LDT. BREAKING: Omar Unveils “Transparency or No Funding” Amendment — Agencies Must Publish Raid Data by Race or Lose Their Budget 📊💥
On most days, budget markups in Congress are a blur of numbers, jargon, and sleepy speeches.
Today was not one of those days.
Rep. Ilhan Omar turned a routine funding debate into a high-stakes showdown over who gets stopped, who gets deported, and who gets to know about it, with a new proposal she bluntly branded:
“Transparency or No Funding.”
The amendment, dropped into a massive homeland security appropriations bill, would force immigration and enforcement agencies to do something they’ve never done at this scale:
publish detailed data on every raid, stop, detention, and deportation—broken down by race, ethnicity, location, and outcome—or risk losing chunks of their operating budget.
Supporters call it “basic accountability.”
Critics call it “handcuffs for agents in a spreadsheet costume.”
“If There’s Nothing to Hide, Why Fear the Sunlight?”
Omar presented the amendment with a stack of reports at her elbow and a simple question for the room.
“Every year, we write these agencies enormous checks,” she said. “We ask them how many people they arrested, how many were deported, how many operations they ran. What we don’t see is the pattern behind those numbers: Who is stopped? Where? How often? And how often did they have legal status or no criminal record at all?”
She let the questions hang for a moment.
“If there’s nothing to hide,” she asked, “why fear the sunlight?”
The Transparency or No Funding Amendment would require agencies like ICE, CBP, and certain joint task forces to:
- Publish quarterly, publicly accessible reports showing:
- Number of stops, raids, and detentions.
- Race, ethnicity, age, and gender of those targeted.
- Final outcomes (released, charged, deported, case dismissed, wrong person).
- Provide geo-tagged data at least down to the county level.
- Disclose how many operations were based on tips, algorithms, or data-sharing tools versus traditional investigations.
- Certify that the data is complete and accurate as a condition of receiving full enforcement funding for the following year.
Noncompliance, under Omar’s amendment, wouldn’t earn a slap on the wrist.
It would trigger automatic budget cuts, with funds frozen until agencies obeyed the reporting rules.
“We’re Not Asking for Secrets. We’re Asking for the Truth.”
Omar insisted the amendment does not expose sensitive ongoing investigations or name individual officers.
“We’re not asking for operational blueprints or undercover identities,” she said. “We are asking: when the power of the state shows up at someone’s door, who does it show up for most? You cannot fix a system you refuse to measure honestly.”
She pointed to past scandals in which limited audits exposed racial profiling, mistaken identity arrests, and botched raids that never made it into public briefings.
“What we have now is selective transparency,” she said. “We get the numbers that make agencies look effective—how many people were ‘removed’—without the numbers that tell us whether certain communities are being treated like permanent suspects.”
Civil-rights groups and data-transparency advocates quickly rallied behind the proposal, calling it “the first real attempt to connect money, power, and the people caught in the middle.”
“Handcuffs for Agents”
Opposition was immediate and fierce.
Several lawmakers allied with enforcement unions blasted the amendment as a “political choke-chain” that would demoralize agents and turn every decision into a potential PR scandal.
“This isn’t about transparency,” one opponent argued on the floor. “It’s about painting a target on the backs of the men and women who do the hardest jobs in law enforcement. If they make one call somebody doesn’t like, activists will turn a spreadsheet into a courtroom.”
A former sheriff-turned-congressman warned that local partners might be less willing to cooperate if they knew every operation could be broken down and criticized online.
“You’re basically telling criminals and cartels, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to second-guess every move our agents make,’” he said. “That’s not oversight. That’s sabotage.”
Omar pushed back.
“Collecting data is not sabotage,” she replied. “It is the bare minimum for a democracy that claims to care about equal protection. The fact that some people hear the word ‘transparency’ and think ‘attack’ should concern all of us.”
The New Fault Line: Budget as Leverage
Underneath the fiery rhetoric, everyone in the room understood why this amendment felt different:
It hits the money.
Congress has passed reporting requirements before, but they’re often toothless—reports get delayed, half-completed, or quietly buried.
Omar’s amendment ties funding directly to compliance. No full data, no full budget.
“Every year, these agencies tell us they need more money,” she said. “Fine. Show us who is paying the human cost of that money. This amendment says: no receipts, no check.”
For her supporters, using the power of the purse is the only language giant bureaucracies understand.
For her critics, it’s an escalation that risks undermining enforcement if data collection is late, incomplete, or disputed.
One moderate lawmaker summed up the tension:
“I agree we need more transparency,” he said. “But we’re playing chicken with vital security operations. What happens if a reporting dispute suddenly cuts off funds in the middle of a crisis?”
A Debate on Omar’s Turf
Whether the amendment passes in its current form is far from certain. Negotiators are already talking about softening the penalties or stretching out deadlines.
But politically, Omar has already won something important: the argument is happening on her turf.
Instead of debating abstract slogans like “tough on crime” vs. “soft on crime,” lawmakers are suddenly grappling with concrete questions:
- Should the public know, by race and county, who is being raided?
- Should budgets shrink if agencies refuse to provide that information?
- Is transparency a luxury—or a condition of exercising state power?
Omar’s closing line made clear how she wants voters to see the choice:
“If you truly believe there’s no systemic bias, no pattern to hide, then you should be the first to vote yes. Because this amendment doesn’t create a problem—it only reveals whether one was there all along.”
For now, one thing is certain:
Whatever happens to the Transparency or No Funding Amendment in the back rooms of Congress, the spotlight it turned on raids and reporting won’t dim quickly.
The question Omar hurled into the debate—
“If there’s nothing to hide, why fear the sunlight?”—
is out in the open now.
And budgets may not be the only thing that has to answer it.
