Some of the Republicans who defended Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are now, weeks before the midterm elections, publicly urging the agency to rein itself in, a turn that says as much about the politics of the moment as it does about the enforcement itself.
The clearest example is unfolding in Kansas, a state President Trump carried by 16 points in 2024.
As ICE ramped up operations in the state’s southwest, targeting cities such as Dodge City, Garden City and Liberal, where the meatpacking industry employs large numbers of immigrant workers, local sheriffs said they had been left in the dark. Schools and businesses scrambled to cope with the disruption, according to reporting by CNN and Kansas outlets including KWCH and High Plains Public Radio.
Both of the state’s Republican senators, Jerry Moran and Roger Marshall, responded Wednesday by calling on ICE to work with local police.
As ICE ramped up operations in the state’s southwest, targeting cities such as Dodge City, Garden City and Liberal, where the meatpacking industry employs large numbers of immigrant workers, local sheriffs said they had been left in the dark. Schools and businesses scrambled to cope with the disruption, according to reporting by CNN and Kansas outlets including KWCH and High Plains Public Radio.
Both of the state’s Republican senators, Jerry Moran and Roger Marshall, responded Wednesday by calling on ICE to work with local police.
“When ICE operates in Kansas, it needs to coordinate with our local law enforcement,” Marshall wrote on X, adding that sheriffs “know these communities better than anyone.” He said he had been in direct contact with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin as agents executed warrants.
That posture is a marked departure for Marshall, who is up for re-election this year and, in a CNN analysis by Aaron Blake, was described as perhaps the most surprisingly vulnerable Republican senator in the cycle. After federal agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January, Marshall took a very different tone than he does now: he told CNN’s Jake Tapper that “sometimes there’s collateral damage” and that the country “could be just as easily talking about the death of ICE agents,” and days later told Fox Business that Americans should be “grateful” to ICE officers “risking their lives.” In March, he authored an op-ed defending the agency’s arrest tactics.
A parallel shift is playing out in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, which Trump won by nine points.
Former Gov. Paul LePage, now a Republican House candidate with a long record of hardline immigration views, has disparaged asylum-seekers as a drain on the state and held a news conference this week accusing ICE of wrongfully moving to deport his son’s father-in-law, a man LePage said holds a work permit. “He is being deported because he came from a country that certain people in Washington do not like,” LePage said, per CNN. “That’s not right.” He urged the agency to focus instead on “people in the gangs and criminals,” a notable reversal, given that after an ICE agent shot and killed a man in Biddeford, Maine, in July, LePage had cautioned that officers must make “split-second decisions” and accused critics of trying to “politicize” the death.
The two episodes follow similar remarks by Republicans in heavily Hispanic districts, including Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida and Rep. Monica De La Cruz of Texas, a logical move, Blake noted in his CNN analysis, given how sharply Hispanic voters have swung against Trump. What is more striking, he argued, is the same anxiety surfacing in places Trump won comfortably, and from lawmakers who until recently were among ICE’s firmest backers.
The public opinion behind that anxiety has been building for months.
A CNN poll in July found that roughly three-quarters of Americans said ICE at least “sometimes” uses force inappropriately, including 54 percent who said it happens “often.” A Quinnipiac University survey around the same time found registered voters disapproved of ICE by 60 percent to 37 percent. As Blake put it, elections have a way of making politicians suddenly notice problems they had previously looked past.
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Sources: analysis by Aaron Blake for CNN.
