Abolishing ICE has been the left's rallying cry since Donald Trump took office.
Now that Democrats have won a majority in Congress, they want to go even further.
What they've proposed would fundamentally transform the country.
The Reimagining Safety Act Would Abolish ICE and Fund Universal Mail-In Voting
Rep. Delia Ramirez introduced H.R. 10803 on October 13 – the Reimagining Safety Act – with Squad member Rashida Tlaib and cosponsors Adelita Grijalva and Jim McGovern.
She filed it one day after federal agents raided Ilhan Omar's home.
The press release said they wanted to abolish ICE, dismantle DHS, and replace it all with something called the Department of Community Safety.
That was the public version.
Section 402(d) didn't make the announcement.
Buried inside the legislation is a new Inclusive Democracy Grant Program that Ramirez's proposed Department of Community Safety would administer.
The agency would do more than replace ICE and Border Patrol.
It would distribute federal money to states, cities, territories, and tribes – for universal mail-in voting, expanded early voting, and foreign-language ballot programs.
Democrats would also use it to fund K–12 and adult civics curricula built around what they call systemic equity and participatory democracy.
The department Democrats want to put in place of DHS would become a federal machine for subsidizing mail-in ballots.
The bill would also cancel whatever immigration enforcement funding DHS has remaining and redirect it toward eight new priorities – universal health care, housing, education, and climate programs among them.
https://twitter.com/nataliegwinters/status/2120853867470758183
The Same Bill Removes the Deportation Penalty for Noncitizen Voting
Flip back twenty pages – to Section 302(b)(10) on page 47 – and there's something else they left out.
That section strikes two paragraphs from federal immigration law: the provision for deporting noncitizens who become public charges and the one that makes illegal voting a deportation trigger.
The second one is what matters.
Under INA Section 237(a)(6), any noncitizen who votes in violation of federal, state, or local law is deportable – no criminal conviction required.
Trump's DHS activated that exact provision in June 2026, directing ICE to pursue deportations of noncitizens who vote illegally in American elections – months after Trump announced DHS had identified 278,000 noncitizens on American voter rolls.
DHS said noncitizen voting dilutes every legitimate ballot cast, and that it "must have consequences."
Ramirez's bill would erase that enforcement authority – the criminal ban on noncitizen voting stays on the books, but the mechanism that actually removes illegal voters from the country disappears.
One provision funds the ballots while the other removes the only legal consequence for casting them illegally.
That pairing didn't end up in the same bill by accident.
Ramirez called dismantling DHS "a revolutionary act" – and she's right, though not in the direction most Americans would choose.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin called the Reimagining Safety Act the most radical plan targeting ICE he had seen and said Democrats pushing to abolish DHS had apparently forgotten what 9/11 revealed about federal agencies that couldn't work together.
"Our flights would be wide open," he said.
George W. Bush signed the Homeland Security Act because 19 hijackers exposed the catastrophic failure of federal agencies that couldn't share intelligence with each other.
Ramirez wants to tear that down and hand the keys to a department that processes ballot applications and teaches children what Democrats call systemic equity.
The coalition behind the bill includes Free Speech For People, CAIR-Chicago, Mijente, and Indivisible Chicago Alliance – groups with long records of opposing immigration enforcement.
The daughter of illegal immigrants from Guatemala, Ramirez is married to a DACA recipient – the only sitting member of Congress who goes home to someone who could be deported. She has called ICE a "terrorist organization" and drafted a bill to erase the law that removes illegal voters.
She won't be writing it alone. Members aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America won House seats in November's midterms and are joining her in the new majority.
This is what the Democrat Party looks like on immigration in 2026. They have the House. If they win the White House in 2028 and hold Congress, this bill gets signed.
That's not immigration policy.
That's election engineering.
Sources:
- Staff, "DHS Directs ICE to Deport Noncitizens Who Illegally Vote in US Elections," Daily Signal, June 10, 2026.
- Staff, "Exclusive — Sec. Markwayne Mullin: Democrats Wanting to Abolish DHS 'Didn't Understand What Happened' on 9/11," Breitbart, October 6, 2026.
- Ben Smith, "Abolishing ICE Wasn't Enough: Democrat Now Wants to Dismantle DHS and Border Patrol," RedState, October 15, 2026.
- Staff, "'Squad' Democrat Slammed by Trump Admin for Most 'Radical' Plan Targeting ICE Yet," Fox News, October 2026.
- Staff, "Rep. Delia Ramirez Calls for Abolition of ICE at DHS Hearing," Fox News, 2026.
- Natalie Winters, "Democrats Want to Abolish DHS – and Make Taxpayers Subsidize Universal Mail-In Voting," Natalie Winters Substack, November 12, 2026.