Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed: 'ICE Needs To Get The Hell Out of Michigan'

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abud El-Sayed spoke out Wednesday against ICE, saying its menacing presence is growing in Michigan.

“Make no mistake: this has never been about border security or even immigration," he said in a statement. "This is about normalizing a paramilitary force on peaceful streets. As ICE appears to be ramping up to do in Michigan what they did in Minnesota, it’s hard not to connect the dots between this and Trump saying he wants to 'nationalize' elections in Detroit. So I speak for all of us who believe in freedom and democracy when I say this: ICE needs to get the hell out of Michigan.”

El-Sayed noted that ICE has just confirmed that it purchased a facility in Romulus that will serve as a detention center. That, he says, is in addition to the North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, in northern Michigan, which he describes as "the largest ICE detention center in the Midwest and one of the largest in the country." The Baldwin center was reopened as a detention center in June 2025. 

"We must abolish ICE, no amount of retraining or reforming will address this rot," he said.

El-Sayed cited a Bridge Michigan report that ICE detained 3,338 people in Michigan — most of them at the North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin --  last year through October, nearly triple the number detained in the same timeframe in 2024. Most came from Mexico.

Democrats on Capitol Hill have been fighting to withhold funding of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection, unless they see reforms in tactics, including the removal of agents' masks and mandatory judicial warrants for home entries.