Bulwark Takes - Sen. Chris Coons: Democrats Are Willing to Shut Down DHS Over ICE Abuses

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

Sam Stein is joined by Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) for his take on the rapidly unfolding government shutdown fight and why Democrats are willing to shut down the Department of Homeland Security unless Congress passes real, binding limits on ICE and CBP. Coons explains why Democrats agreed to a short-term DHS extension, what specific statutory reforms they’re demanding, and how Trump’s governing chaos is reverberating beyond U.S. borders.

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please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bullwork. I'm joined by Senator Chris Coons at the great state of Delaware. We are speaking on Friday at 11-15-ish. I'm time stamping this because by the time this comes out, I don't know what's going to be happening with the government shutdown. It does appear, Senator, that there will be at least a brief shutdown. But real progress has been made, I would say, even in the past 10 minutes, where we've seen Lindsay Graham drop some of his most notable objections to a DLE. He's got some other objections. But walk us quickly through the state of play. And can you, you know, there's obviously some Democrat liberals out there who are upset. What you're doing essentially is a short-term extension of current DHS funding to continue to talk about reforms to ICE. They wanted to reform is just right off the back.

Can you address those criticisms? So thanks, Sam. Thanks for a chance to be on. And thanks for a chance to talk this through. because this is where the translation from a slogan to a statute requires some understanding of the process and the details. What I hope and think we are teed up to do today is what the Democratic Caucus unanimously agreed on when we met earlier this week. Every one of us voted against funding six major departments of the federal government, including like HHS, which does a lot of important health care work. Department of Education, Department of Housing, Department of Transportation, and DHS.

So every one of us stood and voted against that and then forced the White House to negotiate directly with Chuck Schumer. And they came to an agreement to meet our demand that Homeland Security be peeled off and then given a two-week extension to negotiate the specifics of statutory constraints on ICE and CBP agents. meanwhile we pass the other five so let me talk to each of those past the other five why does that matter i'm an appropriator we have worked for months tammy baldwin has secured big wins in terms of rejecting trump's cuts to n iH and cdc and nsf and americore and a whole lot of other things democrats care about without having to accept republican policy poison pills kirstian jellibrand in housing

has rejected all sorts of insane cuts that Trump demanded, and we're going to get full funding for things that help house people like the home program and the CDBG program. I could keep going. There's dozens and dozens of Democrat wins in those five bills. Now what we're doing is calving off the DHS bill. Okay, so why not just impose what we want in terms of constraints on ICE and CBP right away today? because the only way to do that is by unanimous consent. And that means we've got to get the consent of everyone from Ted Cruz to Tommy Tuberville and we won't get it.

A, B, we actually have to write the legislative language. The initial offer from the White House was, yeah, sure, Trump will do an executive order that says the stuff we want, masks off. And you don't take Trump at his word? No roving patrols, actual warrants. And before we even got into the details, my caucus said, we don't trust Trump. He could change his mind tomorrow and reverse an executive order. If this is in statute a law that Trump has signed and then ICE continues and CBP continues to do the horrific things they did that was brought to the nation's attention by the tragic and horrific killings of Renee Good and of Alex Prettie in Minneapolis in recent weeks, then we can sue. And I was on the phone earlier today with Delaware's Attorney General, Kathy Jennings, who along with 22 other attorneys general has beaten Trump in federal court three quarters of the time in 500 lawsuits.

So I know folks are very skeptical that there will be any restraint whatsoever on ICE or CBP. But if we get it in statute, and that means we've got to take a week or more to get the language right and agree on it and then be ready to vote on it if we do, If we get that, we get real constraints on DHS. If this all falls apart in the next two weeks, either the nation changes its attention because Trump strikes Iran, which, you know, look, he's the master of distraction. Look here. No, look here. No, look here.

Yeah, he's likely to do something big and not in our best interest like that. I still don't think at this moment of sustained national rage over the actions of ICE and CBP that in two weeks we won't still be focused on this. If they don't give us the concessions we want, then I expect Democrats will vote to shut down DHS, but we're not shutting down the whole rest of the government with no path. Right. Okay, let's walk through. Give us the specific statutes you want written and what you think the Democratic Party, the Senate Democrats, I should say, writ large, will demand. So there are introduced statutes. I'm not going to quote all of them, but I'll give a few

quick examples. I was responsible for the second largest police department in my state more than 15 years ago when I was a county executive. And we had policies, procedures, and statutes that meant that if a county police officer showed up at someone's door, banged on the door and demanded entry, it's because he or she had a warrant, a judicial warrant, not an administrative warrant. They had a specific articulable reason for being there. They had a suspicion of criminal act or the presence of someone who was fleeing justice in that house. That's fundamentally different from just wandering around at the mall trying to catch someone who looks like a criminal. And an awful lot of, I think, the biggest harm that ICE and CBP have done is these roving

