The battle over ICE funding is getting louder with ex-Yankees All-Star Mark Teixeira blasting Democrats online

“Democrats are so radical that they’re willing to shut down the government to defund ICE,” Teixeira wrote on X/Twitter, quote-tweeting a FOX news segment that ran on Sunday. “They want to tear America down, Conservatives want to build it up.”

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In the FOX News segment, House Speaker Mike Johnson was asked about efforts by democrats in congress to defund ICE.

“We put all of that funding into the Big Beautiful Bill, the working families tax cut, and i’m glad that we did because we had to fix the crisis that was created by the Biden Administration … they opened the border wide, it was absolute chaos,” Johnson said in a clip shared on X/Twitter. “We allowed, by some estimates, 20 million illegal aliens to come into the country, and many of them hardened, dangerous people, criminals. We’ve got to get them out of the country. So we had to front-load the funding. That will be there as you noted. It doesn’t matter what they do to the current DHS bill, those operations will continue.”

In the current DHS funding negotiations, Democrats are attempting to “rein in” ICE by proposing significant policy reforms and budget cuts, according to Government Executive.

Among the things Democrats have pushed for, they’re calling for a $115 million reduction in enforcement, the mandatory use of body cameras and proper identification for agents.

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These efforts were intensified following recent fatal shootings involving federal agents in Minneapolis, leading Senate Democrats to successfully strip the DHS funding out of a larger spending package to force further negotiations.

As Johnson noted, however, these attempts will likely have little to no impact on ICE’s actual operations because the agency is already funded the previously passed “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBBA).

Through that Bill, ICE received $75 billion in multi-year funding that it can use regardless of the current year’s budget outcome. Because of this existing reserve, ICE can continue its operations or several years even if Congress cuts its annual budget or if the government enters a partial shutdown.

On Aug. 28, Teixeira announced that he’d be running in Texas’s 21st Congressional District, where Rep. Chip Roy will not seek re-election as he runs for Texas Attorney General.

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Teixeira is a Maryland native who currently lives in the Austin area. He spent the first four-plus years of his major-league career with the Texas Rangers.

The three-time All-Star concluded his career with eight years on the Yankees, winning a World Series in 2009.

Teixeira retired in 2016 after a 14-year career in which he hit .268 with a .869 OPS and 409 home runs.

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