WASHINGTON — As they seek to curb President Donald Trump’s aggressive approach to immigration enforcement, congressional Democrats are looking to formalize some guidelines previous administrations used.

Of the 10 policy proposals Democratic leaders offered in negotiations to reopen the Department of Homeland Security, which has been in a funding lapse since Feb. 14 in the midst of widespread uproar over the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens by immigration officers in Minneapolis last month, seven have been employed in at least some form by previous administrations.

Democrats are asking the Trump administration to reinstate policies it has rejected in its controversial push to carry out mass deportations. Prior policies Democrats want to formalize include use-of-force standards, allowing unannounced visits by members of Congress to facilities that detain immigrants and obtaining judicial warrants before entering private residences.

“Many of the things the Democrats are asking for are to revert to prior policies,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, a senior DHS official during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. “Some of them are responding to the ways this administration is carrying out its operations that previous administrations did not.”

Formalizing the policies in law, as part of a deal to pass a fiscal 2026 funding bill for the department, would make them more permanent.

“Policies and guidance … apply as the current leadership applies them,” Cardinal Brown said. “They’re not absolutes, and they can be changed much more frequently.”

But an agreement between congressional Democrats and the White House on changes to immigration enforcement appears elusive. The White House’s response to the proposals was “incomplete and insufficient,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a Feb. 9 statement. 

No recent movement on negotiations

Democrats late Monday sent over a counterproposal to Republicans and the White House, but did not make public what those changes were, according to a statement from party leaders.

While there is bipartisan support for some of the proposals, like requiring body-worn cameras, others, such as barring immigration agents from wearing face coverings and requiring judicial warrants to enter private property, have been rejected outright by the Trump administration.

A White House official said the “Trump Administration remains interested in having good faith conversations with the Democrats.” 

“President Trump has been clear – he wants the government open,” according to the White House official.

Even with the department shut down, immigration enforcement will continue, due to $170 billion in funding in the massive tax cuts and spending package Trump signed into law last year. 

Democrats’ proposals do not include consequences if DHS doesn’t comply, which raises an issue of effectiveness, said Heidi Altman, vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, an advocacy group that aims to provide free or low-cost legal services for immigrants.

“When Congress is negotiating policy measures, are they also putting teeth to those policy measures, and are they yanking away the funds that we know ICE and CBP will use to violate guardrails to begin with?” Altman said.

Changes demanded after Minneapolis deaths

After Renee Good was shot and killed by immigration officer Jonathan Ross on Jan. 7, lawmakers amended the Homeland Security funding bill to add guardrails, such as appropriating $20 million for body cameras and adding a requirement for DHS to report how funds from the tax cuts and spending package are being spent.

But a second death in Minnesota, that of intensive care unit nurse Alex Pretti on Jan. 24, spurred Democrats to reject funding for DHS without stronger policy changes to the enforcement tactics used by immigration officers at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. 

Only three of the 10 proposals from Schumer and Jeffries, both of New York, would be entirely new. 

They are: prohibiting ICE and other immigration enforcement agents from wearing face coverings, barring racial profiling after the Supreme Court cleared the way for the practice last year, and standardizing uniforms of DHS agents.

The heads of ICE and CBP rejected Democrats’ request to have their immigration officers forgo face coverings when asked during an oversight hearing before the House Homeland Security Committee last week. 

Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons and CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott, along with congressional Republicans, have argued that masks and face coverings prevent their officers from being doxed. 

Local cooperation

Other proposals, including barring of immigration enforcement of so-called sensitive locations such as religious places, child care facilities, hospitals and schools, would expand previous DHS guidance that restricted enforcement in such places.

The Democratic proposal calls for enforcement to be prohibited at those sensitive locations. Prior guidance allowed for the practice on a limited basis.

Then-acting ICE Director Caleb Vitello rescinded the policy shortly after President Donald Trump took office in January last year. There are several lawsuits brought by religious groups challenging the move by the Trump administration.

A requirement that immigration officials gain permission from local and state governments before undertaking large enforcement operations like the one in Minneapolis would build on previous policies of federal-local cooperation.

But that measure would be a long shot, Cardinal Brown said.

“I think that’s going to be a hard one,” she said. “The federal government has the authority to enforce immigration law anywhere in the country it wishes.”

She said a more realistic option would be for the federal government to inform or coordinate with local authorities for large-scale immigration operations. 

Another proposed requirement that DHS officials present identification also builds on a previous policy.

Another proposal builds on DHS policy of targeted enforcement by ending “indiscriminate arrests,” without warrants.

Under current immigration law, if an officer encounters a person believed to be in the U.S. unlawfully and can escape before a warrant is obtained, a warrantless arrest is lawful.

Democrats want to increase standards on the forms ICE uses to authorize an arrest. These administrative forms are not signed by a judge but instead by an ICE employee.

