MINNEAPOLIS – U.S. Sen. Tina Smith took to the Senate floor this week to take a final stand against additional funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol, even though she knew her opposition was likely to be in vain.

It had been months since the Department of Homeland Security shut down while Senate Democrats blocked funding to demand changes to immigration enforcement in the wake of the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

Those efforts finally collapsed this week as Republican senators lined up a vote to approve $70 billion for ICE and Border Patrol without any of those policy changes, such as ensuring agents wear body cameras and proper identification and remove face coverings. The Senate passed the bill early Friday.

So the retiring Minnesota senator wanted to send a message.

“History will remember that Minnesota won the battle of Operation Metro Surge,” Smith said in her speech Wednesday.

“But that victory was not without a cost,” she continued. “The great damage done by this rogue, dangerous secret police force is still felt in Minneapolis and in St. Paul. It’s felt in Chicago and Los Angeles and Portland and in countless communities across the country.”

Pretti and Good’s deaths sparked national outrage, which eventually led to the announced end of the president’s immigration crackdown on Minnesota in mid-February. It also led Senate Democrats to demand immigration reforms that prompted a record-long partial government shutdown.

The anticlimactic end of that funding holdup prompted Smith to frame the debate around Minnesota’s experience.

“There’s this feeling that the news cycle has moved on to something else,” Smith said during a brief interview on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. “I just wanted Minnesotans to know that we haven’t forgotten.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar also said she would vote against the ICE bill.

“Congressional Republicans already gave $75 billion in additional funding to ICE last summer, and now they want to push through more,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “Instead of $70 billion extra for ICE, we should be working to lower the skyrocketing costs facing families right now.”

Smith and Klobuchar planned to introduce an amendment that would require a joint and unbiased investigation into the deaths of Good and Pretti, but Smith said it was not likely to pass.

Smith said from the Senate floor that legal U.S. residents remain in detention centers far from their families, businesses have closed and the police departments of some cities and counties have maxed out their overtime budgets “to protect their communities.”

“I know that it is uncomfortable for my colleagues to hear all of this, and that everybody wants to turn the page on this, but on behalf of Minnesota, I need to say out loud and to be clear that it is unacceptable that this legislative battle is happening,” she said.

After former Sen. Markwayne Mullin took over for Kristi Noem as Homeland Security secretary, he distanced himself from his and his predecessor’s characterization of Pretti.

But he would not commit to allowing state investigators access to evidence they requested in their probe of the fatal shootings of Pretti and Good.

Following her floor speech, Smith said she is not impressed by Mullin and thinks there still could be “hundreds” of Minnesotans who are legal residents in ICE detention centers across the country.

“I think that [DHS] have gotten better at keeping their ugliness out of the news, but it’s still happening,” Smith said.

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