Jake Tapper Confronts Sen. Ruben Gallego Over Past Support For ICE Funding He Now Opposes

CNN host Jake Tapper confronted Democratic Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego on Sunday over his past support for funding U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since he presently opposes law enforcement actions by the agency.

Democrats ramped up their pushback against ICE and its operations following the Jan. 7 shooting of Renee Good, during which she abruptly accelerated her vehicle during a confrontation. While speaking with Gallego on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Tapper noted Gallego previously voted to expand ICE funding and pressed him on his current position as other Democrats, including Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, have urged the party to not support the budget increase.

“He’s 100 percent right, and I’m talking to him [Murphy]. We cannot vote for anything that actually adds more money and doesn’t constrain ICE. It’s not what we want out of ICE. Again, we want a security force that is focused on targeting and deporting criminals,” Gallego said.

“What they’re doing right now is none of that. What they’re doing right now is actually suppressing U.S. citizens, racially profiling in all parts of our country, bringing violence to areas that you don’t need. You have men with very little training shooting U.S. citizens,” Gallego claimed. “This is not at all what we need. I’m certainly not going to fund something of that nature if it’s only going to cause more and more problems and more harm and less security for Americans and everyday people that are just trying to live their lives.”

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Tapper, however, pressed Gallego on his new position, asking if he would be against the budget action even if it meant shutting down the government and if there were enough Democrats who agreed with the stance.

“I can’t speak for everybody else, but if I have to shut down the portion of ICE — just to be clear, we’re not shutting down the rest of the government — the portion of ICE that is causing this kind of harm, racially profiling people, terrorizing our cities, I know the implications of that,” Gallego responded. “I know the political implications potentially of that, but we cannot keep funding this type of goon squads that are just spreading throughout the whole country just to enforce some weird policy position that Stephen Miller has where he thinks that we have to punish blue cities.”

As a newly elected Democratic senator in January 2025, Gallego co-sponsored the Laken Riley Act, named after a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student who was brutally murdered by an illegal immigrant. The measure, which passed the House in a 264-159 vote, mandates ICE detain illegal immigrants charged with certain crimes and expands mandatory detention requirements.

Although the bill wasn’t directly tied to appropriating new money to ICE, the detention mandates are estimated to cost the agency extra annually to implement, potentially exceeding its budget.

The potential new 2026 fiscal year budget for ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is currently being debated in Congress. In addition to supplemental funding for enforcement officials through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025, the new DHS budget seeks more money to expand detentions and conduct operations.

Murphy, the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security appropriations subcommittee, in a post to X following the shooting of Renee Good, said his Democratic colleagues “cannot vote for a DHS budget that doesn’t restrain the growing lawlessness of this agency.” Following his message, others, including Gallego, joined in, with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries telling reporters Wednesday there is “no bipartisan path forward for the Department of Homeland Security.”