Judicial warrants

The remaining proposals would revert DHS policies to those in place under prior administrations’ guidance. Those include use-of-force standards, use of body cameras when interacting with the public, allowing members of Congress unannounced oversight visits at detention centers that hold immigrants and requiring a judicial warrant to enter private property.

An internal ICE memo, obtained by The Associated Press, showed that Lyons instructed ICE agents to enter private residences without a judicial warrant – a departure from longstanding DHS policy.

“This judicial warrant issue is so disturbing,” said Ben Johnson, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, or AILA.  

He said the question of whether a warrant is needed to enter private property was already decided under the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment. 

“The fact that it’s being discussed now is really frightening,” Johnson said.

Body cameras

Providing funds for DHS to acquire body cameras for immigration officers is one proposal Democrats and Republicans seem to have agreed on.

Earlier this month, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that body cameras would be provided to all immigration agents in Minneapolis, and said that as “funding is available, the body camera program will be expanded nationwide.”

During an oversight hearing on Capitol Hill, Lyons said about 3,000 ICE officers currently have body cameras with another 6,000 cameras on the way. Scott said  roughly 10,000 Border Patrol agents, about half the total force, have body cameras.

But body cameras are not a guarantee against misconduct, Altman said.

CBP officials were wearing body cameras when Pretti was shot and killed. Scott said that footage would be released after the investigation is over.

“We see officers in the field right now wearing body-worn cameras engaging in abuse and violence on the daily,” Altman said. 

Oversight visits

One of the proposals would also end a DHS policy to require members of Congress to provide seven-day notice of oversight visits at facilities that hold immigrants, despite a 2019 appropriations law that allows for unannounced visits.

Since last summer, several lawmakers have been denied oversight visits at ICE facilities prompting them to sue in federal court. 

On the day funding for DHS lapsed, Feb. 14, the Department of Justice submitted a brief, noting that because of the shutdown, unannounced oversight visits by lawmakers can be denied. 

The administration argued that during the shutdown, immigration enforcement has been funded by the tax cuts and spending bill, which does not include language allowing unannounced visits, rather than regular appropriations. 

“There is no lawful basis for the Court to enjoin Defendants’ conduct so long as the restricted funds have lapsed,” according to the document.

WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Maryland Tuesday barred U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from re-detaining Kilmar Abrego Garcia, saying the Trump administration lacks plans to remove him from the United States.

“Respondents have done nothing to show that Abrego Garcia’s continued detention in ICE custody is consistent with due process,” District of Maryland Judge Paula Xinis wrote in her order. 

Tuesday’s order solidifies a temporary decision from Xinis last year that blocked immigration officials from re-detaining him. 

Abrego Garcia is a Salvadoran immigrant and longtime Maryland resident whose wrongful deportation to a brutal megaprison last year cast a national spotlight on the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown. 

His case has remained a focal point for the Trump administration, which brought Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. to face criminal charges lodged against him stemming from a traffic stop in Tennessee. 

Those charges were made while Abrego Garcia remained imprisoned in El Salvador, and after the Supreme Court found his deportation unlawful and said the Trump administration should facilitate his return. 

Abrego Garcia has pleaded not guilty to those charges of human smuggling and that case continues.

Since Abrego Garcia was brought back to the U.S., the Trump administration has tried to deport him to a third country, because he has deportation protections from his home country of El Salvador. An immigration judge in 2019 found he would likely face violence if returned there. 

Costa Rica has offered to accept Abrego Garcia as a refugee and he has agreed to be removed there, but the Trump administration has tried to deport him to three African countries: Liberia, Eswatini and Uganda.

“Indeed, since Abrego Garcia secured his release from criminal custody in August 2025, Respondents have made one empty threat after another to remove him to countries in Africa with no real chance of success,” Xinis wrote. 

Xinis added that because the Trump administration has not secured any travel documents for a third country of removal for Abrego Garcia, his detention would be unlawful. The Supreme Court deemed that immigrants cannot be held longer than six months in detention if the federal government is not actively making efforts to remove them. 

“From this, the Court easily concludes that there is no ‘good reason to believe’ removal is likely in the reasonably foreseeable future,” she wrote.

Abrego Garcia remains in Maryland with his wife, a U.S. citizen, and their three children. 

Last month, the parents of a 7-year-old girl whose nose wouldn’t stop bleeding took her to Portland Adventist Health in Portland, Oregon, for urgent care. Before the family could get through the doors, federal immigration agents reportedly detained them in the parking lot and took them to a detention center in Texas.

At Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, workers say U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers hang around the campus, asking patients and employees for proof of citizenship. Last month, tensions came to a head when ICE agents used handcuffs to shackle a 31-year-old Mexican immigrant to his hospital bed. ICE claimed the man, who had broken bones in his face and a fractured skull, had run headfirst into a wall on purpose while handcuffed and trying to flee.

And last summer, ICE agents chased an immigrant into the Ontario Advanced Surgery Center in Ontario, California, precipitating a confrontation with two surgery center workers wearing scrubs. The two workers were later indicted by a federal grand jury, charged with assaulting and interfering with federal immigration officers.

