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Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan won the U.S. Senate seat on Tuesday, November 3, defeating Republican Michele Tafoya by 10 points and becoming the first Native American woman elected to the Senate — and in her victory speech that night in St. Paul, she pledged to dismantle the agency at the center of the year’s fiercest political fight. “We will rip ICE apart!” Flanagan told the cheering crowd at the InterContinental Hotel, promising to replace Immigration and Customs Enforcement with an immigration system “grounded in public safety for everyone.”
The vow was not new — Flanagan said much the same shortly after winning the Democratic primary in August, telling supporters, “We need to rip ICE apart and stop them from terrorizing our communities” — but delivered from the victory stage, hours after Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress, it landed as the incoming majority’s opening message. The message from the victory stage was unmistakable: for the incoming Democratic majority, the fight over immigration enforcement comes first. In a 30-minute Zoom news conference the next morning, she laid out her priorities for the Senate — ICE accountability, health care and new leadership — and said she supports replacing Sen. Chuck Schumer as the Democrats’ Senate leader. “I am tremendously grateful for Chuck Schumer’s leadership and what he has done over the last many years, and I think it is time for new leadership,” she told reporters.
Flanagan was more specific about what dismantling ICE would mean in practice — and more cautious. She told reporters she and her new colleagues “will get into the weeds of what that looks like from a policy approach,” and she has described her preferred approach as dismantling the agency and rebuilding immigration enforcement from scratch, stopping short of using the term “abolish.” She has said the country can “fix our broken immigration system, secure the border, and create a real pathway to citizenship that aligns with our values.”
The pledge is rooted in what happened in Minnesota this year. ICE descended on the state to run Operation Metro Surge after a sprawling, multibillion-dollar daycare fraud scandal linked to Somali immigrants, and two Minnesota residents, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were killed by federal agents in January, with no charges following. The enforcement push became a rallying cry for her campaign and a pointed issue on the trail, and ICE’s actions in the state led to yet another government shutdown in Washington. Flanagan has blamed the fraud scandal’s oversight failures on Gov. Tim Walz, her former running mate, saying “he was the one who had oversight here.”
Her win also complicates Schumer’s hold on the leadership. Flanagan is one of several newly elected Democrats who campaigned against him, arguing Democrats need change at the top. “People want big, bold change,” she told The New York Times. “They are sick of nibbling around the edges.” Flanagan takes her seat when the new Congress convenes in January.