Democratic lawmakers are increasingly calling to defund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as well as impeach Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem after a federal agent shot and killed a woman in Minnesota on Wednesday.
The defunding push is creating problems for lead Democrats, however, as they argued earlier this week that any attempt to defund ICE is off the table. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., have emphasized that the Affordable Care Act remains their priority.
Nevertheless, Wednesday's killing of a 37-year-old woman in Minneapolis has galvanized ranks of Democrats.
"Certainly everyone in that room, at least on my side, is livid at what happened to this woman," said Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., who has previously called for a government shutdown to defund ICE. "Not just a resident of Minnesota, a U.S. citizen... a 37-year-old White woman, was shot, and then they lied about it."
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"They're disappearing people off the street, and this has nothing to do with citizenship at all, increasingly, in who they're going after," argued Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Ill., said Wednesday that she plans to introduce articles of impeachment against Noem.
"Secretary Kristi Noem is an incompetent leader, a disgrace to our democracy, and I am impeaching her for obstruction of justice, violation of public trust, and self-dealing," Kelly said. "Secretary Noem wreaked havoc in the Chicagoland area, and now, her rogue ICE agents have unleashed that same destruction in Minneapolis, fatally shooting Renee Nicole Good."
While Kelly's effort is more far-fetched, Democrats seeking to throw a wrench in the legislative process over ICE funding could potentially see some success.
"Democrats cannot vote for a DHS budget that doesn't restrain the growing lawlessness of this agency," wrote Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said in a statement.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., echoed Murphy's sentiment, saying Congress cannot "keep authorizing money for these illegal killers," going on to call ICE a "rogue force."
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, on Wednesday called on Congress during a Senate hearing to impeach two federal judges, making his most elaborate case yet for imposing the extraordinary sanction on a pair of closely scrutinized jurists.
Cruz acknowledged that impeaching federal judges is exceedingly rare — 15 have been impeached in history, typically for straightforward crimes like bribery — but the Texas Republican argued it was warranted for judges James Boasberg and Deborah Boardman.
"Rarer still, until now, were the deeper offenses the framers feared most — judges who, without necessarily breaking a criminal statute, violate the public trust, subvert the constitutional order or wield their office in ways that injure society itself," Cruz said. "That is why, throughout history, Congress recognized that impeachable misconduct need not be criminal."
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Cruz, a Senate Judiciary Committee member with an extensive legal background, said the House needed to initiate impeachment proceedings over controversial gag orders Boasberg signed in 2023 and a sentence Boardman handed down last year in the case of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s attempted assassin.
Impeachment proceedings must be initiated in the House and typically run through the House Judiciary Committee.
Russell Dye, a spokesman for the GOP-led committee, said "everything is on the table" when asked if Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, was open to the idea. If the House were to vote in favor of impeachment, it would then advance to the Senate. Two-thirds of senators would need to vote to convict the judges and remove them, a highly improbable scenario because the vote would require some support from Democrats.
Cruz’s counterpart at the hearing, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., defended the judges and accused Republicans of threatening impeachment as an effort to intimidate the judiciary because it routinely issues adverse rulings against the Trump administration.
"There was a time when I'd have hoped a Senate Judiciary subcommittee would not be roped into a scheme to amplify pressure and threats against a sitting federal judge," Whitehouse said. "But here we are."
In the case of Boardman, a Biden appointee, the judge sentenced Sophie Roske, who previously went by Nicholas Roske, to eight years in prison after the Department of Justice sought a 30-year sentence. Roske pleaded guilty to attempting to murder Kavanaugh. Boardman said she factored into her sentence that Roske identified as transgender and therefore faced unique adversity.
Cruz argued Democrats' concerns about threats that judges have faced for ruling against President Donald Trump fell on deaf ears, in his view, because they did not speak out about Boardman's leniency toward Roske.
"My Democrat colleagues on this committee do not get to give great speeches about how opposed they are to violence against the judiciary, and, at the same time, cheer on a judge saying, 'Well, if you attempt to murder a Supreme Court justice, and you happen to be transgender, not a problem. We're going to deviate downward by more than two decades,'" Cruz said.
In the case of Boasberg, former special counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed several Republican Congress members' phone records while conducting an investigation into the 2020 election and Trump's role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Smith sought gag orders so that the senators would not immediately be notified about the subpoenas, and Boasberg authorized those orders.
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Prosecutors seeking gag orders is not unusual, but senators have layers of protection from prosecution under the Constitution. The targeted Republicans have decried the subpoenas, saying their rights were violated.
Smith and an official representing the federal courts have both said that Boasberg was not notified that the subpoenas and gag orders were related to members of Congress.
Rob Luther, a law professor at George Mason University, was a witness for Republicans at the hearing and said Boasberg still should not have signed the gag orders without knowing who they applied to. Luther cited stipulations included in the orders.
