Abolish ICE—For Real This Time

Neither activists nor elected Democrats should repeat the mistakes of the past.

(Photo by CHARLY TRIBALLEAU / AFP via Getty Images)

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 won 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.

Elected Democrats now blanch reflexively at both slogans—abolish and defund—as if the animating issues are identical. Or perhaps because they fear that embracing “abolish ICE” will revive “defund the police” activism, and we’ll repeat the whole unpleasant cycle.

But they’re different ideas stemming from different kinds of abuses and structural flaws, and there’s no reason they must go together.

The way to avoid the doom loop is for those of us who believe ICE must go to be explicit about what makes ICE unique, and specific about what fills the void when its gone. Because if Democrats suspect the real aim is to end all immigration enforcement, the project is doomed.

Six years ago, if you pressed police defunders for details, you’d find the slogan papered over broad disagreement and hazy thinking. Some would hew to the most radical interpretation—complete abolition of armed law enforcement, perhaps followed by the creation of reconstituted, unarmed police forces. Others would describe a more incremental and defensible policy: to siphon from police budgets, and use the proceeds to finance social services, so that cities would no longer have to rely on agents trained in the use of lethal force to resolve civil disturbances.

ICE is different. It needs to be abolished because the agency is rogue, and, more pointedly, because it’d be exceedingly difficult to design an agency like ICE that wouldn’t go rogue eventually. If not on its own, then whenever Republicans came to power.

Police forces are not established through conscription. Policing is a career field people choose to enter. It attracts people who either want to catch bad guys, or wield power over civilians, or perhaps a bit of both. A federal police force that is hyper-militarized, but with jurisdiction limited exclusively to immigration, will never resemble professional law-enforcement. It will invariably attract white nationalists, who will both mete out violence against the population, and subvert our democratic processes, including by taking actions designed to choose their own bosses.

Stephen Miller’s souped-up ICE is in the process of proving me correct about this right now, terrorizing blue cities (and only blue cities) while targeting and politicking against Democratic officeholders. But it’s always been true. It’s true as a theoretical matter. The creation of ICE was a mistake. The purpose of abolition is, in part, accountability for the crimes its agents and administrators have committed, but it would be a worthy and necessary goal anyhow. The question is, How will this timid, cowering Democratic Party ever find the courage to embrace the goal of abolishing ICE? The answer is to provide them approaches to policy that are defensible, and that don’t obligate them to recite “Abolish ICE” as an empty incantation or litmus test.

ICE GUYS FINISH LAST

Step one is to observe something that’s become fairly uncontroversial: The whole panic-driven post-9/11 settlement was an error. We should never have created a Department of Homeland Security, let alone a discrete immigration-enforcement police agency.

Ideally we’d undo all of that. But post-Trump, all federal police forces should be substantially demilitarized, and immigration policing should once again become a largely administrative function, enforced by FBI agents and local cops—officers with broad remit, rather than narrow jurisdiction over immigration laws.

This kind of institutional reshuffling would require new legislation, a happy consequence of which would be the legal dissolution of ICE. But, crucially, the legislation would be technocratic in character. It wouldn’t have to be called the ABOLISH ICE Act, and different politicians could sell it in different ways. For a bill like that to gain broad buy-in, it would be incumbent upon activists not to treat the slogan as a purity test.

But this is where we also need a sea change in Democratic politics. The whole party, including frontline members, needs to be mentally clear about what makes bureaucratic reform so urgent: that ICE is no longer compatible with self-rule, and probably never was. Whatever political concerns they might harbor, they need to move with confidence. To be able and willing to defend the approach on the merits, as a means of democracy protection and accountability for abuses.

Even if Democrats lack a governing trifecta, and thus can’t pass new legislation, they’ll need to stand foursquare behind a Democratic president willing to impose accountability unilaterally.

Abolishing ICE as a legal entity would require new law. Nullifying it, as a practical matter, may not. And if that’s the only option available, a Democratic president will have to embrace it.

Trump has asserted the power to effectively abolish departments and agencies of government by fiat: simply terminate all the people who work there. If the Supreme Court upholds Trump’s mass firings, Democrats will inherit that power¹.

But whether or not the next Democratic president can simply fire ICE agents en masse, he or she could surely ground the agency. Comb through records for evidence of abuses and criminal activity. Prosecute bad actors. Fire others for cause. Bench every agent who received a preemptive pardon from Trump.

The only predicate here is winning power. And this is why I think it’s so important for both activists and politicians alike to approach the ICE challenge differently than they did in the past—with activists offering more generosity and specificity to Democrats trying to win elections, and Democrats earning that generosity by giving their voters reason to believe they won’t tuck tail.

A big selling point of accountability politics and procedural hardball is that the way Democrats currently approach all kinds of challenges makes people suspect they’ll be too scared to take action when it’s needed. What if it doesn’t poll well?

I want progressives to be clear about what the “Abolish ICE” mantra means—what legislation should and shouldn’t do, what a president can and can’t accomplish unilaterally—and I want Democrats to be determined to act, even if they never recite the slogan. Everyone should be OK with a division of labor within the Democratic tent, where protesters can brandish signs that say ABOLISH ICE, and Democratic politicians can simply promise that there will be a reckoning and reform, and people in both camps know the real score.

The alternative is for an angry base to bully Democrats into answering yes-or-no questions about abolishing ICE, without any depth of meaning, such that they enter forthcoming elections divided, and the reckoning never materializes.

1. As I’ve written elsewhere, I think it’s likely the Supreme Court will declare many of Trump’s firings unlawful, now that it’s too late to reverse them. Civil servants will have moved on. Trump will be free to replace them with loyalists who sabotage the functioning of their bureaucracies. But Supreme Court precedent will conveniently preclude Trump’s Democratic successors from responding in kind by simply firing ICE agents and other Trump loyalists en masse. The solution to that kind of judicial fuckery is court packing.