"The day of accountability will come": Rep. Delia Ramirez on abolishing and prosecuting DHS

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Congresswoman Delia Ramirez does not mince words. The Democrat from Illinois and I first met back in August when I did a keynote interview with her on the main stage at the Netroots Nation conference, an annual gathering of progressive Democrats. Though the widespread anti-immigrant violence by federal agents was just ramping up, Rep. Ramirez was clear: ICE is a terrorist organization that needs to be defunded and abolished. Another six months later, though it’s cold comfort, some of her colleagues and millions of Americans are finally repeating her refrain. 

A month before our first chat, Congress passed Trump’s funding bill that appropriated $165 million to the Department of Homeland Security, including billions of dollars to hire thousands of new ICE and CBP agents and build new immigrant concentration camps. “I think that for the first time in Congress, I have colleagues of mine who are beginning to ask the question, well, ‘does ICE have way too much authority?’” Rep. Ramirez told me last summer. Now that recent events in Minnesota and all over the country have provided a concrete answer to that question, what comes next?

In a high-profile hearing this week with the heads of ICE, CBP and US Citizen and Immigration Services held by the House Homeland Security Committee—of which Rep. Ramirez is a member—the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants had the opportunity to do what so many of us dream of: to “look evil in the eye and fight it back.” She called for accountability for these leaders and their agents for all the harms they’ve committed and continue to commit, and called them “the inheritors of the Klan hood and the slave patrol.” 

I reached out to Rep. Ramirez to ask how it feels to be vindicated in the worst possible way, talk about the likely impending DHS shutdown, and what future accountability looks like. This is our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity. 

MARISA KABAS, THE HANDBASKET: When we last spoke in August, you called ICE “unconstitutional and unaccountable,” and said that it's “criminal and we must dismantle it.” And I remember a smattering of applause and support for it, but I feel like if you said that today, there would be a 10-minute standing ovation. How does it feel to see public sentiment towards ICE shift so drastically to where you've been all along?

CONGRESSWOMAN DELIA C. RAMIREZ: I'm glad you asked that question, because I was just talking to someone yesterday morning about the moment that we're living in now. Whether it's talking about abolishing ICE, impeaching Kristi Noem, or blocking bombs to Israel, when some of us initially said this—whether it was a year ago, three years ago, or even in 2018 specifically around ICE—people said, like, ‘you are so radical and not reflective of where people are,’ or ‘you don't really understand the nuances of what you're saying.’ And so I do think in some way I feel validated by watching so many of my colleagues really arrive to a moment that so many of us knew was real: That ICE is an organization of terror. And when I said that, you can imagine, I have had colleagues on the Republican side who said ‘she needs to be denounced, removed, deported.’ Also xenophobic and racist and terrible fascist things. 

But it is encouraging to see colleagues of mine who are very much to the center begin saying literally the same words [as I did]. And so the joke that I often have with my team is—it would just be nice once in a while to get a little credit for the fact that I said this first and I said it often. You kind of cringed a little, and now you're saying it! Listen, we do this to women and women of color all the time.

But also, people on the ground are recognizing that when so many of us said, ‘Listen, you may not be undocumented, you may have family who's been here for five generations, and you may not think that what ICE is doing is going to impact you, but fascism always needs a public enemy. And while today it’s immigrants, while today it’s trans children or black women, we know that it's a matter of time before they're coming after all of us.’ I think people on the ground could not really understand when I said that, I meant them too. Watching Minnesota and watching what's happened in Oregon and all over the country has helped them understand, ‘Oh, my God, I am a US citizen, and I've never had to live in this kind of fear. And now I think I might need my US passport in order to exercise freedom of speech and protest for others.’

People feel it in their guts, on the streets. Abolish them, because otherwise they will execute us. 

KABAS: There's something frustrating about having to see it happen first to have it be taken seriously. 

REP. RAMIREZ: It's super frustrating. I've said to a couple of my colleagues, like, man, what would it have looked like in 2024 when we're in the thick of the campaigns, if we stopped being so defensive on immigration and we went on the offensive; had we all collectively rang the alarm when we saw it start. Had we done that, Silverio [Villegas González], Alex [Pretti], Renee [Good], would be alive, as well as so many people who we don't say their names, who have died in detention. And I think that's the part that really frustrates me, because the work that we do has real consequences, and the work that we don't do has even bigger consequences.

KABAS: What do you see as the work we're not doing?

REP. RAMIREZ: I do want to acknowledge that more and more Democrats are waking up in the morning and realizing, ‘Oh my god, ICE is a problem.’ But on January 20, 2025 when Donald Trump was sworn in as the president, I woke up with that feeling, recognizing that everything I cared about—my constituents, this country, humanity—was under attack, and that we were going to have to live the next few years attempting to survive and attempting to bring people together to have courage and moral clarity. So look, I will give kudos to my colleagues who are holding the line, who in the Senate right now have decided not to give an easy way out to DHS and fund them. They didn't have the votes yesterday in part because Democrats, for the most part, stuck together, right? I do appreciate that they are doing more in recognizing ‘Minneapolis could be my district. Minneapolis could be my constituents.’