patrols where they seem to be snatching people largely at random, who are not the worst of the worst, as Trump had promised, who do not have criminal arrest warrants and have not committed violent crimes. A, B, not going into sensitive locations. So houses of worship, hospitals, schools, not enforcing ICE actions within these sensitive spaces. Requiring accountability through visibility. So any county police officer, you've got a badge and a name and a patch. You know it's county police. You know the name of the officer. You've got a badge number and they are not masked. You know who that officer is. Ice makes the argument that some of their agents have been doxed. I think we can and should impose penalties on those who, you know, with intent to do criminal

mischief, docks police officers. I do not think it is acceptable for us to have masked nameless agents roaming our country. There have been reports of non-officers, just random criminals, also wearing that same unofficial attire, you know, jeans and camo and a mask and like banging on people's doors or robbing them or kidnapping them, it destroys trust between the community and law enforcement at all levels when you have nameless, faceless agents. And I think that is one of the scariest things they're doing in terms of destroying confidence in the rule of law and in civil order. So end all of that. the DHS bill has money for body cams already, but it didn't have the specifics. How are they being implemented?

How is the data being stored? How is the oversight being conducted? And what is the exact timeline in which they will be deployed for all federal agents? That's the sort of thing that requires statutory language. Right. So just to put a button on this, let's say this government funding bill goes through. You have the two-week extension at current levels for DHS and all the other omnibuses or minibuses. everybody want to call them are passed.

Do you believe right now that in two weeks time, 41 Democratic senators, including yourself, would be willing to say, we will shut down DHS unless these statutes are passed? Do you think there's 41? Okay. We'll see. Are you a little bit surprised?

Because I was that. It might be more than that. I might be more than that. You mean willing to shut down DHS if we haven't gotten concrete, specific defensible improvements to oversight and accountability. Yes. I was surprised, and maybe this makes me naive, that the White House and the administration was willing to actually cleave these things apart. Because usually their posture is, Me too. Screw you. Here's the middle finger. And they seem a little bit spooked by this.

I'm curious if you can speak to how you feel or how you interpret that element of it. Republican senators I spoke with after, in particular, the killing. of Alex Preti, where right off the bat, you had statements from Christy Noem and from Greg Bovino calling him a domestic terrorist and saying he was brandishing his weapon and threatening agents. I mean, within a matter of hours, you could see on a video that was being replayed over and over that millions of Americans saw that they were lying. It wasn't true. And then as the details about who Alex was, a Veterans Administration nurse, Another video comes out showing him literally trying to aid a woman shoved to the ground by an aggressive officer.

Another video comes out showing that he's got a camera up, not a gun. Another video, more detailed analysis shows a different agent disarming him. It comes out he had a legal permit. I think your Second Amendment enthusiasts, NRA and others got very mad at President Trump for saying, you know, he brought a gun to a rally. that's unacceptable. He should have known he was going to get in trouble. You had folks who were First Amendment advocates saying he was peacefully protesting. He was not trying to assault ICE officers in any way. And so as the truth became clear and clear about this incident, and it was also demonstrably false what the administration's senior spokespeople had said, there was a flood of phone calls going,

not just to my office, a record number of calls to my office from Delawareans about this, but calls to Republicans. And so you started seeing folks like Tom Tillis and Lisa Murkowski saying there should be a full investigation. Then you had more statements from more senators, you know, the John Kennedy's saying, you know, I don't understand what's going. You know, Rand Paul. And the numbers kept going up. And I am confident the White House was getting not public, but private, anxious, angry phone calls from House members and senators, Republicans who support the president, who support his deportation agenda, but who said, this is not good. This is very bad. My constituents are upset and angry.

I think that is the only reason that President Trump very quickly backtracked, that he replaced Bovino with Tom Homan, who's no easygoing sweetheart of a guy. I mean, he is a punch in the nose, but Tom Homan is a career law enforcement officer who understands, you know, leadership and procedures utterly unlike Greg Bovino. And so Trump tried. a sort of step down and walk back to kind of lower the temperature, but was not offering any binding or substantive changes in policy. And it was only when the unanimous vote of the Democratic caucus showed, we were willing to shut the government down over this. And he heard from enough of his base and his colleagues in Congress that they didn't have his back, that we had a conversation

between Trump, Schumer, Speaker Johnson, and John Thune, where they, where Trump said, okay, okay, we'll carve out DHS, we'll take two weeks, and we'll work through serious reforms. I'm very skeptical that this will actually deliver substantive lasting reforms. We're going to have to stay on this every minute of the next two weeks. But if we get moving in that direction, you're absolutely right. That's not what Trump's done. Sam, this is the first time I've seen Trump genuinely back down. in the face of national anger at his aggressive overreach.

I'm going to hop scotch around the globe and domestic politics here. But you're on the Judiciary Committee. This morning we saw the arrest of Don Lemon. He was involved with it from a journalistic perspective of this protest at a St. Paul Church. What stood out to me was Attorney General Pam Bondi putting up a post that said this was done at her direction. I don't think people appreciate the idea of an attorney general taking credit for the arrest of a journalist is fairly shocking to me, at least.

