When Analilia Mejia, the former political director of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, held town halls during her recent congressional primary race in New Jersey, she’d invite people to stay afterward for a training on nonviolent resistance to ICE. Voters, she told me, are desperate “to understand how rising authoritarianism functions, how it’s moved in other countries, how we can best resist it through nonviolence, noncompliance and education.” Running in a special election to fill the seat formerly held by New Jersey’s new governor, Mikie Sherrill, Mejia was determined to do “more than just traditional politics,” she said.
Her rivals in last week’s crowded contest also criticized ICE. But Mejia, the daughter of Colombian and Dominican immigrants and a veteran of the progressive Working Families Party, was unique in the clarity of her opposition. She called for ICE to be abolished, not just reformed. And she tied the agency’s violent rampages — seen most starkly in Minnesota — to President Trump’s broader assault on American democracy, while seeking to imbue people with a sense that they could fight back.
Though New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District, full of affluent commuter suburbs, is solidly Democratic, it hasn’t traditionally been a left-wing stronghold. But Mejia’s message resonated, and now she’s close to an upset victory. On election night last week, one of Mejia’s opponents, a former congressman, Tom Malinowski, was so far ahead in the early vote returns that the election analytics site Decision Desk HQ called the race for him. But as Election Day ballots came in, the site retracted. As I write this on Monday, the race is still too close to call, but Mejia is ahead by 868 votes, with fewer than 3,000 mostly provisional ballots left to count.
So far, many headlines about the race have focused on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s misguided and self-defeating attacks on Malinowski. In Congress, he’d been moderate and largely pro-Israel, but he angered AIPAC because, as he put it, he wouldn’t promise to support Israel “unconditionally, unquestionably, blindly.” Hoping to help one of the other candidates in the race, possibly the former lieutenant governor Tahesha Way, AIPAC spent more than $2 million on attack ads against Malinowski. The assault backfired when Mejia, who believes that Israel is guilty of genocide, pulled ahead, with Way coming in a distant third.
But the takeaway from the race isn’t just that AIPAC is blundering and underhanded. Should Mejia prevail, it will be because Democratic voters are dissatisfied with what many see as their party’s anemic response to Trump’s autocratic thuggery. There’s a limit, of course, to what you can read into a razor-thin plurality in a special election. But elections are among the best tools we have for gauging public sentiment, and because this one was the first congressional primary of the year, many looked to it as a barometer of Democratic voters’ mood. Now we have a preliminary reading: They are furious and terrified to a degree that Democratic leaders still don’t fully grasp.
The apparent outcome in New Jersey’s 11th has stunned many political insiders. “The left smells blood after shocking Democratic primary result,” said an Axios headline. But the longtime New Jersey pollster Patrick Murray told me he wasn’t surprised, because “this is an incredibly angry Democratic electorate.” New Jersey suburbanites, he argues, didn’t suddenly turn into democratic socialists. But they think the Democratic establishment has been feckless, and they want representatives who won’t consult a focus group before battling the president. “The underlying message,” he said, is that Democratic voters believe their party “should be on a war footing with Donald Trump.”
AIPAC’s ads, it’s important to note, were not about Israel. Rather, they hit Malinowski for congressional stock trading and, most significantly, for a vote he took as a congressman in 2019 that funded ICE. Shady as AIPAC was, it recognized the district’s priorities.
Many mainstream Democrats — Malinowski likely among them — know that ICE is out of control but are wary of demands to dismantle it. They saw voters punish Democrats in 2024 for not taking immigration enforcement seriously enough. They remember how calls to “defund the police,” which proliferated during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, became a political albatross.
But there’s an essential substantive difference between “abolish ICE” and “defund the police.” We need police, which exist in every modern society. But while we also need immigration enforcement, we do not need ICE, an agency that has existed for only 22 years, and that increasingly resembles a fascist paramilitary.
Thanks to Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, ICE now has a budget larger than most countries’ militaries. A majority of its work force has been hired in the last year, many as part of an explicitly white nationalist recruiting campaign. It is surveilling not just undocumented immigrants but American citizens. While Minneapolis’s Alex Pretti was shot by agents of Customs and Border Protection, not ICE, an ICE agent killed Renee Good. Masked and heavily armed ICE irregulars have become a source of terror in communities across the country. Many voters, naturally, don’t want their representatives to fund their own current or future occupiers. When they hear politicians say that ICE needs only to be reformed, it sounds weak.
“We cannot continue to feed the beast,” said Mejia. She doesn’t believe in open borders, asking, “How do you have a country without borders?” But ICE, she argues, is irredeemable and needs to be replaced. “What we are against is the chaos, the violence, the hatred, the impunity, the curtailment and violation of constitutional protections and rights,” she said.
Democratic voters agree: According to a recent YouGov poll, 76 percent of them want ICE abolished. (So do 47 percent of independents.) Support for defunding the police has never come close to that, peaking, in YouGov polls, at 43.4 percent among Democrats in July 2020. Trump’s rapid dismantling of American democracy has thrust us into a new political world, and Democratic voters want leaders who can adapt. Yes, taking bold stands that can be construed as radical is risky, but so is appearing to consent to an intolerable status quo. “Playing it safe,” said Mejia, “is a mistake.”
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