Democrats Read the Midterms as a Mandate to Rein In ICE. The Polls Point to the Grocery Bill

Fresh off a wave election, Democrats are already trying to turn their new majority into a mandate against immigration enforcement. Fox News reported that Rep.-elect Bobby Pulido, who flipped Texas' 15th Congressional District by ousting Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz, told a Capitol Hill news conference that his party must make immigration reform a priority if it wants to win in 2028. Texas Democrats are pressing the party's 2028 hopefuls in the same direction, the outlet reported.

That argument deserves a fair hearing. Pulido campaigned on affordability while tying the administration's worksite raids to labor shortages that he said were hurting the local economy, according to Fox News. And President Trump himself, in a 60 Minutes interview after the election, said of his deportation push, "I think it was too tough," adding that he believed it had hurt him, ABC News reported.

But a mandate is something voters give, not something a party declares. When you look at what voters actually said they cared about, the story Democrats are telling starts to come apart.

Fox News Digital's polling found that 27% of Republican voters ranked immigration as their top issue, compared with just 3% of Democrats. A UnidosUS poll cited by Fox found that 58% of Latino voters nationally named affordability among their top priorities, against 27% who named immigration. And Fox's own pre-election Voter Poll found that 45% of Hispanic voters said the economy was the most important issue facing the country, followed by the state of democracy at 26% and immigration at 15%.

Read those numbers again. The voters who moved toward Democrats this year were worried first and foremost about rent, groceries and gas. The voters who rank immigration at the top are overwhelmingly Republicans, and they want the law enforced. Neither group sent Washington a message to tie the hands of the officers who enforce it.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement carried out a record 483,200 deportations in fiscal 2026, according to Department of Homeland Security figures obtained by CBS News, along with more than 491,000 arrests, nearly 475,000 of them administrative. DHS said it was the most arrests and deportations in the agency's history, topping the previous record of 442,640 deportations set the year before.

Those are not abstractions. Each removal carried out under a final order is the law Congress wrote being applied as written. The Constitution gives Congress the power to set immigration rules and gives the president the duty to see that the laws are faithfully carried out. If Democrats believe the laws are wrong, the honest path runs through a vote in the House and Senate, not through starving or handcuffing the agency that executes them.

There is room for a serious debate about tactics, and the president has opened that door himself. But a debate about how ICE does its job is very different from a campaign to make it stop doing that job.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has made clear where the administration stands. He said he and the president had not yet discussed concrete policy changes since the midterms and stressed that there will be no amnesty, The Washington Times reported.

In the Senate, Republican James Lankford, who is expected to be a central player in any bipartisan immigration effort in the next Congress, said Republicans will look to the president for a signal on what any package should contain, The Hill reported. That is a reminder that Democrats will not write immigration policy alone, even with bigger majorities. Any law still needs the president's signature, and the administration's red line on amnesty has not moved.

When the new Congress convenes in January, Democrats will hold the gavels and the subpoena power. They can spend that power on hearings designed to put ICE on trial, or they can spend it on the issue their own new voters ranked first: the cost of living.

Conservatives should welcome a real conversation about fixing a broken immigration system, one that begins with a secure border, keeps removing criminals and repeat violators, and protects American workers' wages. What they should not accept is the idea that a midterm fought over prices quietly became a referendum on abolishing or defanging immigration enforcement. The polls do not say that. The voters did not say that. And the record of the past year, the most productive in ICE's history, shows what the law can do when it is enforced.