On Tuesday’s broadcast of MS NOW’s “The Weeknight,” Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) defended Democrats rejecting an off-ramp on the DHS shutdown and said that Democrats think Republicans “understand that they’re getting blamed for those long lines, and they’re also getting blamed for being unreasonable about putting guardrails around ICE.”
Co-host Symone Sanders Townsend said, “[T]oday you all held the line. This was an off-ramp you could have taken that would not have given any additional funding to ICE, but it would not have included the reforms you all asked for. And you didn’t take the easy deal, and I do think there’s something to be said about that.”
Baldwin responded, “Absolutely. And I am very resolved to put guardrails around ICE and to rein in what has become a rogue agency. I live in Wisconsin, right next door to Minnesota, where they surged 3,000 ICE agents, and, during the course of that deployment, killed two U.S. citizens, including Alex Pretti, who had grown up in the state of Wisconsin. During that surge in Minnesota, my office received more calls from Wisconsinites than we ever have on any other issue before. It is so clear that we need to write into law — not just a handshake agreement — rules of conduct. Take those masks off, identify yourselves, make sure that there is accountability, and that has to be written into law before we can move forward. But I will tell you what Wisconsinites are not calling for, and that is for the people who work at our airports, for the people who work at FEMA to not get funded. And we think that it is a sign that Republicans have come to the table and are talking to us and negotiating in our early stages. We think that they understand that they’re getting blamed for those long lines, and they’re also getting blamed for being unreasonable about putting guardrails around ICE.”
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