"One must ask on what basis Judge Boasberg found that the disclosure of subpoenas would result in destruction of or tampering with evidence, intimidation of potential witnesses, and cause serious jeopardy to the investigation, end quote," Luther said. "Did Judge Boasberg merely rubber stamp the requested gag order, or was he willfully blind?"
Smith's actions also aligned with a DOJ policy at the time that did not require the special counsel to alert the court that the subpoenas targeted senators, a point raised by Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., during the hearing. Luther said the policy did not matter.
"DOJ policy does not supplant federal law," he said.
In one of his latest displays of political score-settling, President Donald Trump endorsed a Republican challenger running against Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, whom Trump pardoned just last month.
The endorsement, which Trump announced in a Truth Social post Tuesday, went to Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina. Trump also used the post to lash out at Cuellar for what he described as “disloyalty” for seeking reelection as a Democrat.
“I don’t know why, but the fact that Henry Cuellar would be running against Donald J. Trump, and the Republican Party, seems to be a great act of disloyalty and, perhaps more importantly, the act of a fool who would immediately go back to a Political Party, the Radical Left Democrats, whose views are different from his, but not nearly good or strong enough to be a true Republican,” Trump wrote in one of two lengthy posts.
Trump appeared most irate at Cuellar’s decision to return immediately to electoral politics, suggesting that he never expected Cuellar to run for office again.
Cuellar was indicted in 2024 and charged with bribery, unlawful foreign influence, and money laundering, but he has denied making any deal with Trump in exchange for the pardon. He filed to run for reelection the week after Trump issued it, a move that reportedly angered the president at the time.
Trump’s endorsement of Tijerina notably came hours after he publicly predicted that he would face impeachment if Republicans lose their House majority in November. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report currently rates Cuellar’s district as “lean Democratic.”
On Tuesday, Cuellar again thanked Trump for the pardon but declined to engage with his accusations of disloyalty.
“As mentioned previously, my family and I thank President Trump for his pardon,” Cuellar said in a statement to NBC News. “I look forward to a resounding victory in November.”
Cuellar, who was first elected to Congress in 2004, has long proven difficult to unseat. Even as Republicans gained ground in the region in 2024, his district was one of just 13 House seats nationwide that elected a Democrat while also backing Trump for president. Cuellar won his race with 53% of the vote, outperforming Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
But within his own party, Cuellar remains an ideological outlier. He is the only anti-abortion Democrat in Congress and frequently sides with Republicans on issues ranging from reproductive rights to border security.
Still, Republicans see an opening. The National Republican Congressional Committee has targeted Cuellar’s seat as a top pickup opportunity following a redistricting overhaul approved last summer.
According to The Texas Tribune, the new map removes roughly half of Cuellar’s current constituents and gives Trump a 10-point advantage—significantly complicating Cuellar’s path to reelection.
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Tijerina welcomed Trump’s backing on X, calling it an honor.
“Together, we are going to take South Texas back and put America First,” he wrote.
A former minor league baseball player, Tijerina was once a Democrat who switched parties on Fox News in 2024.
Trump, meanwhile, made clear that his support for Tijerina is as much about retribution as ideology. While reiterating that he would still pardon Cuellar if given the chance, Trump said the congressman “deserves to be beaten badly in the upcoming election.”
“Henry should not be allowed to serve in Congress again,” Trump wrote. “Tano’s views are stronger, better, and far less tainted than Henry’s, and he has my Complete and Total Endorsement to be the next Representative from Texas’ 28th Congressional District.”
In a follow-up post, Trump shared photos of letters from Cuellar’s daughters, urging him to pardon their parents. Trump also pardoned Cuellar’s wife, Imelda, who had faced related charges.
“I never assumed he would be running for Office again, and certainly not as a Democrat, who essentially destroyed his life even with the Pardon given,” Trump wrote, adding that, “despite doing him by far the greatest favor of his life,” he now felt compelled to back a challenger.
“Nobody knows Henry Cuellar better than Donald J. Trump,” he said, calling Cuellar “a weak and incompetent version of me.”
Cuellar, for his part, argued last month that the case against him was “absolutely” tied to his criticism of the Biden administration’s border policies. Prosecutors alleged in 2024 that Cuellar and his wife accepted nearly $600,000 in bribes from an Azerbaijani oil and gas company and a Mexican bank. Both pleaded not guilty.
Texas’ primaries are scheduled for early March, but several other candidates are running in Cuellar’s 28th Congressional District, including Republican Eileen Day and Democrats Andrew Vantine and Ricardo Villarreal.
Trump also issued several other House endorsements on Tuesday, backing Amanda McKinney in Washington’s 4th District and issuing a rare dual endorsement for Gina Swoboda and Jay Feely in Arizona’s 1st District.
Taken together, the episode underscores a familiar Trump pattern: loyalty demanded, favors weaponized, and punishment reserved for those who fail to show sufficient deference.