Abolish ICE—For Real This Time
Neither activists nor elected Democrats should repeat the mistakes of the past.
The mantra “Abolish ICE” first gained traction midway through Donald Trump’s first term.
ICE has had critics since it first came into existence more than 20 years ago. Skepticism breached containment among immigration and civil-liberties activists when Trump came to power, and went mainstream during his “zero tolerance” policy, when federal agents began separating children from their parents at the southern border.
At that point, policy demanders outside Democratic Party officialdom treated ICE abolition as part of the price of entry for primary candidates. The progressive pollster Sean McElwee became a minor celebrity for popularizing the phrase. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who mounted a short-lived campaign for president, said that Democrats should “get rid of ICE” if they were able to retake Congress in the 2018 midterms.
Chanting “Abolish ICE” proved to be a potent, replicable means of catharsis, but accomplished little else. It’s at least plausible that without the “abolish ICE” craze, leading progressives wouldn’t have been primed to embrace the activist call to “defund the police” in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd.
Years later, police budgets remain intact, and ICE is the largest, most lavishly funded law-enforcement organization in the world. McElwee left the progressive movement and joined forces with moderate Democrats, before becoming embroiled in ethical scandals. And the legacy of the whole episode is a lot of bad blood within the party.
From a wide-angled perspective, these hard feelings are somewhat mystifying: Whatever substantive or political misgivings Democrats had about Abolish ICE, they went on to win the 2018 midterms in a landslide. “Defund the police” ignited a panic among Democrats, but election polling that summer didn’t budge, and Democrats went on to win a governing trifecta in 2020. The 2022 midterms also went pretty well for Democrats, then an incumbent party. If you believe “defund the police” was a major political misstep, your theory of the case has to account for a four year lag.
But zoom in and the tension makes more sense. Republicans were able to exploit “defund the police” to divide Democrats, and squeeze anxious front-line members. Whether or not it cost any Democrats their jobs, it certainly made their lives more difficult. And since there was no upshot at the federal level, what purpose did the ritual serve? The party has run scared from nearly all justice issues ever since.
NO MORE MR. ICE GUY
That, to me, is the real tragedy of the “abolish ICE” and “defund the police” crazes. It left everyone with skin in the game too snake-bit to propose any higher level of accountability for law enforcement. This is regrettable for many reasons, but particularly because, whatever the politics, “abolish ICE” was a good idea.