Sen. Baldwin Says Agency She Equipped With Record Funding Is “Out of Control”
Tuesday evening Senator Tammy Baldwin gave a statement on ICE that was tepid, and does not meet the moment. She said ICE was “out of control!” She also threatened to withhold her vote on DHS funding until ICE was “reigned in.” The final part of her statement calls out Kristi Noem by name and says that she should be fired or resign, and additionally that she would support impeachment.
Substantively there are elements of that statement that are helpful. A regular person can say “Noem should be impeached” and we would respond “hell yeah.” Senator Baldwin isn’t a regular person though, and so I want to be mad that she’s the one who isn’t specifically impeaching Noem. However it turns out that senators can’t impeach. I learned this today, and now we both know that.
Nevertheless Noem is terrible, and is lying about citizens her agency have killed in the streets! Someone should do something! And if Baldwin is threatening to withhold DHS funding until ICE is reigned in then I submit that getting rid of Noem (the dog killer that she is) does not sufficiently do that.
Later in her statement Baldwin says “We have two choices. We can either move forward and add accountability, strong accountability measures to the Homeland Security bill, or they can opt to not do so and thwart the will of the American people.” That’s an imagined binary, and actually I have a better suggestion we will get to in a second.
A “Herstory” of Tammy Baldwin and ICE
In 2024 Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) introduced the Senate version of the Border Act of 2024. It had a pittance of humanity, expanding green card access and some lubrication for the asylum process. Additionally it gave ICE a huge amount of money to expand their operations, complete a border wall in Mexico, and remove immigration judges authority over asylum cases. It is summarily a move for Democrats to lean into bipartisanship and take some hard stances on immigration. The bill did not pass, and it is widely understood to have lost energy and support from the right as to not give Democrats a win going into the election season.
To be clear this was very much the strategy of the Democrats, and the bill was significant to the Democratic platform in 2024. A lot of Dems pivoted to the right to look tough on immigration presumably to peel off some moderate votes from Trump and other Republican candidates. Tammy Baldwin campaigned pretty hard on being a border hardass actually, and I remember thinking it was gross.
I even pitched an article to the Shepherd Express begging her “to shut the fuck up about the border and fund student basic needs expenses.” No, they didn’t email me back.
I cannot stress enough how hard Baldwin leaned into, or maybe even showed her true colors, on this issue! The week before the election she gave a speech where she told a crowd "We need to vet everybody who is in this country. Anyone who's committed a crime should be deported." What the hell, Tammy!!! That strategy may have allowed Baldwin to triumph over dumb-as-rocks opponent Eric Hovde but it famously didn’t work out too well for the rest of the party!
What Are The Consequences
There is a famous Chuck Schumer quote about pivoting to conservative causes, “For every blue-collar Democrat we will lose in western P.A., we will pick up two, three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” This has never worked, but saying it doesn’t work hides the deeper evils. When we talk about it like it’s a campaign strategy akin to “spend X dollars on social media ads,” or “make a tiktok account" we miss that there are also non-electoral consequences to pivoting to the right!
DHS funding reached record heights under Joe Biden. That came after “abolish ICE” became the popular demand during Trump’s first term. Heck, during the Obama administration people were calling for the abolition of ICE! Did we forget how bad ICE was in 2017-2020? Did you forget? I am the nostalgia beagle, I remember it so you don’t have to.
Maybe Tammy Baldwin thought when Kamala Harris or Joe Biden won the presidency that they would use all that funding and make ICE magically awesome. There may even be some truth to that, and Pretti and Renee Good may still be with us. But countless immigrants whose names we may never know still would not, and that’s bad no matter which party is in the White House!
It has been said that “In the game of White Supremacy people of color aren’t the other team, they are the ball.“ We can’t flip-flop on ICE when “our guy” is in charge. Tammy Baldwin has given us every reason to doubt her commitment to human rights.
So returning to her statement, In the grand Wisconsin tradition I’m going to give it a line item veto before I can approve it. “I will not support the bill unless it has some serious accountability and reins in this chaos,”
There we go, that actually looks pretty good now. Senator Baldwin, it’s time to join the hardcore legislators out there who are doing the work, like Ilhan Omar literally putting her body on the line against these fascist freaks. Additionally this would be a good time to introduce a Senate version of Michigan Representative Shri Thanedar’s Abolish ICE Act. Because ICE must be abolished, that’s the only way forward.
