Washington, DC – Advocates have called on US lawmakers to seize on the tanking public approval of President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement drive as outrage continues to grow over the killing of a United States citizen by an immigration agent in Minnesota.

During a news conference on Wednesday, several immigration experts said lawmakers have a unique opportunity to enact reforms as opinion has turned on Trump’s mass deportation pledges, an issue that helped carry the president to his second term during the 2024 election.

The events in Minnesota, they said, have underscored a grim future of unchecked US immigration enforcement, particularly in light of last year’s massive infusion of cash into the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

“I think we are really at an inflexion point here,” said Kate Voigt, the senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“We’ve seen a swell of grassroots actions over the past few weeks. More and more people are seeing that ICE is dangerous, violent, operating with impunity. More and more people are angry, scared, motivated, and more and more people are looking to their members of Congress for action.”

To be sure, a change of direction remains an enormous undertaking, according to observers.

Trump’s tax bill, passed last year by the Republican-controlled Congress, which the president dubbed his “Big Beautiful Bill”, included a gargantuan windfall of $170bn for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

About $75bn of that was allocated to ICE over the next four years – $45bn to grow detention capacity and $30bn to boost enforcement operations. That comes on top of ICE’s annual operating budget, which has hovered around $10bn in recent years and is subject to congressional approval.

The additional funding has been described by critics as a “slush fund” with little oversight.

It makes ICE the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency by miles, while feeding what the Brennan Center for Justice has called a new “deportation industrial complex”.

Shifting public opinion

As Trump begins the second year of his second term, his administration controls an ICE force that has doubled in size in recent months, now topping 22,000 agents. They are tasked with reaching a ballooning daily detention goal of 100,000, nearly three times the typical rate, as well as a target of one million deportations a year, far beyond the 605,000 the administration reported during Trump’s first year in office.

Advocates say US residents are beginning to understand what those numbers portend.

Video recording of the killing of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in a Minneapolis suburb on January 7 flashflooded across social media, casting doubt, if not completely contradicting, the Trump administration’s immediate claims that Good was attempting to run over an immigration officer when he opened fire.

Within minutes, Trump officials labelled Good a “domestic terrorist”, with the federal government soon dismissing local authorities from taking part in the investigation and repudiating calls for a customary civil rights probe.

The administration then sent hundreds more federal agents to the state, bringing the total to 3,000, as it portrayed protests that spread to hundreds of cities across the US as the work of “agitators” and “insurrectionists”. The Department of Justice has since opened investigations into Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and state Governor Tim Walz, two of the most vocal critics of the administration’s actions, for alleged conspiracy to impede immigration enforcement.

The State of Minnesota, as well as the cities of Minneapolis and St Paul, have launched a lawsuit alleging ICE agents have regularly tread on the civil liberties of residents. Images and videos of sometimes violent confrontations between immigration agents and state residents have proliferated on social media, with several instances of US citizens being harassed or detained.

During a news conference on Tuesday, local police officials in the state also said they have received a deluge of reports of ICE agents trampling on residents’ rights.

Mark Bruley, the chief of police for the Minneapolis suburb Brooklyn Park, said residents are regularly being stopped “with no cause and are being forced to produce paperwork to determine if they are here legally”.

“We started hearing from our police officers the same complaints as they fell victim to this while off duty,” Bruley added. “Every person who has had this happen to them is a person of colour.”

Speaking at Wednesday’s briefing, Heidi Altman, the vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, said recent events have shown “ICE and border patrol agents are not using taxpayer dollars for the purpose of immigration enforcement”.

“They’re using it for the purpose of protecting and projecting the absolute power and executive branch of the president of the United States,” Altman said.

That perception appears to bear out in public opinion polling. A recent CBS News/YouGov poll conducted from January 14 to 16 found an equal split on Trump’s immigration pledges, but growing discontent with how they are being implemented. About 52 percent felt that ICE was making communities less safe, while 61 percent said the agency’s tactics were “too tough”.

Another poll conducted by the ACLU found that 55 percent of voters support ending mass ICE raids targeting immigrants, while a whopping 84 percent said they supported people’s right to “safely observe, record, and document ICE activities”.

An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that while Trump’s approval on immigration was largely split 50 to 49 percent among voters in March 2025, the proportion of those who disapproved rose to 61 percent as of mid-January.

For his part, Trump has blamed the shifting tides on unfair media coverage, urging DHS and ICE to better publicise the “violent criminals” targeted in the 3,000 arrests the administration says immigration agents have made in Minnesota.

“Show the Numbers, Names, and Faces of the violent criminals, and show them NOW,” Trump said in a recent post on Truth Social account.

“The people will start supporting the Patriots of ICE, instead of the highly paid troublemakers, anarchists, and agitators!”

‘Business as usual’

The US Congress, which controls the so-called “power of the purse” in its budgetary discretion, remains slimly controlled by Republicans, who have shown little appetite for contradicting Trump on one of his marquee policy pillars.

Democrats have introduced a slate of legislative actions to siphon funding from ICE, constrain detentions, force ICE officers to unmask, and even to impeach DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, but all have proved non-starters.

More broadly, the party has remained divided on its approach, with some political strategists warning of continued perceived weakness on immigration, which was seen as an Achilles heel in the Democrats’ rout in the 2024 election.

Advocates who spoke on Wednesday, meanwhile, said lawmakers had an immediate opportunity to send a message as they negotiate a bill to apportion annual funding to the DHS.

The current bill would increase ICE’s annual detention budget by $400m from last year, while increasing its enforcement budget by over $300m. That’s on top of the billions of dollars already allocated last year, while offering little in the way of best-practice reforms or oversight, advocates said.

“It is insane to me to think that anybody would vote to give more money to an already bloated agency,” said Beatriz Lopez, the founder and director of the Democracy Power Project, who called the bill an important opportunity to “check” ICE.

Added Amy Fischer, director for refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International USA: “Democrats and Republicans came to the table to pull together this bill as if it’s just business as usual, as if it’s just another year”.

“What we are trying to communicate here is that we can’t actually do business as usual anymore when we have a hyper-militarised agency running lawless in our country, killing US citizens,” she said. “What we’re asking members of Congress to do is actually respond in a way that will hold back this agency, will hold back the lawlessness.”