As the Trump administration intensifies its immigration crackdown, health care workers in multiple states say ICE is increasing its presence in health care facilities, deterring people from seeking medical care and creating chaos that jeopardizes the safety of their patients.

Even before Trump took office last year, Republican-led states such as Florida and Texas began mixing health care and immigration enforcement by requiring hospitals to ask patients about their immigration status. Now that ICE has extended its enforcement activities to hospitals and health care facilities — areas that were largely off-limits during the Biden administration — an increasing number of Democratic-led states are pushing back.

Last month, Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Maura Healey filed legislation “to keep ICE out of courthouses, schools, child care programs, hospitals and churches,” and signed an executive order to limit ICE actions on state-owned property.

In December, Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker signed a measure that bars health care providers from sharing sensitive health information with federal immigration agents and requires hospitals to develop policies around how they will interact with agents.

And in September, California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation that makes immigration status and place of birth protected health information, and prohibits agents from entering nonpublic, patient-sensitive areas of health care facilities without a warrant signed by a judge.

Other Democratic states — including Maine, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and Washington — are considering similar bills.

Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers in Arizona are pushing legislation that would require hospitals accepting Medicaid patients to include a question on intake forms about immigration status.

Skipping medical care

Whether or not ICE presence is actually increasing at health care facilities, it’s clear that people living in the country illegally are being deterred from seeking medical care, said Drishti Pillai, director of immigrant health policy at the health policy research group KFF.

A KFF and New York Times survey released last November showed that 43% of respondents identifying as immigrant parents living in the country illegally skipped or delayed health care for their children over a 12-month period because they were concerned about immigration enforcement. Even among lawfully present immigrants,10% said that they avoided seeking medical care for their children due to immigration-related concerns.

Pillai also pointed to the Trump administration’s efforts to consolidate the bits of personal data held across federal agencies, creating a single trove of information on people who live in the United States.

“We are expecting that these fears have further been exacerbated this year since the data sharing agreement was made public, and there are certain concerns around privacy of data going forward,” Pillai told Stateline.

Dr. Paula Latortue, an OB-GYN in Washington, D.C., who volunteers with the Migrant Clinicians Network, a nonprofit group that provides health care to immigrants, said it’s unclear how many people are avoiding health care, and how often.

“The one part that is really hard to know is people who are not showing up to the hospital when they usually would for some sort of urgent or emergency complaint,” Latortue said in an interview. “But I think there’s a concern for many physicians in the community that has happened.”

States step in to protect sensitive locations

The Biden and Obama administrations directed ICE to avoid enforcement activities in “sensitive” places such as hospitals, schools and churches unless it received permission from top leaders at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

In January 2025, however, the Trump administration rescinded those guidelines, opening up these spaces to immigration enforcement.

Stateline reached out to the White House and the Department of Homeland Security multiple times but did not receive a response. When the administration changed the guidelines, the Department of Homeland Security said that opening up “sensitive” areas to agents “empowers the brave men and women in CBP [Customs and Border Protection] and ICE to enforce our immigration laws.”

The previous guidelines didn’t prohibit ICE from operating in those locations, but it did “strongly discourage” them, according to Sophia Genovese, a legal fellow specializing in immigration law at Georgetown University.

She added, however, that states and cities can enact laws to protect such spaces, even though they are limited in their capacity to “infringe and engage in immigration lawmaking.”

“Warrants are always needed to conduct searches or investigations in private, nonpublic areas, and these warrants need to be signed by a judge. This is just a basic Fourth Amendment right,” Genovese said. “When it comes to ICE entering hospitals and gaining access to private areas of hospitals, that’s an issue of individual hospital policy.”

Genovese said states also can require that hospitals standardize their policies on where law enforcement agents can go within a medical facility and create protocols to ensure agents are presenting a warrant before entering the premises.

Health care workers want protections

Those moves are exactly what health care workers in many states are asking for.

“There’s a high level of fear and anxiety. Nurses see the videos of what’s happening around the country, and nurses have experienced it themselves,” Peter Starzynski, spokesperson for the Oregon Nurses Association, told Stateline.

Last month’s incident involving the 7-year-old girl and her parents in Portland highlighted the importance of protecting health care spaces from ICE, he said.

“That should never happen. That’s disgusting,” Starzynski said.

The Oregon Nurses Association also has condemned ICE’s presence at Legacy Emanuel Medical Center in Portland, claiming agents are violating hospital policies, including on access to patients. Legacy has disputed the union’s allegations, saying that no ICE officers have entered its facilities “unless accompanying a patient in custody.”

“Nurses in emergency rooms deal with local law enforcement on a regular basis, and those relationships are built on mutual respect, where law enforcement understands what they need to do once they enter a hospital,” Starzynski said. “That has changed with the increase in federal agents in Oregon.”

Stateline reporter Shalina Chatlani can be reached at schatlani@stateline.org.