Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi’s Senate campaign has been blanketing the Illinois airwaves for months. For his final TV ad before the March 17 Democratic primary, he focused on standing up to President Donald Trump and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
So did the TV ad before that. And the one before that, too.
Fully two-thirds of the TV ads in the last month of the race have mentioned ICE, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact. And it’s not just in Illinois: Nearly a quarter of all TV ads from Democratic campaigns across the country in the last month have referenced the agency.
The Illinois race — a contested open primary after Sen. Dick Durbin decided to retire — could be an early test of how anti-ICE messaging is playing out in Democratic primaries this year, including what most motivates the party base. Krishnamoorthi, Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton and Rep. Robin Kelly have each staked out slightly different positions on the agency, with Krishnamoorthi speaking of reforms and abolishing “Trump’s ICE,” Stratton taking a simpler “abolish ICE” line, and Kelly calling to “dismantle” ICE.
The focus on ICE comes amid broad pushback on the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown following enforcement surges in cities including Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis, where federal immigration agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens earlier this year. The campaign is also an early test of whether the issue has staying power, even as federal agents draw down some operations. Democrats say it does.
“Fighting ICE has become synonymous with opposing and fighting back against Trump,” said Brandon Davis, a Democratic consultant who worked on Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s successful 2023 campaign.
On the airwaves
“I’m an immigrant myself,” Krishnamoorthi says in his closing ad. “It wasn’t easy, but when things got tough, our neighbors had our backs. That’s why stopping Trump and ICE’s attacks on our communities is deeply personal to me.”
Krishnamoorthi told NBC News in an interview that his closing message ahead of Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary came after facing attacks from his chief opponent, Stratton, for accepting campaign donations from a top executive at Palantir, a software company and ICE contractor.
“One big fact that she fails to mention is that I’m an immigrant. I’m the only immigrant in this race,” Krishnamoorthi said, later adding: “When ICE terrorizes a community, when it racially profiles brown people, I say, ‘There but for the grace of God, go I.’ That could be me.”
Stratton’s first TV ad, which included bleeped-out expletives aimed at the president, also touted her call to “abolish ICE.” Stratton noted in an interview that the community was still reeling from the enforcement surge in the Chicago area last year, known as Operation Midway Blitz, during which agents shot two people and roughly 1,600 people were arrested.
“The fear that people have has not left just because one day they packed up and said, ‘OK, Operation Midway Blitz, we’re going to put a pause on it,’” Stratton said. “People are still scared and they’re still worried.”
Kelly said in an interview that Operation Midway Blitz affected her congressional district, which stretches from Chicago’s South Side into rural parts of the state, including an incident where a helicopter landed on an apartment building and dozens of immigrants were arrested.
“It was absolutely horrific,” Kelly said. One of her first TV ads of the race featured footage of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the two Minnesotans killed by federal agents in January.
Those killings galvanized Americans, and Democrats in particular, in opposition to ICE and Customs and Border Protection tactics.
A NBC News Decision Desk Poll conducted in the weeks after those deaths found 67% of Americans, including 97% of Democrats, said ICE and CBP agents’ tactics had gone too far, while 23% said they had been about right and 10% said they had not gone far enough. Two-thirds of Americans disapproved of how ICE was handling its job, including 96% of Democrats.
But Kelly stressed that “affordability is still the main issue” ahead of Tuesday’s primary. Her final TV ad of the race does not mention the issue of immigration, instead touting her positions to lower costs as she says, “It’s time to focus on what really matters.”
Different approaches
Stratton, Krishnamoorthi and Kelly all approach the ICE issue slightly differently, raising questions about what is most appealing to Democratic voters.
Stratton notes that she is the only candidate calling to completely abolish the agency, saying in an interview, “I want to abolish ICE because I don’t believe that this agency can be reformed. I want ICE and CBP out of our American cities.”
Asked how immigration enforcement would be carried out if ICE no longer existed, Stratton said, “I believe that we need to look at a more holistic approach where we’re investing in immigration judges, where we’re investing in social services and community-based resources.”
“We can still have, of course, security at the border, and we can still address issues like smuggling and trafficking,” Stratton said. “But we can’t take this sort of one-size-fits-all approach where, you know, immigrants, our immigrant communities, are criminalized.”
Krishnamoorthi has called to “abolish Trump’s ICE,” explaining in an interview that he is pushing for certain reforms including barring agents from wearing masks, requiring them to wear identification, ending “warrantless arrests” and stopping “roving gangs of ICE and CBP agents stirring up trouble in our cities.”
