On Sunday, Jan. 25, the day after Alex Pretti was killed by immigration enforcement agents in Minneapolis, Cardinal Joseph Tobin, archbishop of Newark, spoke against continued funding for ICE, encouraging people to call their legislators and “ask them for the love of God and the love of human beings, which can’t be separated, [to] vote against renewing funding for such a lawless organization.”

The Senate faces a Friday deadline to vote on a package of funding bills to keep the government open. In the wake of Mr. Pretti’s killing, Senate Democrats have called for funding for the Department of Homeland Security to be carved out from the rest of the package and negotiated separately. 

Even though there have been some indicators in the last few days that the Trump administration recognizes that the violence and chaos of immigration enforcement in Minneapolis has gone too far for most Americans, Congress must legislate enforceable reforms, rather than trusting the Trump administration or immigration enforcement agencies to fix themselves. 

Speaking on Saturday to call for a joint federal and state investigation into Mr. Pretti’s death, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana explained why: “The events in Minneapolis are incredibly disturbing. The credibility of ICE and DHS are at stake.”

As one of the few Republicans who spoke immediately in the wake of the second killing by immigration agents in less than three weeks, Mr. Cassidy deserves credit for confronting the administration, and his call for a joint investigation ought to be heeded. But his concern about the credibility of ICE and D.H.S. understates the problem: Their credibility is not at stake; it has already been destroyed, especially in Minneapolis.

Hours after Renee Good was shot during a confrontation in which she appeared to be trying to drive away from ICE agents, President Donald J. Trump falsely claimed in a social media post that she “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer.” Multiple administration officials said immediately after Alex Pretti was shot that he had attacked federal officers with the gun he was carrying, only for video evidence to show that he had been holding a phone and that agents disarmed him of his holstered gun after having already tackled him to the ground—all before he was shot. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted that Mr. Pretti was an “assassin,” and Vice President JD Vance reposted that lie. In both these cases, administration officials immediately described the shooting victims as “domestic terrorists,” without offering any evidence beyond their opposition to the administration’s immigration enforcement action. 

The agents who shot these American citizens were masked; federal agencies refused to allow state officials access to the crime scenes to conduct investigations immediately after the shootings. These are not the actions of an administration that believes clear explanations of its actions would convince people, nor of one that wants to repair trust in the community where it is operating. 

The reason people do not trust ICE or Border Patrol agents at this juncture is that these agencies and the administration directing them have repeatedly proven themselves untrustworthy.

Two other significant examples include the D.H.S. secretary, Kristi Noem, baldly lying in testimony to Congress last October that “no American citizens have been arrested or detained,” despite ample documented reports to the contrary, and Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official, initially lying about being hit in the head with a rock before lobbing tear gas into a crowd; he later backtracked on his statement when video evidence disproved it.

Nor should we forget that the administration’s immigration enforcement surge is premised on a lie about undocumented immigrants posing an enormous risk to American safety and defended with lies about it being “narrowly targeted” toward violent criminals, despite being conducted in many cases as a dragnet operation. These lies are themselves elaborations on a lie that Mr. Trump has been telling since he began his 2016 presidential campaign by declaring that Mexico was “sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Yesterday, the administration announced changes in the leadership of its Minneapolis operation and floated the possibility of reducing the number of agents deployed. While any movement toward restraint is better than continued escalation in Minneapolis, no one should be willing to trust the administration to moderate itself, for the basic reason that it remains unwilling to tell the truth—and possibly unable to recognize the truth—about how the situation in Minneapolis turned into a crisis. Tellingly, while administration officials have stopped trying to vilify Mr. Pretti, they have made no apology for the lies already told about him.

No matter what promises of moderation the administration may make or what hope some legislators may read in the tea leaves of its pivot in Minneapolis, regular funding for immigration enforcement should be withheld until legislators have come to agreement on substantive reforms to which ICE and Border Patrol can be held legally accountable. Catholic leaders, including bishops and ideally the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops as a body, should join Cardinal Tobin in calling for withholding funding until reforms are enacted.

The reforms to be discussed should include: Requiring immigration agents to operate without masks and with badges and badge numbers visible; specifying the range of offenses and the standard of proof for the targeted deportation of dangerous criminals; limiting or eliminating “flood the zone” operations that target whole metropolitan areas; outlawing the use of ethnic and racial profiling for immigration targeting and restricting speculative immigration enforcement in which agents detain individuals on the mere suspicion of immigration status; enforcing robust standards for humane conditions and capacity limits in immigration detention; minimum recruiting and training standards for immigration agents, including standard police training for crowd control operations and de-escalation; and clear limits on the immunity of agents for the violation of civil rights.

No doubt many other reforms could be suggested as well. Some limitations on sanctuary city policies and requirements for local cooperation with federal enforcement will likely be proposed as well and should be part of negotiations. Of course, all of these will be subject to legislative compromise and the perfect should not be made the enemy of the good in finding a set of reforms that can be adopted and enacted relatively quickly.

The basic point remains that the administration has not just overstepped in its pursuit of immigration enforcement but that it has repeatedly lied in order to avoid accountability for its violation of the civil and due process rights of both citizens and immigrants. The administration cannot be trusted to reform itself. In the American system of checks and balances, the appropriate remedy is not only the courts vindicating the rights of individuals and states but also the legislature taking up its constitutional responsibility to authorize, fund and oversee the powers delegated to the executive branch.

Recent polling from before Mr. Pretti’s killing already showed that more than 60 percent of Americans think that the administration’s deportation tactics have gone too far. The credibility of immigration enforcement and, even more, the basic peace and welfare of the United States require Congress to act.