People Keep Dying in ICE Custody. 13 Democrats Back a Bill to Abolish the Agency.

Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva was at home in Georgia with his family on July 9 when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents came to arrest him. Sonimar Maria, Arenas-Silva’s sister, said her family implored the agents not to take the 45-year-old Venezuelan, mentioning his medical needs, but ICE did not listen to their pleas.

Flanked by progressive House Democrats and speaking in Spanish to reporters at a Capitol Hill press conference on July 22, Sonimar said ICE agents also ignored her family’s request to let Arenas-Silva take his medication with him. Arenas-Silva required four different medications for a medical condition, Sonimar said, but ICE allowed him to bring only one to the remote Irwin County Detention Center in rural Georgia.

“Jesús Manuel later told me on a phone call that ICE did not give him the medication he needed,” Sonimar said in a translated statement. “He went without medication during his detention until he tragically died in ICE custody on July 13 … I am 100 percent certain that he did not receive proper care.”

Arenas-Silva died while being transferred from Irwin County Detention Center to the Folkston ICE Processing Center, a roughly 100-mile drive. He was found unresponsive five days after he was arrested, according to ICE. At least 53 people have died in ICE custody since President Donald Trump returned to office and launched a mass deportation campaign led by adviser Stephen Miller, making the past fiscal year the deadliest in the agency’s history.

Additionally, at least 30 people have been shot in public or in their homes by federal immigration agents during Trump’s chaotic crackdown, and 11 have died, including multiple parents and two United States citizens. Sonimar is calling for an independent investigation into her brother’s death, but the Trump administration has consistently erected barriers to accountability for both the deadly shootings and the deaths in ICE jails.

“He was a loving son, brother, and uncle, a caring and hard-working man who came to this country to seek better opportunities,” Sonimar said of Arenas-Silva, adding that she came to Washington, D.C. to seek justice for her brother so that other families do not have to endure similar trauma.

Some Democrats are pushing for structural changes to put an end to the violence enacted by ICE, which has been emboldened under policies set by Trump and Miller. At a House Judiciary Oversight Subcommittee hearing on conditions in ICE jails on July 22, Democrats slammed the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress for spending billions of dollars to build immigrant jails and recruit poorly trained federal immigration agents while slashing funding for health care and food assistance.

Progressive House Democrats are going a step further than simply questioning ICE’s tactics and bloated budget. They propose abolishing the agency altogether and redirecting its funding to safety-net programs that can help people navigate a spiraling affordability crisis.

“Americans are demanding members of Congress pursue more than training, more than reform, and more than bare-minimum policies,” said Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Illinois) a July 22 press conference. “They are demanding that no other family suffers the pain of deportation or death at the hands of DHS’s immigration enforcement.”

In January, Ramirez introduced H.R. 7190, or the Melt ICE Act, which would dismantle ICE by ending the Department of Homeland Security’s authority to surveil and jail immigrants. The legislation would also redirect enforcement funding toward federal housing and health care programs that recently suffered budget cuts under Trump and the GOP, as well as groups that support migrants and households with noncitizen family members.

“ICE agents are murdering people in the streets, tearing families apart, abducting our neighbors, and locking them in cages,” said Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Michigan and co-sponsor of the bill. “ICE must be abolished — full stop. The billions of dollars that funded ICE should be given to the communities who suffered under their reign of terror.”

In the past month alone, ICE agents shot and killed two unarmed fathers in their vehicles while they were driving to work: Immigration agents killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero on July 13 in Maine and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo on July 7 in Texas. Both men were reportedly not initial targets for arrest and were pursued by Trump’s immigration officers in vehicle stops in what civil rights activists suspect are clear-cut cases of racial profiling. Guerrero, a husband and father of a 3-year-old, was reportedly killed by an ICE agent who was recently recruited despite a well-documented history of violence and abuse.

On July 22, Juan Jairo Coronilla Durán was fatally struck by a semi-truck in Florida while fleeing ICE agents. Coronilla Durán had a tourist visa and was visiting family in the U.S. while on vacation from Mexico. An advocacy group assisting Coronilla Durán’s wife said she thought “he was very afraid, and that’s why he ran away.” Ramirez echoed that, adding Coronilla Durán likely ran away out of fear of being arrested and detained in one of ICE’s notorious jails and prison camps, where people are dying at a record rate.

