A group of House Democrats suing for access to federal immigration detention centers are demanding a federal judge’s urgent intervention after Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security quietly ordered new restrictions barring them from entering.
Democratic lawmakers are now suggesting they could block future funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement if they’re blocked from ICE facilities under Noem’s “brazen” order, attorneys wrote Monday.
Annual funding for Homeland Security lapses January 30, and “members of Congress are actively negotiating over the funding of DHS and ICE, including consideration of the scope of and limitations on DHS’s funding for the next fiscal year,” attorneys wrote.
“And ICE continues to expand its operations, including immigration detention and enforcement,” they added. “This is a critical moment for oversight, and members of Congress must be able to conduct oversight at ICE detention facilities, without notice, to obtain urgent and essential information for ongoing funding negotiations.”
One day after a federal officer fatally shot Renee Good in Minnesota, Noem issued a new policy requiring members of Congress to give one week’s notice before visiting ICE facilities. Three lawmakers were then blocked from visiting a detention center in Minneapolis, with ICE officials claiming that President Donald Trump’s massive spending bill manages congressional visits.
Democratic Reps. Angie Craig, Kelly Morrison and Ilhan Omar rebuked the agency after they were denied entry. “The public deserves to know what is taking place in ICE facilities,” Omar wrote.
District Judge Jia Cobb rejected a similar Homeland Security policy last month, arguing that federal spending laws allow unrestricted congressional visits to ICE detention facilities without advanced notice, a key part of congressional oversight responsibilities.
Noem claimed that oversight can be restricted under Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
“ICE must ensure that this policy is implemented and enforced exclusively with money appropriated” by that law, Noem wrote.
“Unannounced visits” divert officers and resources while creating “circus-like” publicity stunts that create a “chaotic environment with heightened emotions” rather than “legitimate oversight,” according to Noem.
Lawmakers presented ICE with a copy of Judge Cobb’s December court order that blocked restrictions on oversight visits, but “they refused to look at it,” Rep. Craig told MSNOW.
“I informed them that they were violating the law,” she said. “They said they didn’t care.”
Noem’s latest order, which largely echoes prior DHS policy rejected in court, is a “brazen attempt” to “subvert” Cobb’s order,” lawyers for Democrats wrote.
Homeland Security cannot use the law to tap into federal funds while also deciding which parts to “ignore” in an attempt to “do the very thing that Congress has prohibited in DHS’s general funding,” they said.
Lawmakers now want Homeland Security to prove that “every dollar” behind the new policy that bars them from detention centers “was and will be” from those One Big Beautiful Act funds.
The months-long legal fight over congressional oversight visits joins an avalanche of legal and political battles surrounding the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, with protests and outrage boiling over nationwide in the wake of Good’s killing.
Witness statements and analysis from video footage from multiple angles appeared to contradict the administration’s initial statements in defense of the officer who fired three shots into Good’s car, striking her in the face at close range, claiming that she was endangering his life.
A growing number of Democrats are also threatening to introduce articles of impeachment against Noem, while lawmakers are mulling whether to choke off funding for ICE, with a potential government shutdown at stake.
Republicans have only the slimmest of majorities in the House, but Democrats have limited tools at their disposal as the minority party in both chambers of Congress.
As lawmakers race towards a January 30 deadline to adopt three appropriations packages, some Democrats are mulling whether to withhold support for Homeland Security funding without any new limits on Trump’s anti-immigration agenda and the thousands of masked militarized officers carrying it out in Democratic-led cities across the country.
Last week, Senator Chris Murphy, the top Democrat on the appropriations subcommittee on Homeland Security, said his party “cannot vote for a DHS budget that doesn’t restrain the growing lawlessness of this agency.”
