"100% Against ICE." She Ran the Ad. We Pulled the Record.

Rep. April McClain Delaney was the only Maryland Democrat who voted for the Laken Riley Act. Now it seems she wishes she hadn't.

WASHINGTON — She ran the ad. She made the claim. Now the record speaks.

Rep. April McClain Delaney, D-Md., the frontrunner in Maryland’s crowded Democratic Senate primary, is telling voters she “voted 100% against Trump’s ICE.” It is not true. Not close to true. And the receipts are sitting in the Congressional Record.

McClain Delaney has voted with Donald Trump roughly 22% of the time — nearly twice as often as any other Maryland Democrat — casting a string of pro-ICE votes that expanded the agency’s detention powers, handed it nearly $1 billion in fresh funding, and even thanked it publicly for carrying out the most aggressive mass deportation campaign in modern American history.

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The Only Maryland Democrat

She was the only Maryland Democrat to vote for the Laken Riley Act — a law that gave ICE the power to detain immigrants without a criminal conviction. The only Maryland Democrat to back a bill authored by Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., that would let ICE jail and deport domestic violence survivors who come forward to report abuse. The only Maryland Democrat to vote for legislation making it easier to deport immigrants and permanently bar them from the country — again, without a conviction, without due process.

That was before the Kilmar Abrego Garcia deportation. Before the Los Angeles ICE raids. Before Operation Midway Blitz, which swept through Chicago neighborhoods with documented brutality.

After all of that, McClain Delaney voted in June 2025 for a resolution thanking ICE for “protecting the Homeland.”

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Nearly $1 Billion, No Strings

Three months later, she went further.

On Sept. 19, 2025, with a government shutdown looming, House Democrats forced a vote on their own competing funding measure — HR 5450 — through the motion to recommit process. The measure would have extended government funding through Oct. 31, 2025, at existing levels, with zero new reforms or restrictions on ICE or the Department of Homeland Security.

At ICE’s annual appropriation of $10.04 billion, a one-month continuing resolution at existing levels meant $852.9 million in new funding flowing directly to Trump’s deportation apparatus. CBP would have received an additional $1.67 billion. DHS as a whole, another $10.7 billion.

McClain Delaney voted for it.

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“Common Sense”

When pressed on any of this, she doesn’t retreat. She doubles down.

As recently as two weeks ago, McClain Delaney called her Laken Riley Act vote “a common sense vote” and described criticism of it as “really absurd.”

Now she’s running a TV ad claiming she “voted 100% against Trump’s ICE” — while defending, in the same breath, the vote that expanded ICE’s detention powers beyond what any prior Congress had authorized.

The ad is running. The record is there. Maryland Democratic primary voters head to the polls with both in front of them.