Michigan Senate candidates tell Washington Democrats: Show some spine

Democratic candidates for Michigan’s Senate seat have a lot on the line as the race has become an ideological proxy fight for the Democratic Party’s future set against the backdrop of an effort by the party to protect their numbers in one of the purplest U.S. states.

It is also a race that could decide who control the chamber in Congress and whether Donald Trump can continue to ram his agenda through Washington, D.C.

At the United Auto Workers candidate forum in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, that battle was in full view. So was the candidates’ desires to seize on another theme, the anger and hunger for leadership that Democratic voters demonstrated throughout 2025 as the party’s base demanded that their minority party’s representatives in Washington hold the line with whatever leverage they could find.

Even as policy differences were evident between the three Democrats, Mallory McMorrow, Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed, their attitudes toward that impending deadline were roughly the same. All three oppose giving Democratic votes to fund the Department of Homeland Security without significant reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and. A continued demands for radical shows of strength among the Democratic base against Trump’s deportation machine.

Across ideological lines the three candidates had in common a promise to bring a new brand of politics to the Senate.

open image in gallery

As the DHS shutdown deadline fast approaches, Democratic senators on Capitol Hill no doubt took notice on Wednesday that all three of their party’s Senate candidates for this purple-state Senate seat are vowing to shake up the status quo, a call that was since 2016 largely confined to the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party.

None of the three, including the reportedly Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee-favored Stevens, are willing to publicly back Chuck Schumer for another term as Democratic Senate leader. McMorrow, endorsed by Sens. Chris Murphy and Martin Heinrich, has called for Schumer to step down from the post.

Wednesday’s forum took place one day before the Senate is due to decide the fate, once again, of funding for the DHS and ICE. Congress is embroiled in a battle over that funding pushed ahead last week by a two-week continuing resolution and still threatening to endanger funding for not just immigration enforcement but other agencies. On the pending shutdown fight, the three also show a similar shared attitude.

open image in gallery

Democratic leaders including Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries put forward a list of ten reforms the pair want to see codified into legislation to fund ICE and DHS for the remainder of the calendar year. McMorrow and El-Sayed both told The Independent that those requests don’t go far enough; Stevens did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but in January said that “not one penny more” should go to ICE in a statement posted to social media.

El-Sayed, the Sanders-backed candidate in the race, told reporters after the UAW forum that he supports abolishing ICE altogether. Calling it a paramilitary force, he argued that Trump’s deployment of a surge of immigration enforcement resources to Minneapolis was not in fact solely about enforcing immigration laws. Instead, El-Sayed argued that the administration’s true aim was to test the use of armed forces on U.S. streets to enforce control ahead of a possible attempt to subvert the midterm elections this year.

“This is about normalizing the use of paramilitary force on our streets. Why? Because you want to do it in a moment where it actually has impact, and that looks like the 2026 election,” said El-Sayed. He called for Democrats to demand that ICE and DHS agencies stay out of elections, a point he also brought up onstage in response to a UAW member’s question about stopping Donald Trump’s efforts to “nationalize” U.S. elections.

open image in gallery

“Good government is kind of about seeing around the corner, like, you got to see where they're going. [You] could have seen where they're going with ICE in 2018 right? Here we are in 2026,” he continued. “Those ten points are not enough. They're not enough. We completely whiffed on the point of protecting our elections.”

McMorrow largely concurred.

“You need to hold firm. I mean, we cannot fund this agency with a penny more until it is overhauled from the ground up,” she told The Independent.

open image in gallery

“I think you need to get ICE off of the streets immediately. No roving patrols, no attacking American citizens, no going into people's homes without a judicial warrant, no targeting preschools and child care centers Amazon warehouse in just outside of my district. Get them off the streets, and then from there you can start the negotiations,” she said.

A state senator in Michigan’s legislature, McMorrow rejected the idea that the minority party didn’t have enough leverage to force Republicans’ hands, as some Democrats argued last year amid shutdown talks. She argued that her party had the “upper hand.”

“I know that there's going to be a lot of pressure on a shutdown, but really narrowing in specifically on this agency gives Democrats leverage to be defending everything. Demand a full overhaul of this agency,” she continued. “Use the budget to take a look at spending. Is this the amount of money that this agency really needs, or can it be allocated somewhere else?”

What seemed like a fanciful concept — Democrats launching another gambit around government funding — as recently as early January now seems baked in, thanks largely due to the shocking fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, Minneapolis residents, by ICE and Border Patrol agents this year. In one fell swoop, Trump’s long-desired mass deployment of federal resources to a Democrat-run city has seemingly erased the malaise his adversaries in Washington fell under after the end of the longest government shutdown last fall.