Several Senate Democrats have joined dozens of insurgent challengers calling for Congress to abolish the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, exposing a widening of the gulf in the party with those who want a more cautious approach, NBC News reported Monday.
Potential 2020 presidential candidates Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have urged the closing down of ICE.
This comes as Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., works on legislation that would do just that, and the Democratic base appears to be warming to the idea as massive immigration marches recently featured calls to abolish the agency, which is at the forefront of enforcing the Trump administration border policy.
Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., one of only two co-sponsors to Pocan's bill so far, added his voice to that call, saying in a Medium post, "We should abolish ICE and start over, focusing on our priorities to protect our families and our borders in a humane and thoughtful fashion."
But party leadership has pushed for a more cautious approach, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., telling reporters, "Look, ICE does some functions that are very much needed. Reform ICE? Yes. That's what I think we should do. It needs reform."
In a similar vein, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called for "an immediate and fundamental overhaul" of the agency.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., explained abolishing ICE would have no practical impact at the moment, because "even if you abolish ICE, you still have the same administration carrying out the same horrendous policies. Whatever you replace it with is just going to reflect what this president is already doing, which is tearing families apart and holding children in cages."
With Democrats in the minority in both houses of Congress, any "abolish ICE" measure would serve more as a mission statement than a strategy and is already being used by President Donald Trump as a way to cast the Democrats as extreme.
Vox explained the change over the years in the party's views on immigration by saying their "attempts at 'tough love' centrism didn't win them any credit across the aisle, while an increasingly empowered immigrant-rights movement started taking them to task for the adverse consequences of enforcement policies."
Vox concluded some "Democrats have now learned to ignore the critics on the right they couldn't please and embrace the critics on the left whom they could."
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