By Julia Harte, Kristina Cooke and Richard Cowan
Nov 11 (Reuters) - Democratic lawmakers are gearing up to fight President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown when in control of Congress next year, targeting ICE tactics and expanding paths to legal status despite limits on how much they can achieve.
Democrats handily won control of both chambers of Congress last week, fueled in part by voters’ dissatisfaction with Trump’s aggressive arrest and deportation campaign. But lawmakers from both parties
expect Stephen Miller, the architect of that campaign and Trump's new chief of staff, to go on driving immigration policy.
House and Senate staffers told Reuters they expect the president to veto any legislation that would curb immigration enforcement or expand pathways to legal residency and citizenship.
Trump’s immigration crackdown has become a political vulnerability, with his approval on the issue falling to 38% from 50% at the start of his presidency, based on Reuters/Ipsos polling, and Latino voters swinging sharply back to Democrats in the midterms after tilting Republican in 2024.
In a Friday interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Trump acknowledged his deportation strategy may have been "too tough." Asked about that by reporters on Monday, Trump responded: "My policy has not changed."
Democrats will have more latitude on oversight. They have already drawn up a list of investigative targets at the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to staffers, including detention center conditions, fatal use of force by federal agents and the 2025 deportation of Venezuelans to a Salvadoran megaprison.
“We will investigate the administration weaponizing DHS against Americans (and) its out of control immigration policies,” US Representative Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat and the soon-to-be chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, told Reuters in a statement.
The party also plans to push for greater transparency into how DHS is spending the more than $100 billion allocated by Congress since last year, staffers said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
At a Wednesday press conference at the US Capitol with House members and newly elected representatives from southwestern border states, Henry Cuellar, a centrist Texas Democrat, said he had already had conversations with Trump officials about focusing deportation efforts on criminals.
"We're not going to be extreme," Cuellar said, nodding to conservative voters across the United States who cast their votes for Democrats.
Asked for a response to this story, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers told Reuters in a statement: “The Democrats are colossally misreading the electorate if they think the American people want an extremist, anti-American immigration agenda.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.
The Democratic Party is in a “whole new world when it comes to their immigration agenda,” said Sarah Pierce, social policy director at the center-left Third Way think tank.
“They've clearly broken from the policy that we saw under the Biden administration, but they have yet to offer a proactive vision for what immigration should look like.”
Democrat Joe Biden, president from 2021 to 2025, initially rolled back some of the restrictive immigration policies of Trump's first four-year term before taking a tougher approach to the border late in his presidency.
REINING IN ICE
Some Democrats emerged from last week’s midterm elections ready for battle.
“We will rip ICE apart,” Senator-elect Peggy Flanagan said while celebrating her triumph in Minnesota, where federal immigration agents shot dead two US citizens during an enforcement surge in January.
US Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Washington state Democrat and the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee’s immigration subcommittee, pledged to summon “every single one of these corrupt people that kidnapped and detained and deported and killed people in the streets.”
Just the specter of having to testify on Capitol Hill could change the behavior of federal officials, a Democratic congressional staffer said.
In a statement to Reuters, Josh Gottheimer, a moderate Democratic representative from New Jersey, highlighted the ICE Standards Act, which he introduced in March.
“Agents need real training and body cameras,” he said. “They need to wear clear identification unless they are on an undercover operation. They must coordinate with state and local law enforcement.”
Republicans counter that they have already provided ICE with funding to purchase body cameras and have resisted Democratic attempts to place further guardrails on the agency.
On the campaign trail in 2024, Trump made no secret of his plans for an immigration crackdown. But the tactics of masked, armed federal agents, first in Minneapolis and then across the country, generated widespread outrage.
REFORMING THE SYSTEM
Jose Parra, a former US Senate aide with knowledge of current congressional discussions on immigration, said “voters moved the goal posts" last week, potentially opening the way for some stalled bills to advance.
He pointed to the Dignity Act, a bipartisan bill that would create a path to legal residence for workers while tightening border security and reforming visa programs.
Another bill likely to gain traction, Parra said, is the Dream and Promise Act, which would open a pathway to US citizenship for immigrants who arrived as children, known as “Dreamers.”
Despite Gallup polling that shows more than 80% of Americans support a legal pathway for Dreamers, even that legislation might be difficult to advance, according to a senior Senate Republican aide, who said any serious attempt would likely come closer to the next presidential election.
Parra agreed with that assessment, saying Republicans might want to "take that off the table and not let it be a messaging cudgel against them in 2028.”
Trump’s veto power will likely be an insurmountable barrier to enacting comprehensive immigration reform or clawing back the tens of billions of dollars already appropriated to ICE.
“Congress has ceded so much of its authority and so much of its power to the executive,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior ICE official. “There are real limitations on how much Congress can do.”
Still, she said, lawmakers could use funding deadlines and Senate confirmation votes as leverage. And they could pass measures redirecting ICE funding to popular programs like healthcare or school lunches, even if the bills die on Trump’s desk.
At Wednesday's press conference, US Senator Ruben Gallego, Democrat of Arizona, said his party will have to cut deals with Trump, and that members were already discussing how to move forward with a Dreamers bill by the end of 2026.
"Republicans have been saying we will have immigration reform as soon as we have a safe, secure border," Gallego said. "We have that right now."
(Reporting by Julia Harte in New York, Kristina Cooke in San Francisco and Richard Cowan in Washington. Editing by Jesse Mesner-Hage and Howard Goller)
