As workers prepare to march in the streets on May Day, congressional Republicans are moving to use a budget reconciliation process to add $70 billion in new funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. No legitimate reform is attached. No oversight is required. And many of the people in the crosshairs of this expanded deportation machine are among the workers we march for on May Day.
This term, the Trump administration restarted worksite raids — enforcement actions the Biden administration had mostly paused — and aimed those raids at workers, not the employers exploiting them. Indeed, companies exploiting such workers are almost never held accountable. Thus, workers who fear deportation don’t report wage theft. They don’t report unsafe conditions. They don’t organize. Research on previous enforcement surges found that when immigration raids increase, the willingness of workers to make workplace injury complaints falls, and minimum wage violations rise — not only among immigrant workers but also among everyone working alongside them. The suppression spreads. The terror and its associated chilling effect are not a side effect; it’s the intended effect.
This term, the Trump administration restarted worksite raids and aimed those raids at workers, not the employers exploiting them.
The $70 billion request is outrageous if for no other reason than we have already seen what the Trump administration does when it has unlimited resources and no accountability: masked agents smashing car windows and grabbing parents in front of their children. The administration wants no guardrails against racial profiling. It wants no accountability for the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two U.S. citizens shot dead during this year’s federal paramilitary surge in Minnesota. Republicans want to give ICE billions of dollars more even as it makes no effort to rein in White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s mass deportation operation.
All the reasons above are why Rep. Delia Ramirez helped introduce the Melt ICE Act, and they’re why we should see this May Day as not just another protest but as a reckoning. The bill would begin dismantling Trump’s expanded deportation machine. Not reform it. Not alter who oversees it. Dismantle it. Because the problem is not that ICE lacks accountability. It’s that an agency with so much money, so much power and so little oversight is designed for impunity. ICE is designed to be a vehicle for terror, not safety.
ICE’s total funding is already larger than the combined budgets of the FBI; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the U.S. Marshals. The administration has requested enough new funding to support the removal of one million people per year. That is not security. The administration is pushing for a domestic enforcement apparatus operating at a scale our country has never attempted, and $70 billion more would lock in such outrageous and disproportionate spending for three more years.
To give the funding cover, Republicans will begin to advocate for any number of “immigration reform” bills that fail to meet the moment. Don’t be fooled. Republican efforts to advance these bills are not earnest. They are designed to give members facing competitive races something to point to while big corporations, profiteers and private interests rake in record profits from building out the enforcement machinery and exploiting workers fearing deportation. You fund the machine to hurt immigrants. You hold a press conference about reform to lie to workers.
On May Day, FIRM members in more than 30 states will march alongside labor unions and community organizations that understand what is at stake. They are marching while Republicans’ additional $70 billion hangs over their heads. They are marching because the same Congress that funds the raids and cuts working people’s programs and services also refuses to pass a real pathway to citizenship, which would give workers the legal standing to report abuse, organize and participate fully in the economy.
A true pathway to citizenship advanced in bills like the American Dream and Promise Act and the Renewing Immigration Provisions of the Immigration Act of 1929, paired with the Melt ICE Act, is what would actually bring about change — not performative bills that are designed to fail. And not press conferences timed to election cycles. We need legislation that meets the scale of what is being built against immigrant communities and starts tearing it down. To pass immigration reform that truly meets the moment will require the power of the people and legislation endorsed by people-powered movements.
Immigrant workers helped build our country. They are still building our country. This May Day, they are marching for the right to stay in it, and we are introducing legislation to make sure they can.
Rep. Delia Ramirez
Delia Ramirez represents Illinois' 3rd Congressional District in the House of Representatives.
Andy Kang is the managing director of the Fair Immigration Reform Movement, a national coalition of immigrant rights organizations.