What I would say that they could be doing more of is the willingness to call this organization what it is, and therefore dismantling the Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Homeland Security was created intentionally after 9/11 to violate people's rights under the guise of protecting the homeland. We know that it was created so that they can call people like me, Muslim people, immigrant people, and anyone that would challenge fascism, a domestic terrorist. As long as they make us a domestic terrorist, they can attempt to get away with doing anything to us and violate our rights without due process. So to me, this moment requires members of Congress to ask themselves, how will we never be here again? How will we actually really hear our constituents when they're saying they need us to fight for them? And how far am I willing to go to, at times, ignore my DC consultants in order to fully represent and fight for my constituents?

KABAS: I think so many are guided by, like you said, the consultants and the polling and public sentiment, when this moment really seems to require doing what's right. And it seems like that's what's always guided you, so I can imagine that it's frustrating to watch others struggle to do that. 

Yeah, and frankly, this moment and every moment requires us to do what is right. If we would have been doing what is right, this moment would not have come. If Democrats would have organized for comprehensive immigration reform to not just preserve our democracy but expand it to actually pass the most comprehensive voting rights in this country; to get big money out of politics; to eliminate Super PACs; to get pharma the hell off of Congress so that we have Medicare for All; to actually have prioritized housing; to stop funding wars at the expense of their people and then say it's called diplomacy; had we been doing that, we wouldn't be here.

I think we need to stop leading from a place of fear, or let me wait until what the poll tells me, but from a place of moral clarity, courage, conscience and an understanding of what's happening to our constituents and our responsibility.

There are people—Democrats, and maybe a few Republicans—who are beginning to call out ICE, because in every single poll ICE’s favorabilities are under 30% and people dying, people living in fear, self-deporting, committing suicide in detention, should not be the reason you finally recognize, ‘wait a minute, how do they get away with this again and again?’ and ‘what can we do to stop them?’

I also want to say to you that I do find hope in this moment. Not because of people in leadership, but because I am finding people on the ground that are saying enough is enough. I'm not just going to be a spectator and think that politics is not going to affect me. I know politics affect me. I'm not going to let politics keep doing to me, right? I'm going to influence politics. I think that you're seeing people that despite of the fear of surveillance, despite of the fear of targeting or being executed, are still showing up in Minneapolis and Chicago and California. And I think that you're also seeing people who would never have thought they'd run for office say, ‘Here I am'.’

(I asked Rep. Ramirez if she would be endorsing a candidate in the hotly contested primary in her neighboring district, IL-09. She said “I'm probably going to stay out because there's so many progressives and amazing people running there. But I am telling you bluntly that I don't want to see Laura Fine go to Congress, and we need to take on AIPAC. And I believe that Illinois is primed to show AIPAC that no longer can they continue to be a foreign lobby harming people and using their power, using their MAGA Republican money, to continue to bomb children and literally keep these politicians on a chokehold and under control, and that the community is not going to let them continue to elect these people.”)

KABAS: So many comparisons have made between the current state of US immigration terror and Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and I've seen some say that kind of seeks to absolve this country of its own history of racial terror and genocide. In the hearings this week with ICE and CBP and USCIS, you said you have “no respect for inheritors of the Klan hood and the slave patrol.” How did it feel to publicly and explicitly draw that connection? 

REP. RAMIREZ: I knew that I was going to make them very uncomfortable. I'm not talking about just the DHS directors there—I meant my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. And I say this often, ‘Courage is not the absence of fear. It’s the willingness to act despite the fear.’ I'm a little scared [in that moment], because if I'm being blunt with you, every time I speak there's a death threat. And yet I thought it was so important, as a daughter of immigrants, as a proud representative of Illinois-3, as someone who has been calling out what they do, to be able to look evil in the eye and call them what they are.

KABAS: Even after you spoke, Republican Chairman Andrew Garbarino made a comment about, like, “maintaining decorum.” 

REP. RAMIREZ: And the thing is that my remarks also were drafted in a way that he could not strike my words from the record. Because if they could have, they would have.

KABAS: So you were very intentional about how you approached this. 

REP. RAMIREZ: Oh, yeah—and the team. It was like, I didn't say ‘you are the epitome of evil.’ I said ‘I got to stare at evil in the eye.’

KABAS: You also said in the hearing that one day these people will ‘be held accountable for their role in this dark moment in America.’ Just looking ahead, what does accountability for these leaders look like? 

REP. RAMIREZ: I think that it's really important for us to understand that them quitting their jobs—that's just not enough. That doesn't bring back Silverio, the children who are orphans are not gonna have their parents back. That doesn't recover Marimar [Martinez] from the shooting and the permanent scars that she now has. So to me, when we're talking about what justice looks like, it's ultimately getting to a place where every single fascist agent and the leaders that directed them to do what they did are held accountable to the highest degree of the law. And that means prosecution. There has to be oversight. The masks have to come off. We ultimately have to make sure that these criminals, and especially this administration, are brought to justice. And that means I want to see them behind bars. They have to be, for the sake of who we are as a nation.

I think it was important for me to say that pretty bluntly to them, because there's this idea for them that they're going to be in power indefinitely. And I wanted it to be on the record: You will not be in power forever, and the day of accountability will come, and I will assure that that happens.