You know, Bondi has not really gone through the committee or appeared before the committee in some time. What is the role here that your fellow committee members have to play to provide at least a modicum of oversight for the Justice Department, which I think, you know, I'm curious for your thoughts, but it clear to me that the Justice Department has very much transformed itself into a tool for the president, really. Sam, I voted against Pam Bondi when she was in front of the Judiciary Committee and her confirmation hearing, because I was confident that she would cave to Trump's demands, that she would

ultimately act more as his personal lawyer than as the attorney general for the people of the United States. And the most shocking recent instance of that was where Trump, on social media, demanded that the attorney general move to investigate and indict people he identified as his political enemies, which she then did. And, you know, look, there have been hundreds of lawsuits against President Trump. He has lost the overwhelming majority of them. In some of those instances, grand juries refuse to indict or existing U.S. attorneys resigned or AUSA federal prosecutors resigned rather than move ahead with some of those investigations and prosecutions. This is just the latest example of where Attorney General

Bondi is trying to demonstrate that she is acting against Trump's. political enemies and the Judiciary Committee has an obligation to conduct oversight. Chairman Grassley, in the 15 years I've served with him on the committee, presidents of both parties has said that he champions the committee's oversight role and hearing from whistleblowers. He has underperformed on that in this administration, but we have had a few oversight hearings that were important and we will have Christy Gnome in front of the committee. There are other committees that have done none, like zero oversight. We have done this much, but this is the sort of incident that demands engagement and

oversight from the committee and from Congress. Peeling back the curtain a little bit here, when we initially reached out to your office to talk to you, it was because the acquisition or invasion of Greenland was the primary story. Remember that? Yes, I do. I was just last week. You were heading out to Denmark, then you're going to Davos. You're back now. We have not invaded Greenland. It appears we have some sort of. of, I don't know, talks going on with official to have a firmer brace. I just want to know, like, in all honesty, when you were in Denmark, when you were at Davos, obviously this topic was coming up because it was the front and center.

What were foreign leaders and diplomats and maybe even business leaders saying to you in private about that conversation? That this is bat shit crazy. I'm not quoting them. I mean, what they said was this is unthinkable, this is unimaginable, this hurts, this is just unimaginable. In Denmark, a country that has been our loyal ally and partner for 225 years that after the Second World War, when we launched the United Nations and when we launched NATO, both to keep the peace and to prevent a renewed, a large-scale war, Denmark was one of the original NATO. allies. As you know, I suspect, Sam, the NATO promise of each one defends all has only really been invoked once. And that was after the 9-11 attacks on the United States, the Danes were among

the first to gear up and go with us into Afghanistan and later into Iraq. They lost 52 Danes. On a per capita basis, the highest of any NATO ally. So when President Trump said, we've never asked NATO for anything. NATO's never done anything for us. We don't really need them. The families of those Danes who served and died alongside Americans, I can only imagine the harm it caused them. One night at an event that I was at in Davos several days after Senator Tillis and I laid a wreath at the memorial for those Danes in Copenhagen. a very large man came up to talk to me at an event that was about a very different subject and said to me he'd served four tours, four tours in Helmand Province in the Danish Armed Forces, that he had lost friends, that he had seen how bravely his brothers and sisters in arms had

fought, and that he thought it was an undying shame upon the American people that our president disrespected that sacrifice and that he was grateful that Senators Murkowski and Tillis and I, Senator Shaheen and Durbin went and Welch laid that wreath. This was the constant source of conversation from Ursula Funderladen, who's essentially the head of the EU, to Mark Ruta, the NATO Secretary General, and with business leaders in Denmark who said they're reassessing whether we're a reliable partner with Greenlandic leaders, who said they're. children are terrified of an imminent American invasion. If we want to be trusted and trustworthy in the world, which is what keeps us secure and prosperous, we cannot threaten either armed force or

tariffs against our closest allies to extract concessions from them. Yes, a week later, America's moved on. Because of the chaos in Minnesota, because of the urgency of this moment in the United States, 98% of Americans have forgotten about this completely. Meantime, look at what our allies are doing. They are closing trade deals with China. They're reaching out for new partnerships with India, with South America. They are actively talking about what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke about in Davos after Trump's actions and said, we need to prepare for a world where we cannot count on the United States. That is a shattering observation from one of our closest, longest allies. Trump's chaos, Trump's disrespect, Trump's lack of grasp of history and facts, where he's treating the world like a risk game or a chessboard, and he's just trying to cut great deals the way he used to in, you know, Jersey and New York, where he blusters and threatens and says all sorts of crazy shit and ultimately gets a good deal.

You can't do that as president without deep and lasting costs and harm to the American people. That's true. Senator Chris Coons, thank you so much for doing this. We're speaking again on Friday morning. So if you were watching this in Friday in the afternoon, some of this may be obsolete. We may have a government shut down or not. Who knows? It may change.

Who knows? Thank you so much. Take care. Talk to you later.