Minnesota’s New Senator Vows to ‘Rip ICE Apart.’ ICE’s $74 Billion Is Locked In Through 2029.

Minnesota’s next U.S. senator stood in front of her victory party Tuesday night and told the crowd what she plans to do to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “We will rip ICE apart,” Democrat Peggy Flanagan said. The room roared. “That’s right.”

Flanagan beat Republican Michele Tafoya 1,520,868 votes to 1,233,464, or 53.7% to 43.6%, in the state’s unofficial count, and takes the seat Democrat Tina Smith is giving up. She is one of the new Democrats who flipped Congress on Tuesday, and she didn’t treat ICE as a side issue. It was in the middle of her to-do list, right after lowering costs and right before ending the war in Iran and passing Medicare for All.

Here is the full passage, from NBC News’ unedited feed of the speech: “We will rip ICE apart. That’s right. And we, we have the opportunity to replace it with an immigration system that is grounded in public safety for everybody. Dignity and due process, which by the way is still a part of our Constitution. A system that does not tear children away from their families.”

Earlier in the same speech she called ICE agents “masked goons shooting our neighbors and terrorizing our communities,” and said that when Trump “sent thugs to our state, you sent his private army packing.” Those are the federal officers who arrest illegal aliens, many of them with criminal records, under laws Congress itself passed.

She said it before, and so did Jayapal

This wasn’t a heat-of-the-moment line. Flanagan used the same words in August, in a post about an ICE detention center in Appleton, Minnesota.

Over in the House, the Democrat most likely to run immigration oversight said much the same thing the morning after the election. Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington is the ranking member, the senior Democrat, on the House Judiciary Committee’s immigration subcommittee, which puts her in line for the gavel when her party takes over in January.

Jayapal has been practicing. Because Republicans control the subcommittee, she has held unofficial “shadow” hearings since June 2025 under the title “Kidnapped and Disappeared,” eight of them so far, listed on her official House site. One, in January, was called “Trump’s Deadly Assault on Minnesota.” In a majority, those hearings come with real subpoenas.

The part they didn’t mention: the money is already spent

Here is the hole in the “rip ICE apart” plan. Most of ICE’s money for the next three years doesn’t go through the yearly budget fights Democrats are about to control. It was written into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the reconciliation law Trump signed in July 2025.

Section 90003 of that law gives ICE $45 billion for detention, “to remain available until September 30, 2029.” Section 100052 adds $29.85 billion for hiring, deportation flights, 287(g) partnerships with local police and more, on the same deadline. A breakdown published by Rep. Lauren Underwood, an Illinois Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, puts the total for ICE operations at $74.1 billion.

Think of it like a paid-off lease. A new landlord can make noise, but the rent for the next three years has already cleared. To take that money back, Congress would have to pass a new law cancelling it, and that law would land on Trump’s desk. Democrats already know how that ends. The day after the election, Trump answered their sweep with a red hat that says “VETO.” Overriding him takes two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate, and Tuesday didn’t come close to giving Democrats that.

The same goes for “ripping apart” the agency itself. ICE exists because of the Homeland Security Act of 2002. Getting rid of it, or replacing it with the new “system” Flanagan described, takes a bill that passes both chambers and gets Trump’s signature.

What a Democratic Congress can actually do

That doesn’t mean nothing changes. ICE’s regular yearly budget still runs through annual spending bills, and a Democratic House and Senate can squeeze it, attach strings, or force a shutdown fight over it. Committee chairs can subpoena officials and agents, demand records and drag them into hearings, which is exactly what Jayapal has been promising.

The fight that Flanagan and Jayapal picked is over the agency that enforces the immigration laws already on the books. Voters in Minnesota sent Flanagan to the Senate. They didn’t repeal those laws, and they didn’t repeal the money.

What to watch: committee assignments when the new Congress is sworn in on Jan. 3, 2027, whether Jayapal gets the immigration gavel and issues her first subpoenas, and whether Democrats try to cancel any of the reconciliation money for ICE in their first spending bill.