“What I’m saying is there’s going to be immigration enforcement of some kind,” Krishnamoorthi said. “There was under Barack Obama or Joe Biden, and there will be in the future. And there are other functions, such as policing human trafficking, child sex trafficking, controlling fentanyl at the borders — all those functions will have to continue.
“However,” Krishnamoorthi went on, “they cannot continue in the present format.”
Kelly has called to “dismantle” ICE and the Department of Homeland Security itself, saying the department is “too big, too unwieldy and they’re not accountable.” Kelly has also touted her effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was fired earlier this month and is set to leave her post soon.
“I don’t think there’s any member of Congress that doesn’t think there needs to be some type of enforcement,” Kelly said of her calls to dismantle the department, later adding: “We need to have a plan and we need to look at everything.”
Anti-ICE politics
The various ways each Democrat would deal with ICE underscore the tricky politics of the issue, as some moderate Democrats argue that embracing the slogan of “abolish ICE,” which first began to take hold during the first Trump administration, damaged the party long term.
The moderate Democratic think tank Third Way in January encouraged the party to focus on addressing ICE’s tactics rather than calling for the agency to be abolished, arguing that the “abolish ICE” position could be a “politically lethal” one that Republicans could easily weaponize.
Stratton dismissed those concerns, saying, “Anyone who wants to talk about what can be weaponized, how about the fact that the federal government is being weaponized against our own citizens? That’s the real travesty here.”
Stratton and her allies are betting it’s a position that will resonate with Democratic primary voters. Illinois Future PAC, a super PAC funded largely by Gov. JB Pritzker, who has endorsed Stratton, touted her position on ICE in one of the group’s first TV ads.
“Primary voters want ICE to be held accountable. They don’t want you to just come in and say, ‘OK, we’re going to do some sort of reform,’” said Illinois Future PAC spokeswoman Jordan Abudayyeh.
The NBC News Decision Desk Poll found that while virtually all Democrats wanted to overhaul ICE, they were split over how exactly to do it. Half of Democrats said ICE should be “reformed” while 48% said it should be “abolished.”
Illinois Future PAC has also launched attacks against Krishnamoorthi on the issue, knocking him for taking donations from a Palantir executive and for supporting a resolution that expressed “gratitude to law enforcement officers, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel, for protecting the homeland.”
Krishnamoorthi has denounced the attacks, noting that resolution was actually condemning an antisemitic attack in Colorado. His campaign also donated to charity the funds from Shyam Sankar — Palantir’s chief technology officer, who also joined an Army initiative as a senior adviser last year — following a Chicago Sun-Times report on Krishnamoorthi campaign donors with ties to Trump.
Krishnamoorthi suggested the donations from Sankar, who had given to Krishnamoorthi’s campaigns since 2015, were driven by an effort to increase South Asian representation.
“It’s common in the community for people to do that, but you’d have to ask him,” Krishnamoorthi said.
“I’m not beholden to any one individual, one special interest, one set of actors,” the congressman later said. “And as you know, nobody’s bankrolling my campaign.”
Krishnamoorthi has called the attack an “example of hypocrisy,” knocking Stratton for contributions to the Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association from CoreCivic, a private prison firm and ICE contractor. CoreCivic operated ICE’s facility in the Chicago suburb Broadview, which became the center of local protests against the agency.
Stratton has said she did not personally solicit those donations and encouraged the group to return the funds. The DLGA, which is supporting Stratton in the race, has said it will no longer accept donations from CoreCivic and will donate 2024 and 2025 contributions to an immigrant rights group.
DLGA executive director Kevin Holst said in an interview that the attacks on Stratton, which have also been leveled by Fairshake, a group tied to the cryptocurrency industry, are “really preposterous guilt by association.”
“It’s a very disingenuous attack because Juliana Stratton did not solicit any contribution from CoreCivic, while Raja Krishnamoorthi personally picked up the phone year after year to solicit money from the CTO of Palantir,” Holst said.
Even as the attacks and ads continue to fly ahead of Tuesday’s primary, Chicago-based Democratic strategist Jaimey Sexton noted that the candidates were largely aligned in opposition to ICE and the administration’s deportation efforts, which until recently had been led by Border Patrol’s Greg Bovino.
“Whoever goes to the Senate is going to be good on the issue for Democrats,” Sexton said. “Nobody’s going to say, ‘Let’s bring Greg Bovino back.’”
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