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The Texas Democrat poised to take the gavel over ICE’s budget in January said Wednesday he will not abolish the agency, whatever the socialists joining his caucus may demand.
“I’m not going to abolish ICE, but I will put serious railguards [sic] on ICE,” Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) said in response to a question from The Post at a Congressional Hispanic Caucus press conference outside the Capitol.
Cuellar is the top Democrat on the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds the Department of Homeland Security. He’s in line to chair the panel once Democrats, who flipped the House last week, take power.
The Post asked him about Rep.-elect Claire Valdez, a democratic socialist who won New York’s 7th District and told a Progressive Caucus press conference Sunday that the results amounted to a mandate to abolish ICE.
“What you are looking at behind me is a mandate,” Valdez had said.
Cuellar wasn’t persuaded.
“Look, the Democratic Party has a large ideological spectrum,” he said. “I understand what they said, but I will tell you this as the incoming chairman.”
“We’ve got to put ICE the way it was before January of 2025, and we will get that done,” he added.
The “railguards” he has in mind would ride on the spending bill itself — policy language written into ICE’s funding, telling the agency what it may and may not do with the money. He said he would restore language, stripped by Republicans in 2017, directing ICE to focus its resources on criminals. He also said he has a list of restrictions aimed at the agency and its detention centers.
None of it can gain any traction until this year’s Homeland Security funding bill is finished. Cuellar said the House has done its part and the Senate has not. He noted that Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) spoke by phone Monday.
The Laredo Democrat has seldom marched in lockstep with his party on border policy. He was one of seven House Democrats who voted for DHS funding in January, when most of his party refused — and he’s urged Democrats not to return to Biden-era asylum policy.
And he owes President Trump a favor — the president pardoned Cuellar last December on federal bribery and money laundering charges, and House Democrats restored him as the subcommittee’s ranking member days later.
Valdez, a Mamdani-backed state assemblywoman, will succeed retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez in a seat spanning Brooklyn and Queens. On the campaign trail, she called ICE a “militarized terrorist organization.”
By Tuesday, she’d changed her tune. She told reporters voters had delivered a mandate to “rein in ICE.”
