Don’t Stop at ICE, Says Progressive Dem: Abolish the Department of Homeland Security

Rep. Delia Ramirez is expected to introduce a bill to abolish the Department of Homeland Security and eliminate all immigrant detention in the United States on Tuesday, the Illinois Democrat shared exclusively with The Intercept. 

The Reimagining Safety Act would repeal “duplicative and overreaching terrorism laws,” according to the bill summary and text, and curtail the widespread surveillance state that emerged in the wake of 9/11 terror attacks.

It comes the day after agents from Homeland Security Investigations searched the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., in what the Department of Justice has described as an opaque “federal criminal investigation.” HSI is a component of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the agency at the center of mounting concerns about the violent weaponization of DHS against immigrants and the Trump administration’s perceived political enemies.

The sweeping legislation faces long odds in Congress, but Ramirez argues that strictly limiting the government’s immigration enforcement apparatus is critical for public safety in the wake of yet another shooting by federal immigration agents.

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Last Thursday, an ICE agent shot 28-year-old Oscar Belgal in the neck by firing into his car, where Belgal’s 5-year-old child was in the backseat, in New York City. Belgal was the latest of at least 25 people shot by federal immigration agents in the past year; six of those shootings were fatal. Deaths in detention are also surging under Trump. As of early October, at least 28 people have reportedly died in ICE custody this year, according to the National Immigration Project.

“Just this week, our communities were reminded that DHS is a weapon: pointed at a father shot in front of his 5-year-old and at Congresswoman Omar, who is using her voice to demand an end to fascism,” wrote Ramirez in a statement to The Intercept. “It is clear that now is the time to reimagine our safety, dismantle DHS, abolish ICE, and end the use of broad authorities to circumvent our rights and due process.”

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Ramirez’s bill seeks to replace DHS with a new agency called the Department of Community Safety, which would oversee the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The new department would also fund new public safety measures like providing support to community violence intervention programs and public health-backed approaches to gun violence. And it would implement a new program where social workers, medical professionals, and interpreters aid asylum-seekers who arrive at the border.

Other DHS functions would be transferred to existing agencies. The DOJ would take over immigration enforcement authority; the Department of Transportation would assume the functions of the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard; and the Department of the Treasury would conduct customs enforcement.

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The Department of Homeland Security has only existed since George W. Bush established it in 2003, ushering in a new era of broad federal surveillance and policing powers that the new legislation now seeks to roll back.

For example, the bill would prevent the federal government from placing people on the “no-fly list” without a criminal conviction or warrant. Civil liberties advocates have frequently criticized the database that restricts people from air travel, arguing it’s arbitrary, secretive, and racially biased.

The legislation would also terminate the ability of the secretary of state to declare “foreign terrorist” organizations, arguing that the arbitrary list has been weaponized against protesters and civil liberties groups.

In 2025, Trump’s State Department attempted to revoke the visas of several students who had protested or spoken out against Palestine under the guise that their support for Palestinians amounted to “material support” for Hamas, making them immediately deportable. The Treasury Department, meanwhile, in August sanctioned Palestine Action, a U.K.-based group that opposes Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as a foreign terrorist organization, allowing the federal government to freeze all the group’s U.S. assets, impose travel restrictions, and ban U.S. companies from conducting business with the organization.

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The raid on Omar’s home, Ramirez said, is just the latest example to underscore how the Trump administration has weaponized DHS in particular. President Donald Trump and his allies have routinely and without evidence accused Omar, who became a U.S. citizen in 2000, of immigration fraud and threatened to deport her back to Somalia.

In a statement to The Intercept, Omar spokesperson Jackie Rogers called the raid “an outrageous abuse of power and an unprecedented escalation in the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies.”

Ramirez said the search was an example of DHS “acting as designed.”

“DHS is not rogue,” wrote the congresswoman. “For 23 years, since its inception, DHS has been utilized by the government to target and persecute those they consider the public enemy — whether it is Muslim-Americans, Haitians escaping violence, Latinos yearning for a better life, or dissenting voices demanding an end to the genocide in Palestine and the kidnapping of our neighbors.”

Congress is currently in recess until after the November elections to give members a chance to campaign, which means the bill won’t get a vote until November 9 at the earliest. The legislation is highly unlikely to pass this session. Republicans maintain the majority, and only a handful of Democratic members have called for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Still fewer have called for abolishing the Department of Homeland Security.

But Ramirez said she hopes this bill shows what is legislatively possible if lawmakers want to unravel the surveillance and carceral state that has arisen in the last two decades. 

“Every person dead in detention, everyone shot or killed by ICE and CBP, every neighbor deported to a third country, every family separated, every community FEMA failed,” wrote Ramirez, “every miscarriage due to substandard care, every dissenter wrongfully branded, targeted, and persecuted as ‘terrorist,’ and every threat against our elections by Trump, Markwayne [Mullin], and [Stephen] Miller is a reason DHS must be dismantled and something new must take its place.”