Republicans are waking up to the awful optics in Minneapolis

For a year the plight of Democrats in Washington has been that of the protester at a “noise demo” who clangs pots and pans: loud, righteous and mostly ineffectual. Completely shut out of power, they have watched Republicans roll over as Donald Trump seized authorities once held by Congress. Democrats’ only leverage is their ability to withhold government funding, a trick they tried in October and are set to deploy again as a budgeting deadline looms on January 30th, this time in outrage at the president’s siege of Minneapolis. Now even some Republicans acknowledge that the immigration crackdown there has gone deeply wrong after the shooting of two citizens by federal officers.

One cause of this change in mood seems to be the administration’s immediate impulse to smear Alex Pretti, a protester killed on January 24th. Stephen Miller, a White House adviser, called him a “would-be assassin” and “domestic terrorist”. But Republicans could see the videos that clearly showed otherwise. That the administration vilified Mr Pretti for lawfully carrying a firearm rankled gun-rights groups. Some have demanded a proper investigation. Even MAGA loyalists such as Kevin Stitt, Oklahoma’s governor and chair of the National Governors Association, said the president was “getting bad advice” and asked: “What is the endgame?”

A second explanation of the change can be found in the polls. Mr Trump’s deportation campaign increasingly looks like a political liability. Three in five Americans say immigration officers’ tactics are too forceful. More want to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) than want to preserve it. Support for that far-left proposition has risen even among Republican voters. Now nearly a fifth back it, up by ten percentage points from June.

This suggests the inescapable tension in Mr Trump’s pledge to launch the largest deportation operation in history. The campaign envisaged by hardliners like Mr Miller—a programme of indiscriminate, mass removals—is neither pretty nor popular. It requires detaining law-abiding immigrants and instilling so much fear that people “self-deport”. Sarah Pierce, an analyst at Third Way, a think-tank, says the animating question among her fellow immigration-watchers is whether Mr Miller’s ideas prove so powerful in this administration that they can survive the negative polling.

For now, his boss seems sensitive to the numbers. He has recalled Gregory Bovino, the bellicose face of his campaign, from Minneapolis. Tom Homan, who advocates a more targeted approach, has taken charge. Two Republican senators, Thom Tillis and Lisa Murkowski, have called for Kristi Noem, head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), to resign.

In the meantime the federal government is heading for a partial shutdown come January 30th, when funding for six agencies, including DHS, runs out. Democrats are demanding constraints on ICE as part of any legislation. What little leverage they have lies in the Senate, where a unanimous Republican caucus, if one can be forged, still needs seven Democrats to overcome the filibuster. Republicans could limit the impact of a shutdown by decoupling DHS funding from the other five agencies; but with the House out of session until February 2nd, they say the soonest they could do that is next week.

Democrats want several guardrails. One is a guarantee that the feds will co-operate with local investigators probing ICE misconduct. Another is better training for agents and a mandate that they wear body cameras. Yet another is to enact the “Bivens fix”, extending the scope for plaintiffs to sue federal officials who violate their constitutional rights. Decades ago, in Bivens v Six Unknown Named Agents, the Supreme Court established that right—only to chip away at it in subsequent cases. Beyond the wrangling over specific concessions, though, is a broader fight. Democrats do not want to fund an agency that has run amok and hand it any more cash than it already has.

Indeed ICE got such a massive infusion over the summer from Mr Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that it can fund its operations twice over for the next three years, says Bobby Kogan of the Centre for American Progress, a progressive think-tank. Customs and Border Protection has enough to last between nine and 11 months. Republicans, then, can ignore Democrats and wait out the shutdown without impacting ICE at all. They took that tack during the shutdown last autumn, and Democrats eventually folded. If Republicans give ground this time, it will be because public opinion tells them they must. ■