Democratic Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego came just short of saying that ICE should be abolished completely, instead calling for the agency to be "totally torn down" and replaced with an agency that's not run by a bunch of lawless thugs like we're seeing now.
Gallego also told CNN's Jake Tapper he supports a funding freeze when the bill to fund the government comes up for a vote again at the end of this month:
TAPPER: A CNN poll this week found that half of Americans, more than half, really, think ICE is making cities less safe.
A growing number of Democrats are renewing calls to abolish ICE entirely in the wake of the death of Renee Good a couple weeks ago. You have said that ICE is a problem, it's out of control, but that abolishing ICE would be a mistake. Why?
GALLEGO: Well, look, I think ICE needs to be totally torn down. It has to be created in the image of what people want, right?
And what does that look like? From my experience running in Arizona, in a very hard, hard state when it comes to immigration and immigration issues, people want immigration enforcement that goes after criminals, right, and focuses on criminals, and immigration enforcement that is actually focused on security, and not the goon squad that has come from Stephen Miller and Donald Trump, one that issues warrants, one that doesn't have people masked and acting like we're a Third World police force.
What we're seeing right now is not what we want from ICE. And we can create and have a force that's actually focused on immigration and on security, and not this type of intimidation that's happening right now.
TAPPER: As you know, there's a government funding bill that comes due this month, and there's a growing push by some Democrats in the House and Senate to freeze ICE funding as a point of contention in the government funding bill.
A year ago, you voted to expand ICE funding. What are you going to do this week, this time? Because Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said -- quote -- "Democrats cannot vote for a Department of Homeland Security budget that doesn't restrain the growing lawlessness of this agency."
GALLEGO: Yes, he's 100 percent right, and I'm talking to him.
We cannot vote for anything that actually adds more money and doesn't constrain ICE. It's not what the -- what we want out of ICE. Again, we want a security force that is focused on targeting and deporting criminals. What they're doing right now is none of that. What they're doing right now is actually suppressing U.S. citizens, racially profiling in all parts of our country, bringing violence to areas that you don't need.
You have men with very little training shooting U.S. citizens. This is not at all what we need. And I'm certainly not going to fund something of that nature if it's only going to cause more and more problems and more harm and less security for Americans and everyday people that are just trying to live their lives.
TAPPER: Even if that means shutting down the government? And are there enough Democrats that agree with that the government actually will be shut down?
GALLEGO: I can't speak for everybody else, but if I have to shut down the portion of ICE -- just to be clear, we're not shutting down the rest of the government -- the portion of ICE that is causing this kind of harm, racially profiling people, terrorizing our cities, I know the implications of that. I know the political implications potentially of that.
But we cannot keep funding this type of goon squads that are just spreading throughout the whole country just to enforce some weird policy position that Stephen Miller has, where he thinks that we have to punish blue cities.
