Inside the battle to curb ICE’s power
episodePreviously titled “Inside the battle to curb ICE powers” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026
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Good morning. The congressional clock is ticking to get a deal on ICE reform. But are the sides simply too far apart? NBC goes inside the negotiations.
There are already concerns that Congress is not going to reach a deal in time, and those concerns exist at the highest levels.
What are the Democrats' demands for ICE reform?
Massive Russian strikes make an unusually brutal winter even harder for Ukrainians amid this week's peace talks. A Kyiv reporter for Politico tells us how she and others are coping and why a group of monks is walking from Texas to D.C. It's Thursday, February 5th. I'm Shemitah Basu. This is Apple News Today.
Democrats spent yesterday explaining in greater depth what they're looking for in return for avoiding a shutdown. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer laid out three stipulations.
One, none of these roving patrols. You can't just stop anybody on the street. You can't just pick them up and not even tell them why they're picked up, put them in some dark place. No access to a lawyer or a phone or anything else.
He also mentioned independent oversight of ICE by state and local governments and a ban on masks. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has already authorized one of their demands, body cameras for agents. In a press conference earlier this week, Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune laid out his party's parameters for negotiations.
What I hope it doesn't devolve into is something that makes it harder, not easier, to deport and detain dangerous, illegal aliens in this country. And I also hope that it focuses on protecting and ensuring that the law enforcement officers in this country are safe in their jobs.
How are Ukrainians coping with winter amid Russian attacks?
The breadth of Democrats' demands and the short timeline before funding runs out has turned this into a real challenge.
The idea of doing them in this condensed time frame of less than two weeks, I mean, 10 days from when the bill was signed into law, is very questionable in and of itself.
Sahil Kapoor is a senior national politics reporter at NBC News. It's not only a question of time, though. Republicans have real reservations about some of the conditions Democrats are pitching, including the ban on masks for ICE agents.
So Republicans are concerned about that. They're not sold on requiring judicial warrants as well. The Trump administration doesn't want that. They prefer to have maximal power in-house to carry out a mass deportation program they believe Trump was elected to carry out.
And Republicans have demands of their own. Some members are calling for a crackdown on sanctuary cities in this legislation, which would pave the way toward penalizing local law enforcement who refuse to turn over people believed to be in the country illegally to federal law enforcement.
Whereas Democrats and a bunch of mayors and governors, especially in blue parts of the country, say that makes the community less safe. It creates a chilling effect between ordinary residents, citizens and the local police if they're, for instance, required to turn over someone who's been in their community, who's not doing anything wrong.
If no deal is reached, Kapoor said that it's not totally clear if DHS would be funded immediately.
It's an open question whether DHS would be funded at all or if Democrats would block a continuing resolution. And that would impact not just immigration enforcement, but it would also impact TSA. It would impact FEMA, a whole bunch of things under DHS.
As Congress enters intense negotiations in Minnesota, Trump's border czar Tom Homan announced they would be reducing the presence in the state by 700 officers. While Democrats point out that still leaves 2,300 on the ground.
It has been the harshest Ukrainian winter for a decade, made worse by some of the biggest Russian attacks so far this year. As the temperature plunged to freezing this week, Russian military targeted energy infrastructure and residential buildings, knocking out power and putting people out on the streets. One European foreign minister has called it a war crime. After an informal week-long ceasefire on attacks on energy infrastructure, Ukraine says Russian forces struck at power plants again on Tuesday, leaving more than 1,000 apartment buildings in Kyiv without heat.
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