of Democrats took from the election was we cannot get caught up in these feel-good slogans that end up being politically toxic.

I'm not going to dispute that. And you're seeing it play out in a couple of races, right? So this piece from Huff Post just came out about the primary, the Democratic primary for Senate in Minnesota. You have Penny Flanagan, who's the lieutenant governor and Angie Craig, who's a congresswoman. from the state. They're running to be the nominee. And, you know, both of them are critical of ICE right now, but Flanagan is going after Craig for old votes like the Lacken, Lake and Riley Act, which Craig voted for, which essentially gave ICE more rain when it came to rounding up illegal immigrants. And she said, you know, you coward, basically early in the Trump administration when you voted for that. And Craig,

meanwhile, I was at there saying, well, I want to, you know, impeach Christine Ome. And so, you know, the divisions are starting to show on the Democratic side. I have a sense that this could be something that actually does divide the Democratic Party when, you know, in reality, it should probably be dividing the Republican Party. Yeah, I think it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out in primaries because Angie Craig, obviously, she's a moderate member of Congress. She represents a swing district and now she's running statewide, which is totally different ballgame. So I'm kind of curious to see like what the Senate candidates say in the coming days, not just in Minnesota, but, you know, Texas is an interesting one. Maine. We've got some really spicy primaries

coming up in the next few weeks. Do not like that word. That's just an interesting way to describe primary. Spicy. How do you describe it? Contentious. I don't I don't give it a, yeah, okay, fine. But yeah, I think Craig's going to be forced to kind of, I mean, she already has kind of, you know, soften her rhetoric on this. And, I mean, you know, that's an interesting primary because she shot right back at Flanagan for her role in the fraud crisis going on. I mean, it's like all of that, you know, it's a messy primary. Yeah. The other thing that's happening is there's like these kind of quirky efforts to like say you're going after ICE with reforms that I don't know if they're ever going to pass. but I don't know how they would even work in practice.

Like Richie Torres has this one where it's like every ice agent should have a QR code that you can just scan with your phone. Like this is like a restaurant or something? It's like, oh, here, hold on. Wait, wait one second. My internet is a little busted and I need to upload the QR code. It's just like I'm not sure how it would work. I thought we all agree that QR codes suck.

Yeah, we've had our experiences with those at the restaurants. Yeah, we're out. Not going there again. There's obviously efforts to demand that ICE agents are going masked. I think California passed a lot that says, or going to pass a law that says you can't mask. That seems like nipping around the edges a little bit, but maybe that's where you can get actual traction. Yeah. And I know folks like individual in their protests last weekend, they were talking a big game about like we've got to put pressure on state legislatures to pass similar laws like California did.

And they kind of were like, look, we want to force Congress to have a fight over this and then shut down. but we recognize, like, it's only going to get you so much and that more immediately where things could actually change and where we might actually be able to sort of put up some resistance is actually on the state level for the time being. But even that, it's like, you know, you're going to have some legal issues around whether the state can impose specific restrictions on federal agents and so on and so forth. Yeah. I mean, part of this is just, like, tough.

Like, I feel like it's just, you know, I hear you on like, what can Democrats do to get more creative about this, but it's also like, I don't know, like, they're just like not in power. You know, it's just, it's hard. I get it. I get it. I guess I'm just sort of struck by the fact that maybe you can put aside a bottle shy's for a little bit. Sure.

But the $75 million that ICE was given by the big beautiful bill is an extraordinary sum of money. And what the search light memo basically concedes, at least my reading of it, is that that money is not coming back. Like you might be able to redirect it to different immigration functions, but there was going to be $75 million from our government for the purposes of immigration enforcement and deportations. And that's just that. And if they're not willing to touch that tranche of money, it means the Overton window has really shifted because there should be a real debate about whether that's too much money for immigration enforcement. Or we need that much money, not whether it's allocated properly. You can have a whole host of

different functions that need to be funded. Like, like I said, immigration judges would be helpful if you really do want to up deportations. But like, you know, why are people not arguing over whether you should reduce the sums is beyond me? I don't really understand it. Because I think it just comes back to the fact that they don't feel like Democrats going out there saying we want to give less money, even amid all this polling.

I think they still feel like if Democrats are out there, and just like hammering this message of like, we want to give less money to ICE, that that's, they're just such a trust deficit on this issue within the party. Yeah. All that does is communicate to voters that you're still soft on immigration. Like it's a really hard message that they have to land on.

And clearly. Yeah. And there is some, there is some evidence that, you know, you have to play a ball like this. I mean, Biden,

when he was running in 2020, he did not call for abolishing police. In fact, he introduced a plan, I believe, and people can fact check me, that called for increasing money for cops. And he won. I mean, yeah, he won. And he neutralized some of the attacks that were inevitably going to come his way from Trump by doing so.

And so there is some precedent to saying, hey, we have to be cautious about this. It just leads you to the point of like saying, well, you know, are we just inevitably going to get into a place where we're spending more and more sums on police, on ice, on military? and once that money level is set, you're never going to reduce it. And it certainly seems that way. Grim stuff. That was spicy. That was a spicy response. Thank you, Lauren.

All right, Lauren Egan, thank you so much. You didn't tell us where you got that fly hat. Where can people get it? Do you have a store? Yeah, the bulwark store. What's the URL? I have no idea. I should know that.

People can Google it. We should Google Bullwork store. We'll get you the, people should look for it. work.com and you can find it somewhere. You can find it somewhere. I'm sure there's going to be a mass rush to order those hats now and plugging them in this pod. All right, Lauren, thank you so much. Everyone should subscribe to opposition. I already plugged it, but you should do it. You should subscribe to our YouTube page where you get takes that are spicy like this. I'm never using that word again. Bye.