Lightfoot: 14 Demands Senate Democrats Must Make Before Agreeing to Any New DHS Funding

Former Chicago Mayor and federal prosecutor Lori E. Lightfoot today released an open letter outlining 14 demands Senate Democrats must make before agreeing to any new Department of Homeland Security funding.

At a moment when public confidence in federal immigration enforcement has collapsed and Americans are demanding change, Lightfoot—drawing on her experience as a former federal prosecutor and nationally recognized leader in accountability and oversight—lays out a practical framework to rein in ICE and restore constitutional guardrails before Congress approves additional funding.

The open letter was published on social media (Facebook, X, LinkedIn), and the full text appears below:

Federal immigration enforcement is out of control. Congress must rein it in—not give it a blank check.

Since September, the Department of Homeland Security has shot 12 people during immigration enforcement operations—killing four and injuring eight, according to NBC News. The first was Silverio Villegas González, killed at a traffic stop in Franklin Park, Illinois on September 12. The most recent was Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, shot and killed in Minneapolis on January 24 while filming enforcement activity with his cellphone.

Federal judges ruled in at least 2,300 cases that immigration officials detained people without bond or basic due-process protections, according to reporting by Politico. ICE’s own data shows that roughly three-quarters of people they’ve detained have no criminal conviction at all, and only a small single-digit share have violent criminal convictions.

After terrorizing Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis, Greg Bovino is reportedly out of his job as Customs and Border Patrol Commander at Large and will soon return to his post at the border — where he belonged the whole time. 

The fact pattern is clear. 

The “worst of the worst” is not who federal immigration agents are going after.

It is how they are operating.

Over my career, I have investigated scores of police-involved shootings—sometimes arriving on scene within minutes, other times evaluating whether a shooting was a legitimate use of force. I have also devoted a significant part of my career to police reform and accountability. It is impossible, therefore, to watch what federal immigration agents are doing in the streets of America’s cities and not conclude that something is very, very wrong.

On a near-daily basis, federal immigration agents operating in our cities are violating core constitutional protections—the First Amendment rights of peaceful protesters, the Fourth Amendment’s limits on unreasonable searches, seizures, and warrantless entries, and the Tenth Amendment’s constraints on federal overreach into local and state authority. These constitutional violations seem to arise from a fundamental absence of the basics that have been standard in local law enforcement for decades.

Those failures are evident in video after video: agents operating with little or no meaningful training for urban enforcement, a glaring absence of supervision, and a profound lack of grounding in basic constitutional principles. Under those conditions, it is not surprising—though it is horrifying—that people have been killed. Without immediate intervention, I fear we will witness more.

The public sees this too. Nearly two-thirds of Americans disapprove of how ICE is operating, with majorities saying enforcement has gone too far and is no longer focused on serious crime, according to a recent New York Times/Siena College poll. Support for dismantling the agency has reached historic highs—an unmistakable signal of how far public trust has eroded.

It is abundantly clear that the American people are demanding change.

The U.S. Senate now faces a choice. Voting no on the current DHS funding package is a start, but it is not enough. Congress must stop treating immigration enforcement as an accountability-free zone. Any funding bill must be conditioned on real, enforceable constraints that restore constitutional guardrails and public confidence.

At a minimum, the Senate should require some combination of the following before approving additional DHS funding:

These are not radical demands. They reflect principles Americans overwhelmingly support: transparency in law enforcement, limits on the use of force, bans on racial profiling, independent investigations after deaths, and accountability before continued funding is granted. 

We must restore the rule of law, respect for the Constitution, and the rights of our residents. Nothing less is acceptable. This is not the time for half measures — because lives are hanging in the balance.