AUSTIN, Texas — The Democratic National Committee left Austin on Saturday with two conflicting positions on immigration enforcement on the books, approving resolutions both to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and to pursue what a separate measure called "concrete reforms" of the agency — a split that lays bare a tension the party has not resolved since 2018.
The DNC gathered for its summer meeting Aug. 13 through the weekend in Austin. Both resolutions passed at the same session. Neither is binding and neither sets the party's platform, which will be determined at the 2028 convention. Candidates and incumbents remain free to stake out their own positions on ICE, and most will.
The abolition resolution calls on members of Congress to craft legislation abolishing ICE and to restrict funding for the Department of Homeland Security's enforcement operations. Michele Johnson, a DNC member from Louisiana who proposed that measure, said the party must take a clear stand. The July shootings — two fatal encounters involving ICE agents — gave the push renewed urgency inside the meeting rooms.
The reform resolution does not call for the agency's elimination. It demands "concrete changes" to how ICE operates, without specifying a legislative vehicle or timeline. DNC Chair Ken Martin, who spoke at both the Black Caucus meeting and a Labor Council session during the Austin gathering, said the disagreement reflects where the party's voters actually are heading into the November midterms.
Martin did not publicly back either resolution over the other. In remarks at the meeting, he said that whatever their differences on abolition versus reform, Democrats agree that what ICE is doing now — and what U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the broader federal government are doing — should stop. That framing attempts to hold together a coalition that ranges from safe-seat progressive members who have called for abolition since the first Trump administration to frontline-district Democrats who view the label as a political liability.
The "Abolish ICE" rallying cry first gained national traction in 2018, during President Trump's first term, when family separation at the southern border became a defining controversy. It faded as a front-line Democratic demand through the Biden years but never fully disappeared among activist circles and the party's left flank. Trump's return to the White House in January 2025 and the expansion of deportation operations in the 18 months since have pulled it back to the surface.
The two July shootings by ICE agents — both fatal — added a specific, recent set of facts to what had been a largely abstract policy debate inside Democratic Party committees. Johnson cited those incidents directly in pressing for the abolition measure. The shootings have not been adjudicated in any public proceeding referenced in the meeting record, but their political weight inside the Austin gathering was evident.
The intraparty friction is not simply ideological. It maps onto the party's electoral geography. Progressive members in safely Democratic urban districts face primary pressure from activists who view reform language as insufficient. Democrats running in competitive suburban and exurban districts in states like Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania treat the abolition framing as a target their Republican opponents will use in the fall. The dueling resolutions are, in that sense, a direct reflection of the party's congressional map.
Saturday's vote does not resolve that tension — it institutionalizes it. The DNC's decision to pass both measures simultaneously rather than choose between them was itself a procedural outcome that reflects the balance of power inside the committee. Neither side had the votes to block the other.
What happens next is a question each Democratic candidate answers individually. The DNC resolutions will be cited by progressive challengers pressing incumbents to adopt abolition language and by Republicans framing the party's immigration posture for general-election audiences. The 2028 platform process is the only DNC mechanism that produces a binding statement, and that process is two years away.
