On Thursday, Senate Democrats reached a deal with the Trump White House to extend funding for the Department of Homeland Security—which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—for two weeks as the two parties haggle over cosmetic changes to federal immigration policy that will do nothing to abolish the agencies or end their illegal and murderous operations.

The agreement underscores that the Democratic Party will do nothing to stop the growth of the immigration Gestapo or oppose the Trump administration in any meaningful sense of the word. In addition to ensuring funding for the same agencies responsible for the murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex F. Pretti, the deal clears the way for the passage of five other major 2026 spending bills, including funding for the Department of Defense, Labor-Health and Human Services-Education, Transportation-Housing and Urban Development, and the State Department.

Crucially, the bill funds the Department of Defense through September 30. This is under conditions in which the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier is steaming toward Iran less than four weeks after the US military illegally kidnapped Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and his wife. The Democrats, a party of Wall Street and war, will do nothing to stop Trump’s attacks on workers in America or anywhere else, because they represent the same class interests as Trump and the Republicans.

The current proposal strips the existing DHS funding bill, which seven Democrats in the House voted in support of last week, and replaces it with a continuing resolution that will keep ICE and CBP funded and functioning under their current budgets for the immediate future. A temporary shutdown is still likely, as the House will have to return and vote, but the chamber is currently in recess until Monday.

Trump hailed the agreement on his social media account Thursday, writing that he was “working hard with Congress to ensure that we are able to fully fund the Government, without delay. Republicans and Democrats in Congress have come together to get the vast majority of the Government funded until September, while at the same time providing an extension to the Department of Homeland Security (including the very important Coast Guard, which we are expanding and rebuilding like never before).”

The fascist in the White House said he hoped “both Republicans and Democrats will give a very much needed Bipartisan ‘YES’ Vote.”

Asked Thursday evening by a reporter at a Washington, DC, screening for the Amazon-funded Melania “film” if he was considering scaling back immigration operations in Minnesota, Trump replied, “No, no, not at all.”

Under conditions in which a majority of self-identified Democrats and a plurality of independents support abolishing ICE, the short-term deal agreed to by the Democrats does not abolish or defund ICE or CBP. Senate Democrats are instead proposing a number of meaningless “guardrails” that will do nothing to end their criminal operations. Proposals floated by Democrats include wearing body cameras and unmasking requirements.

Prior to the murder of Pretti last Saturday, Democrats in the Senate were not planning even token opposition to funding DHS. However, the mass protest in Minnesota last Friday, and growing momentum for a nationwide general strike to abolish the immigration police and bring the murderers to justice, has forced the Democrats to posture as opponents of the immigration police.

Democrats, along with the corporate media, are promoting the fiction that the sidelining of Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino and the elevation of Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, represented a change in policy and lessened the danger of dictatorship. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In an interview with Tim Miller of The Bulwark on January 27, Walz said, “My hope is with Tom Homan is different from Greg Bovino and these, you know, these folks on the streets that are just amateurs, that he is a true, you know, law enforcement professional.”

The “law enforcement professional” Walz speaks of is the same person who was recorded in September 2024 accepting a $50,000 bribe from undercover FBI agents in exchange for promising to help secure future government contracts.

Walz presented the federal occupation of Minneapolis as simply a bad immigration policy choice, in the process downplaying and obscuring the dictatorial character of the occupation, which is aimed at establishing a presidential dictatorship. The attacks on immigrants are simply the spearhead for a broader campaign aimed at eliminating the democratic rights of all who oppose this government of, by and for the financial oligarchy.

Promising further cooperation with the immigration police, Walz said, “My guess is that Tom Homan understands if you really want to enforce immigration, if you really want to get the worst of the worst, you coordinate with local folks, you coordinate with our BCA and you pick these people up when they are not suspecting it, in the middle of the night where no shots are fired. You heard the police chief say that we’ve taken 900 guns off the streets in Minneapolis last year and didn’t fire a single shot. Same thing with my state troopers.”

“I think this is an opportunity,” Walz concluded.

Forty-eight hours later, in a Thursday morning press conference carried by all the major networks, Homan made clear that he and the administration blamed protesters for their own deaths and that thousands of federal immigration agents would continue to operate in the state for the foreseeable future.

“I’m staying until the problem is gone, but we have made a lot of progress,” Homan declared.

In between calls to “tone down the rhetoric,” Homan repeatedly dehumanized immigrants as “criminal illegal aliens” and blamed “agitators” for their own deaths.

He said CBP and ICE thugs “are American patriots,” “mothers and fathers,” and “God bless every one of them.” At the same time, he called for “hostile rhetoric and dangerous threats and hate” to stop.

“I begged for the last two months on TV for the rhetoric to stop. I said in March if the rhetoric did not stop there was going to be bloodshed. And there has been. I wish I wasn’t right. I don’t want to see anybody die, not officers, not members of the community,” he said, before adding threateningly, “They are not the targets of our operations.”

Using language US government officials typically reserve for foreign war zones, Homan referred to agents being exhausted from being “in theater” for months at a time. He said agents needed to “rotate out of theater” after conducting months of kidnapping operations.

Underscoring the cooperation between the Trump administration and Minnesota Democrats, Homan added that he “met with Governor [Tim] Walz, Attorney General [Keith] Ellison, Mayor [Jacob] Frey, numerous police chiefs and sheriffs” and what “everybody agreed on is that public safety is paramount. One thing we all agreed on was US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a legitimate law enforcement agency that has a duty to enforce the laws enacted by Congress to keep this community safe.”

Homan revealed that he came to an agreement with Democrats to turn over immigrants currently incarcerated in jails: “I am also pleased to announce I had a very good meeting with Attorney General Ellison and he has clarified for me that county jails may notify ICE of the release dates of criminal public safety risks so ICE can take custody of them upon their release from the jail.”