For many of us, living in President Donald Trump’s America feels like a never-ending doom loop. Every day brings a fresh batch of headlines about the administration’s lawless attacks on independent federal agencies, the judiciary, and our democracy itself—and you can easily miss some important things. To help you sift through the noise, we’re launching a new newsletter: Executive Dysfunction.

Each week, we will surface one important legal story that you may have overlooked amid all the ongoing chaos. We’ll be highlighting stories about how Trump is doing violence to the law, and stories about how people involved in shaping and upholding the law—judges, lawyers, lawmakers—are pushing back. And we’ll also keep you in the loop about what’s going on with our Slate Jurisprudence team, including Mark Joseph Stern and Dahlia Lithwick. Welcome to the first edition of Executive Dysfunction. To sign up to receive this newsletter in your inbox every week, please click here.

You may have missed it over the long weekend, but a partial government shutdown began on Saturday. After over a year of enduring President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda—as we’ve watched masked agents drag people through the streets, harass families in their homes, and even kill U.S. citizens in broad daylight—Democrats in Washington decided to use their power over federal funding to try to force change. Before signing off on any new dollars for the Department of Homeland Security, Democrats have put forth a list of 10 demands they want Republicans to meet in an effort to rein in a rogue Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

One big question remains, though, as we wait to see if the partial shutdown begins to affect the day-to-day of Americans in travel and other parts of life: Would the Democratic demands, if met, actually do anything to stem ICE’s abuses? This question has already spurred fights on social media, where some progressives are excoriating the Democrats for not asking for nearly enough, and others are praising these proposals as pragmatic solutions that will make a real difference. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

“What these mostly require is for ICE to follow laws and return to practices and procedures that had been standard practice for a long period of time,” Scott Shuchart, former assistant director for regulatory affairs for ICE under the Biden administration, told me. “And so they’re not very ambitious.” ICE would not be completely transformed by this particular set of Democratic demands; rather, it would return to a pre-Trump status quo when we were not witnessing masked agents rampaging across the entire country, pepper-spraying children, ripping disabled people out of their cars, and gunning men and women down in the street.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ list of demands—unveiled in early February, shortly after Alex Pretti was shot to death by federal agents in Minneapolis—ranges from banning agents from wearing masks to outlawing racial profiling. Progressives want the party to go further, while activists have been pushing to simply abolish ICE completely. Voters want something to give, with polling consistently showing they are seriously concerned about the way the Trump administration is handling immigration enforcement.

When looking at Democrats’ list of demands, it’s important to consider that U.S. immigration law has not been significantly updated since Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act in 1996. Whatever the party manages to win in this government funding negotiation will likely be narrow and insufficient to solve our country’s biggest immigration challenges, but it could pare back some of the worst excesses and abuses of the current administration. Thus far, negotiations don’t seem to be going anywhere. It’s also hard to say whether ICE would even obey any new restrictions, given the administration’s persistent refusal to comply with congressional directives and the Supreme Court’s tolerance for such defiance. During a recent congressional oversight hearing, for instance, DHS leadership outright rejected a mask ban, one of Democrats’ key demands.

Let’s take a closer look at the list to try to assess whether the demands actually stand a chance of making a material difference in how ICE uses—and abuses—its vast power over immigration enforcement.

Democrats........

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