Democrats in four states seek to bar ICE employees from future civil service jobs

Supercharged by billions in dollars from Congress, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has hired thousands of new officers to carry out Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign in an effort it has likened to “wartime recruitment”. In several states, Democratic lawmakers want applicants to think twice about taking part.

Bills introduced in recent weeks in the legislatures of at least four Democratic-led states would impose long-term consequences on new ICE employees by rendering them ineligible for jobs in law enforcement, public education, and, in their most expansive form, the entire state civil service.

None of the proposals has been signed into law, and potential legislation may face legal challenges. The bills nonetheless underscore Democratic state lawmaker’s determination to undermine Trump’s hardline immigration policy, even as a similar effort in Congress that has resulted in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutting down faces uncertain prospects.

“If you’re an ICE agent, you’re signing up to engage in unlawful conduct. You’re signing up to engage in racially profiling Latino communities. You’re signing up to engage in illegal detentions and deportations of people who have legal rights in this country, you’re signing up for the separation of families and children,” Democratic New Jersey assemblyman Ravi Bhalla told the Guardian.

Earlier in February, he introduced legislation that would effectively bar from state and local government employment anyone who joined ICE between September 2025 and the expected final day of Trump’s term in 2029.

“If you make that decision, there will be consequences if you seek employment in New Jersey,” Bhalla said.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin accused the lawmakers proposing these bills of “falsely casting federal law enforcement as villains while ICE officers are being targeted, threatened, and doxxed simply for doing their jobs.”

“To most Americans, ICE officers are heroes,” she said.

After Trump returned to the White House last year, Congress’s Republican leaders moved quickly to provide ICE and other federal agencies money to make good on the president’s campaign promise of deporting all undocumented immigrants.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act approved by the GOP along party lines allocated nearly $30bn to hire and train new ICE agents, and the agency embarked on a hiring spree that made liberal use of patriotic and, at times, xenophobic, slogans as well as incentives like signing bonuses as high as $50,000.

In January, the DHS announced the agency’s headcount of officers and agents had more than doubled, reaching 22,000. But ICE’s aggressive tactics appear to have become a political liability for Trump, whose approval ratings on immigration have recently slumped.

A key driver of that collapse came after an ICE agent shot Renee Good in Minneapolis last month, and two officers from border patrol and Customs and Border Protection opened fire on Alex Pretti weeks later. Democrats in the US Senate responded to their deaths by blocking passage of legislation funding DHS – which oversees those agencies – until Congress’s Republican majority agrees to demands including a ban on officers wearing masks, a requirement they seek judicial warrants before entering private property and an end to their practice of stopping people they suspect of being undocumented on the street.

GOP leaders have rejected several of their conditions, leading to the DHS shutting down after its spending authorization expired. Talks between the two parties remain ongoing, but the deportation push has continued with funding from the One Big Beautiful Bill act.

Though their laws apply only within their borders, states where Democrats control the governor’s office and the legislature have sought to circumvent the congressional deadlock with new measures to address what lawmakers characterize as ICE’s brutal and indiscriminate tactics. The New Jersey governor, Mikie Sherrill, this month signed an executive order banning the agents from some state properties, and California lawmakers last year approved rules against federal agents wearing masks, though the law was recently blocked by a federal judge.

In Maryland, where Democratic governor Wes Moore this month signed a law prohibiting local law enforcement from being deputized for federal immigration enforcement operations, delegate Adrian Boafo has introduced the ICE Breaker Act, which would prevent any state police agency from hiring people who took jobs with ICE after 20 January 2025 – the date Trump began his second term.

The measure, which is similar to one proposed in Washington state, is necessary both because of ICE’s tactics in Minneapolis and Trump’s pardoning of January 6 defendants, which led to at least one taking a job at the justice department, Boafo said. Adjacent to Washington DC, the state of Maryland is a frequent employer of former federal workers, and the delegate said he wants to state law enforcement is free of people involved in Trump’s deportation push.

“We are, in the state of Maryland, blessed to have retired federal workers come work for us in the state and local governments,” Boafo said. “We’re putting a marker in the ground. If you recruited under this administration, under these tactics, we don’t want you to come ever work in Maryland state law enforcement.”

In California, Democratic assembly member Anamarie Ávila Farías has proposed the Melt Ice act, which would stop people who took jobs with ICE during Trump’s second term from becoming school teachers or police officers in the most-populous state.

“I would think for any rational person, this should resonate to be a deterrent to join the ranks of ICE in this administration in its current form,” Ávila Farías said.

Tom Lackey, a Republican assembly member and former California highway patrol officer, said the Democratic proposal would amount to employment discrimination.

“It punishes lawful employment, not misconduct, and I don’t think it has any chance of being constitutionally supported,” he said. “I’m actually baffled by it.”

The lawmakers sponsoring such measures say they believe their bills can stand up in court, but several say they expect them to be amended as they work their way through their legislature.

Commenting on the Melt Ice act, Joseph Fishkin, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, said the proposal “presents some novel issues that no court has yet addressed”, though whether it can overcome federal supremacy over state law remains to be seen.

“California lawmakers certainly know that. They may be proposing or even passing these laws in part to send a message that California as a state finds the actions of ICE abhorrent,” Fishkin said.

“Passing such a law does send that message loud and clear even if a court were to ultimately strike it down on federalism grounds.”