The morning after Tuesday's midterms was gloomy and rainy in Minneapolis, but people still gathered at the place where Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a VA nurse and U.S. citizen, last January. All week, community members have come here to place their "I Voted" stickers at the memorial.
Nicki Adams, who dated Pretti and was his close friend for nearly 17 years, watched quietly as a woman added her sticker to a street lamp completely covered in the red decals.
"I wanted to see all the stickers. I just wanted to be here," she says. "It just means a lot to me. I think it would mean a lot to Alex, too."
A few blocks away, people left their stickers where an ICE officer killed Renee Good, a mom of three and a U.S. citizen, just a few weeks before Pretti's death. In Houston, they left them where an ICE officer killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a father of three and a Mexican immigrant, in July.
Adams says these stickers, and the election results this week, send a clear message to Congress: "You work for us, and please carry on these values that we care about … We want to be seen and heard and taken care of and have our neighbors taken care of."
The deaths of Pretti and Good during the ICE surge in Minneapolis marked a pivotal moment for the country, sparking intense public backlash to President Trump's aggressive deportation efforts. But federal law enforcement officials have given little indication they're progressing in investigating their deaths, or the deaths of at least seven other people killed by federal immigration agents since Trump took office again last year. DHS did not respond to an NPR request for the status of those investigations.
Now, after Democrats' sweeping wins this week, their deaths at the hands of immigration agents will likely be the targets of renewed investigations. With a majority in Congress, Democrats can issue subpoenas to the major players in Trump's mass deportation plan, compelling them to testify under oath before the legislature.
That could include White House Border Czar Tom Homan, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, former Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, and White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, among others.
Congress can also demand internal documents like use-of-force reports.
"They can dissect these individual shootings, and really unravel the story of what happened," says Naureen Shah, who leads the ACLU's immigration policy work.
Democrats have already held shadow hearings on the ICE shootings, during which they've called in family members and witnesses to testify.
But Shah says now Congress can ask key questions of top decision makers: What orders were given to immigration officers in the field? What was training like for these officers?
Who made the decision to paint Good and Pretti as threats, including calling Pretti a "would-be assassin" and a domestic terrorist, when video showed otherwise?
"It's like we can turn the faucet on and actually find out so much more," Shah says. "There's an aspect of this that is really about a kind of reckoning with how it's possible that things that seemed unthinkable could happen on American streets. How do you have that reckoning if you don't actually have the ability to force people to explain themselves?"
Democratic leaders have already said that's the plan.
Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, who is expected to lead the House Judiciary Committee, told NPR in a statement that Congress will use "every tool" at its disposal to investigate ICE and that it is time for the agency to "start answering to the American people."
California Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia, expected to lead the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, vowed to take on DHS and ICE abuses in a two-word statement: "Lawyer Up."
Mississippi Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, expected to lead the House Committee on Homeland Security, sent a letter on Wednesday to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, demanding the agency "comply with all document preservation requirements."
Illinois Democratic Rep. Delia Ramirez wrote on social media that Noem, Miller, Homan, Bovino and Mullin should "clear" their schedules.
In response to that, DHS general counsel James Percival said Democrats are "more interested in political shenanigans than in governing" but said the agency is prepared to "deal with this nonsense."
There are key limitations to what Democrats in Congress can do with their majority when it comes to ICE accountability, says Rachel Moran, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law.
Major changes, like clawing back funding for the agency, would require a veto-proof majority, something the Democrats don't have.
"You still have a president who has shown a complete lack of interest in accountability for federal agents and in fact, a great deal of knee jerk defensiveness about their conduct," Moran says.
In a statement, a White House spokesperson told NPR "if Democrats choose to pursue sham investigations and radical left policies, they are choosing to work against the American people."
Democrats, the statement added, "should be reminded that we still control the federal government and all of its powers."
But that's not true. Congress has its own powers, one of them being the ability to compel testimony. Moran says a deeper probe into the shootings could still serve important purposes, like making evidence available for states to use in their own criminal investigations.
Minnesota officials, for instance, have been fighting with the federal government to get evidence related to the Pretti and Good killings.
Brent Ganger, Renee Good's brother, says learning more information about his sister's death will be hard to hear, "but I think it's also super important for us to understand what happened that day. I don't want history to keep repeating itself."
It was painful, he says, to watch immigration agents kill more people after his sister. He thought her death would be a turning point. In a way, it might have been the start of one. After the surge in Minneapolis, most Americans said ICE had gone too far.
Ganger, who considers himself a moderate, was happy to see the Blue Wave this week. On election night, he was scrolling Instagram when he saw a photo of his sister's memorial site, with all the "I Voted" stickers.
"I was very grateful to see the repudiation of this administration from the country. It felt very supportive of my entire family," he says.
The next morning, in his home in Colorado, he got up and made biscuits and gravy, his sister's favorite breakfast.
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