Mayor Brandon Johnson called for abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Saturday after a federal agent killed another person in Minneapolis, while Gov. JB Pritzker called upon Democrats to halt funding for the agency but stopped short of saying it should be dissolved. “When they co me for one of us, they come for all of us,” Johnson, a progressive mayor of the nation’s third-largest city who verbally tangled with ICE and federal Border Patrol during their high-profile raids in and around Chicago, posted on X in Spanish. “ICE must be abolished.” Amid roiling protests in Minnesota that continued Saturday, federal immigration officers fatally shot the 37-year-old man in Minneapolis, where Republican President Donald Trump’s latest deportation campaign has unfolded. Video of the scene appeared to show the man on the ground when gunshots rang out, quickly drawing condemnation from witnesses on the scene and later Democrats. U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said the man was armed, posting a photo of a handgun. The second Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown has revived calls among the left to dismantle ICE — though many of the raids witnessed in Minneapolis, Chicago and elsewhere across the nation feature other DHS agencies such as Customs and Border Patrol. Multiple Democrats, such as U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez and Juliana Stratton, Pritzker’s Illinois lieutenant governor and a candidate for U.S. Senate, as well as several congressional candidates, have also endorsed the “Abolish ICE” movement. Pritzker, a possible 2028 presidential contender, has not yet gone that far. “We must put a stop to Trump’s ICE,” Pritzker wrote on X. “Stop the funding, stop the occupations, stop the killings.” The issue of ICE’s budget has become a new line of demarcation within the Democratic Party. On Thursday, the Republican-controlled House approved funding for ICE and other agencies under the Department of Homeland Security. While some have called for ICE to be fully abolished, others have said funding for the agency and other immigration arms of the federal government should be cut off. Meanwhile, pressure is mounting on Democratic Senators to hold the line. “I just think that if we do not stop this now, if we don’t abolish Trump’s ICE and make sure that we have a trained force that is following the law, that this is going to erupt into something really terrible. It already is, but it could get vastly worse,” Pritzker said Saturday afternoon on MSNOW. That Pritzker qualified his calls with abolishing “Trump’s ICE” in particular shows he and others might be reluctant to support permanently dismantling the agency, especially after the 2020 “defund the police” movement caught fire among progressives but ultimately fizzled out in the political arena. U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, Stratton’s primary challenger, has also stressed that he supports abolishing “Trump’s ICE.” Another Senate candidate, U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly, has focused her efforts on issuing articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Pritzker said during the brief interview on MSNOW that under the current administration ICE’s ranks have been increased with “a bunch of untrained and unqualified people” and the agency has “become some sort of secret police force for Donald Trump.” “They need to step back from American cities, and in particular, right now, they need to withdraw, step back from Minneapolis, and we need to talk about, How are we now going to proceed without them causing more damage and more violence, rather than them lying persistently about what they’re doing and causing uproar in our American cities,” Pritzker said. Saturday’s fatal shooting happened just weeks after the Jan. 7 slaying of Renee Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis. Johnson, who has called for the city to broadly “resist” Trump’s attacks on Chicago, first alluded to the movement to dismantle ICE last month when he endorsed an entry to the city’s annual snowplow contest that said “ABOLISH ICE.” Last week, he more forcefully said on X, “Abolishing ICE would make us all safer,” noting the city’s crime drop preceded the Trump administration’s targeted immigration raids last fall. The Associated Press contributed. ...read more read less