Senate Democrats have repeatedly blocked legislation this past month to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Democratic leaders are refusing to end the partial shutdown until DHS implements a series of guardrails, which include prohibiting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers from wearing masks and requiring them to wear body cameras and show identification.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) accused Democrats of negotiating in bad faith because “they see this [DHS shutdown] as politically advantageous to them.” He’s right in this sense: The politics increasingly favor Democrats.
Large majorities favor the changes that Democrats propose. Polling shows that over 90% of Americans favor requiring ICE to wear body cameras. In a recent YouGov/Economist poll, about 75% said that ICE officers should be required to wear identifying uniforms and 59% say masked agents should be prohibited. Half of the respondents in that poll supported ending ICE altogether, compared to just 39% who opposed abolishing the agency.
Few prioritize funding ICE and DHS
Moreover, funding for ICE and DHS ranks at the very bottom of Americans’ spending priorities. Drawing on YouGov/Economist surveys, the graph below shows that more Americans prefer increasing to decreasing federal government spending on everything from veterans to the environment to national defense. That fits a familiar pattern in which few Americans say that the country spends “too little” on most governmental programs and national problems.
But more Americans want to decrease than increase spending on DHS and ICE. Only 27% are in favor of more money for ICE. In a recent Quinnipiac University poll, opposition to funding ICE was even more lopsided: 51% favored decreasing funding and only 14% favored increasing it.
As the graph shows, defunding ICE is actually slightly more popular than cutting foreign aid. That’s noteworthy because foreign aid almost always comes in last place on the General Social Survey’s 20+ questions about which specific policies the country should spend more money on.
A winning strategy for Democrats?
Democrats’ messaging during the partial shutdown is bolstered not only by the broad public opposition to increased spending on DHS and ICE, but also by the wide gap between the Trump administration’s spending priorities and the priorities of the American public.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) of 2025 financed its massive budget increases for DHS and ICE in part by cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from popular programs like Medicaid, SNAP, environmental protection, and education. But Americans want to spend more, not less, in those areas. So, it’s not surprising that Democrats have introduced legislation to repeal the $75 billion increase in ICE’s budget and shift those savings to reverse OBBBA’s cuts to Medicaid.
In short, it’s simply good election-year politics for Democrats to take a stand against unpopular spending for DHS and ICE that has come at the expense of funding for popular safety net programs.
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