“He did what my brother would have done, he did what your sister would do, he did what your mother would do if she was stopped by ICE and looked a certain way — he ran away,” Ramirez said. “He was afraid they would take him to a private detention center where he could die in days and never see his family ever again.”

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A recent ramp-up of enforcement is impacting citizens and noncitizens alike as recently deputized and heavily armed federal agents raid homes and target random people on the street to increase Trump’s deportation numbers. A review of 1,200 incidents involving ICE and its partners by the American Civil Liberties Union found the tactics being deployed are causing civil rights violations at a “scale and severity without precedent in our nation’s recent history.”

Ramirez reminded fellow lawmakers that Congress created ICE and the Department of Homeland Security only 25 years ago following the 9/11 attacks and can be dismantled just the same.

“I know that people are saying, ‘You are radical, you want to melt ICE’; people are asking, ‘What is going to happen with detention?’” Ramirez said. “I say to people: Look at our history, and we had a Department of Justice that handled all of our immigration cases until 2003, and I want to remind people that people were not dying the way they are dying right now.”

So far, only 13 Democrats have co-sponsored Ramirez’s Melt ICE Act: Tlaib, along with Representatives Yvette Clarke (New York), Ilhan Omar (Minnesota) Yassamin Ansari (Arizona),Nydia Velázquez (New York), Adelita Grijalva (Arizona), Jesús G. “Chuy” García (Illinois), Valerie Foushee (North Carolina), Ayanna Pressley (Massachusetts), Summer Lee (Pennsylvania), Danny Davis (Illinois), LaMonica McIver (New Jersey), and Sylvia Garcia (Texas). Ramirez suggested that most of the signatories are people of color.

“To all of our white allies in Congress, this is the moment to join the movement to melt ICE,” Ramirez said. “I want to see your last names here, too.”

The Melt ICE Act has virtually zero chance of passing while the GOP holds a majority, but the bill represents an important political Rubicon for Democrats as their base pushes for change in the midterms.

As the elections approach in November, Republicans are deploying a familiar strategy of casting Democrats as radical “communists” who want to defund law enforcement. In reality, the party’s establishment has consistently provided plenty of funding for police, including in the years following the nationwide outbreak of protests against racist police violence in 2020 that called for defunding police.

Republicans painted the entirety of the Democratic Party as supporters of the “abolish ICE” and “defund the police” movements anyway, and establishment figures and pundits often mention those movements in their discussion of their electoral losses in 2024. However, Republicans are now on the back foot. Trump is deeply unpopular, with his approval ratings on the economy and immigration plummeting since taking office.

A YouGov poll released on July 21 found that about half of all U.S. adults now support abolishing ICE, including 73 percent of Democrats. Only 40 percent somewhat or strongly oppose eliminating the agency. News of ICE killings appears to be reaching voters, with 60 percent telling pollsters they heard about ICE shooting and killing people in the last week.

In a July 21 letter to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, more than 100 progressive state lawmakers, city council members, and politicos from his home state of New York demanded that Democrats in Congress come out in support of abolishing ICE. After Joan Sebastian Guerrero was killed by ICE in Maine, the debate over abolishing ICE became central to a much-watched Senate campaign in the state, with Democratic hopeful Troy Jackson recently confirming that he supports dismantling the agency.

Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a moderate Democrat, wrote in a July 15 letter to the state’s congressional delegation that the “violence has to end” before more gunshots shatter a windshield and another family loses a loved one. “ICE needs to be fundamentally reformed, and if not, then it is time to abolish it,” Mills wrote.

As Ramirez pitched the Melt ICE Act again this week, a coalition of immigrant rights groups launched End the ICE Age, a campaign to dismantle ICE as an agency and pressure Democrats to co-sponsor the Melt ICE Act.

“People are dying in ICE detention at a record-breaking rate, ICE agents are tearing families apart and shooting people on the streets, making people less safe, and causing chaos wherever they go — whether in Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Biddeford, or beyond,” said Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network. “Make no mistake, we are witnessing a watershed moment.”

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