After another wave of deadly shootings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement this month, Democratic members of Congress are once again talking about clawing back money from the agency if they win back control of the House of Representatives in November.

But Democratic leadership is not so sure.

Earlier this month, ICE agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero in Biddeford Maine. That reignited outrage about the immigration agency ater months of back and forth and a partial government shutdown.

Now, talk of defunding ICE is once again in the conversation. An Economist/YouGov poll showed that Americans support abolishing ICE by a margin of 48-40 percent, while 58 percent say ICE uses too much force. And many Americans are losing their faith in the idea that most or more of the people ICE deports are criminals, with only a quarter of Americans saying so.

All of this makes ICE’s most outspoken critics in Congress eager to shrink the agency’s budget.

“There's 100 ways to skin a cat around here,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), one of ICE’s biggest critics, told The Independent.

In 2025, Republicans gave ICE about $75 billion for hiring new agents and creating new detention facilities in their “One Big, Beautiful Bill” that President Donald Trump signed. And last month, after Congress reopened the Department of Homeland Security save for ICE and Customs and Border Protection, Republicans passed a party-line $70 billion fund for ICE.

Ocasio-Cortez said there are options to rein in ICE should Democrats win back the House such as clawing back the money or withholding other money in the annual appropriations process to force ICE to spend the money down.

“There's a lot of different ways to look at it,” she said. “But we cannot allow this genuinely unacceptable and irresponsible deployment of resources with no accountability to become a new floor.”

She’s not the only one. Rep. Seth Magaziner of Rhode Island delivered a fiery speech criticizing ICE after the killings earlier this month.

“They are hiring people with inadequate training, inadequate oversight, they're not using their body cameras. they're not enforcing any sort of discipline,” he told The Independent.

If Democrats win back the House and Senate, they will have significant authority to rein in ICE through the appropriations process, wherein Congress writes the 12 spending bills that fund the government throughout a fiscal year.

But House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries did not commit to reducing ICE funding.

“We've made clear that ICE is completely and totally out of control, that taxpayer dollars should be used to make life more affordable for the American people, not to brutalize or kill American citizens or violently target law-abiding immigrants,” he told The Independent when asked about reducing ICE funding during his press conference last week.

That’s not necessarily a commitment to reducing money for ICE. Jeffries seldom makes news during his press conferences and prefers to stay on his talking points. But it does hint that Democrats might use ICE funding as leverage for some safeguards should they take back the House.

“We've also made clear that Donald Trump's violent mass deportation machine doesn't get a dime from House Democrats,” he said. “Unless things change next year, in terms of the way in which ICE conducts itself, our position as House Democrats, I assume, is not going to change.”

But even in the Senate, there’s signs that Democrats are willing to rein in ICE if they win back the upper chamber.

“I already think that that that money that they put forward was for ICE only can and should be used for better purposes,” Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J) told The Independent. Kim has visited the ICE facility in Delaney Hall and was pepper-sprayed outside the facility.

After the ex-wife of Durán Guerrero’s shooter had a history of allegedly assaulting women, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) said that agents “should be properly vetted for domestic violence and about 1,000 other things, and it's clear that they're not being properly vetted.”

But for now, ICE will continue its spree with little efforts from the Trump White House to hold it accountable. On Wednesday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller arrived on Capitol Hill for some meetings with his wife and children in tow.

When The Independent shouted some questions about what he would say to Durán Guerrero’s family, he said nothing.