Haley Stevens Voted to Fund and Thank ICE. Now She Wants Michigan to Forget.

As Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary hits its final stretch, Rep. Haley Stevens is running as an ICE reformer. Her voting record tells a messier story.

WASHINGTON — Masked ICE agents continued their killing spree this month, gunning down innocent Americans in the street from Texas to Maine. And on Aug. 4 — eleven days from now — Michigan Democrats will decide whether the person who votes to rein in ICE should be someone who once voted to fund it.

Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., wants voters to see her as the woman who told ICE “not one penny more.” But as you’ll read below, her anti-ICE position is newfangled. Before opposing ICE was cool, Stevens voted multiple times to support the rogue agency terrorizing American communities.

On the other hand, Stevens’ opponent in the Michigan Senate primary, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, has opposed ICE from the jump; but his is a position untested by any voting record. That is, El Sayed’s never had a job that required him to chose Aye or Nay on things like, say, federal appropriations for the department of Homeland Security. Stevens has that job and like many Democrats, voted Aye for ICE until it was more popular to vote Nay.

Can Michigan voters trust Stevens to translate her campaign rhetoric into votes in the Senate? My guess is: probably not. While many of Stevens Democratic colleagues in the House arrived in Congress and continue to be anti-ICE on principle, for Stevens, it seems more than plausible that this political trend will not translate into policy action.

Let’s dive in, but before we do, please consider a paid subscriber to Migrant Insider, the first and only immigration news outlet in the Washington Press Corp. Since 2024, your support has kept the lights on as we’ve broken a ton of immigration news by holding Holding the government to account for the atrocities of mass deportations. And also please share this with anyone you know in Michigan who you think would benefit from the facts.

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Stevens’ record before the reform

Start with the paper trail. Since 2019 when Stevens arrived as a House freshman representing Michigan’s 11th congressional district, she has voted to support ICE multiple times — 

Beginning in 2024, Stevens voted yes on House Resolution 1102, a $1.2 trillion omnibus that kept the government open and funded the Department of Homeland Security — ICE included — through the fiscal year.

In June 2025, she was one of 75 House Democrats to back a resolution condemning the Boulder, Colorado, terror attack that also thanked ICE agents by name for “protecting the homeland.”

And this May, according to El-Sayed’s campaign, she joined 203 House Republicans to pass the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act — legislation that hands ICE a national intelligence hub and sweeping new authority to collect Americans’ personal data under a shoplifting pretext.

Stevens has an answer for the Boulder vote. In a 2026 debate, she called the ICE language “a cynical point” Republicans slipped into a bill about condemning antisemitic violence. “I am always going to stand up to violence,” she said, “and I just wish my opponent wouldn’t pursue the cynical approaches of Republicans.” She has not offered a comparable public defense of the retail-crime vote.

Then came the reversal — and the bodies

Everything changed after ICE agents killed two Americans, including one in Minneapolis during what El-Sayed calls “Project Metro Surge.”

Stevens’ Michigan-specific reckoning came at the North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, where detainee Nenko Gantchev died in ICE custody. Stevens and Rep. Hillary Scholten visited and got nothing.

“ICE’s leadership has been silent in response to our requests for information and oversight,” Stevens said afterward. In a separate interview, she went further: “This is a prison. Ninety percent of the people that are being taken by masked agents without badges, without IDs, they’re not criminals. ... It’s just a complete overreach and it’s not acceptable.”

She has since cosponsored H.R. 7163, which would strip ICE of the $75 billion “slush fund” created under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and redirect it to hire up to 200,000 local police officers. She backs the VISIBLE Act, which would ban ICE agents from wearing masks. She’s pushing an independent-prosecutor bill for agent misconduct.

And in June, she took a genuine win: ICE abandoned plans to convert a Romulus warehouse into a detention facility after Stevens and other Michigan officials pushed back. “The people of Michigan have been clear,” she said. “We don’t want a new ICE facility in our state.”

She has also called on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign. “She’s in dereliction of duty,” Stevens said. “She has lied to the American people. She has gaslit Congress.”

What Stevens has not done is call for abolishing ICE. “No, I don’t agree with that as a step,” she said when asked directly. “But we do need dramatic overhauls.”

The opponent with no record to defend

That distinction is the entire campaign. El-Sayed, the former Wayne County health director, has called for abolishing ICE since 2018 — long before Trump’s second-term deportation surge made it a mainstream Democratic position.

He has never cast a vote on ICE funding, never sat in a hearing room negotiating a DHS appropriations bill, never had to weigh a Boulder resolution against a “thank ICE” rider. His position has the clarity that comes from never having been tested by governing.

“ICE is not about immigration. ICE is not about the southern border,” El-Sayed said at a recent debate, invoking his own trip to Minneapolis during the ICE surge there.

“ICE is about normalizing paramilitary force on our streets. ... You cannot reform this. You cannot retrain this. The only logical path is to abolish ICE.” His campaign has been explicit about the contrast: “I don’t take money from corporations, I don’t take money from ICE contractors, which is why I can say with a clear voice: we need to abolish ICE” — a direct jab at Stevens, whose campaign has faced its own scrutiny after reporting revealed her strategist, Caitlin Legacki, was simultaneously consulting for Palantir, the surveillance firm that built the tracking software powering Trump’s deportation machine.

Polling on the underlying question favors El-Sayed’s framing more than Stevens’s record: two-thirds of Americans, and 91% of Democrats, now say ICE has gone too far. Prediction markets in the race have moved sharply toward El-Sayed in recent days, with AIPAC-aligned groups pouring nearly $30 million into Stevens’s campaign to hold the establishment line — the same super PAC that attacked Rep. Tom Malinowski for casting the identical 2024 ICE-funding vote Stevens cast.

What Michigan is actually voting on

Strip away the ad spending and the debate-stage lines, and the choice on Aug. 4 is not really about whether ICE has committed abuses in Michigan. Both candidates agree it has. It’s about whether a lawmaker who voted for the agency’s money and its gratitude — before two Americans died and public opinion caught up to her — should be trusted to lead the reckoning, or whether the state should hand the job to someone who called for abolition when it cost him something to say it.

Stevens is asking Michigan to grade her on the turn. El-Sayed is asking Michigan to grade her on the votes that made the turn necessary. I am asking the Stevens campaign if they will return donations they’ve received from Palantir employees, consultants, and firms that lobby for the wildly problematic data surveillance giant. If the Stevens campaign replies, I’ll let you know what they said in the chat, which you can join here:

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Eleven days out, Michigan Democrats are choosing between a record and a promise. If you want the receipts before you vote, not after, subscribe now. And send this to the Michigan voter in your life who still thinks this is a simple choice.