Tell Your Senators: Rein in ICE/CBP! No Funding for Political Murders!
Call BOTH of your Senators.
Call Script
My name is __________. I am a constituent, and my zip code is _______. I am a member of Indivisible SF.
The unjustified and illegal ICE/CBP murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti are part of a broader pattern of unchecked violence, impunity, and denial of basic human rights carried out by federal immigration enforcement agencies against our communities. As my Senator, you cannot allow them to continue intimidating, abusing, ethnic-cleansing, and murdering our families, friends, and neighbors. You must push for an appropriations bill that puts serious restrictions on ICE/CBP, ends its dragnet raids, and does not add a penny to its already bloated budget.
Strip the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) appropriation bill out of the six-bill Minibus.
Refuse to vote for – and support a filibuster against – any DHS appropriation bill that fails to rein in ICE/CBP, even if that means voting against the entire Minibus.
Pressure Minority Leader Schumer and other Democratic senators to support a vote against cloture that would end a filibuster
Demand an impartial, joint federal-Minnesota investigation into the ICE/CBP murders and also the lies, cover-ups, and character assassinations against Renee Good and Alex Pretti perpetrated by the MAGA Regime.
Background
Trump's MAGA Regime campaigned on – and came into office vowing – to implement a massive deportation campaign targeting more than 10,000,000 nonwhite immigrants.This is ethnic cleansing. It cannot be done without trampling on the Constitutional rights that protect all Americans – citizens and non-citizen alike. Police violence, military occupation, usurpation of power, and destruction of our traditional checks-and-balances democracy are the inevitable result.
For months now, ICE and other federal agents have escalated their operations in neighborhoods across the country, resulting in increasingly disturbing scenes and illegal conduct. Our communities have been left reeling as agents have arrested U.S. citizens, dragged children from their beds in the middle of the night in zip-ties, rounded up people based only on the color of their skins or their spoken accents, and incarcerated them in distant prisons.
On January 7, ICE agents shot Renee Good to death while she was in her car trying to avoid them. On Saturday, CBP agents shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse who cared for veterans, after brutally assaulting him in front of multiple witnesses in Minneapolis. They were killed seeking to protect their communities by bearing witness to CBP and ICE operations. These acts of violence are just the latest in a series of escalations from ICE and CBP.
Our senators have a choice. They can vote for a DHS funding bill that gives ICE and Border Patrol more money to brutalize our neighbors or they can say ENOUGH! We must demand that our senators – especially our Democratic senators -- refuse to give ICE and Border Patrol one more penny of taxpayer money or vote for any funding bill that doesn’t get these political storm trooper thugs off our streets and under control.
Last week the House passed a 1059 page Homeland Security funding bill which seven Democrats voted for. Democratic Minority Leader Jeffries voted against the bill but chose to free other Democrats to vote for it. The bill – which is now before the Senate – increases funding for ICE, including $400 million more for detention and $370 million more for its enforcement budget compared to last year. That’s on top of the $170 billion allocated by Trump’s Big Ugly Bill for his mass deportation machine.
The conservative Democrats who voted for the bill claim that they did so because it included some minor reforms such as funding for body cameras, officer training, and the DHS Inspector General’s Office.
Those so-called 'reforms' are completely inadequate, cosmetic shams. We’ve already seen what ICE will do on camera -- one filmed the killing of Renee Good on his own cellphone. And the MAGA Regime is both actively suppressing bodycam videos while blatantly lying about and distorting citizen videos. There’s no reason to think that giving the MAGA Regime more money to investigate itself will stop the violence unfolding in our streets.
Congress can end ICE/CBP deployments, restrict their dragnet operations, racial profiling, and mass surveillance; and prevent these agencies from stealing funds from other programs to run their mass deportation machine. Such provisions would have real impact on the ground, but none of them are included in this bill.
If the DHS appropriation bill is not passed and there is no Continuing Resolution (CR), some "non-essential" DHS employees will be furloughed – but the law enforcement activities of ICE CBP, and other agencies will continue unchanged. The same is true if the entire Minibus fails without a CR, but on a larger scale as some entire agencies might go into shutdown.
Conservative Democrats are arguing that a shutdown is bad politics and a CR fails to implement the 'reforms' they claim they won in the House bill. This is political spin at its most flagrant. The fundamental issue is political. Congress has to summon enough political will to step up and demand accountability. They can only do that by taking some demonstrable ACTION that says ENOUGH!
Block the DHS Appropriations bill until it contains real, substantive reforms that rein in ICE and CBP.
References
U.S. deportation tracker: Counting arrests, deportations, NBC News 4/15/25
Near Certain Cataclysmic Consequences of a Mass Deportation Program, NASW (Nat'l Assoc. Social Workers)
Lawmakers scramble to avert partial shutdown, The Hill, 1/19
House Appropriations Committee Statement on Homeland Security Funding Bill
Jeffries Won’t Whip Vote Against ICE Funding, American Prospect. 1/21/26
Senate Republicans Steamroll Democrats on Another ICE Funding Increase, Migrant Insider, 1/20/26
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