Enough Is Enough
Politicians can either support the abolition of ICE or get the hell out of the way.
Many things in life are hard. Some things are simple. What we have right now when it comes to ICE is simple: either back its abolition or get the hell out of the way.
The need for these goon squads—it feels too respectful to call them “agencies” or “law enforcement groups” or any other euphemism that makes them sound proper and regulated—to be wiped off the map is nothing new. (I wrote my first “abolish ICE” post way back in 2017.) Nor is the fascist abuse they carry out. These aren’t people who were behaving themselves until Donald Trump took the brakes off. ICE (and, to be clear, when I say ICE, I’m using it as an umbrella term that includes Border Patrol and all the other machinery of death that constitutes our immigration system) has always been a cancer on our society. It is poison. Its job is to destroy, to terrorize, to torture, and, as we keep seeing in Minneapolis, to kill. It is the worst of us.
But if what ICE is and what it does has been clear forever, the demand to eliminate it has rarely occupied a central place in our politics. The Abolish ICE movement spiked under the first Trump administration, and then subsided when Joe Biden took over. A Democrat was in charge, and there were plenty of other things to worry about. By the time the 2024 campaign rolled around, it was conventional wisdom that something had to be done about all these immigrants in the U.S. Democrats raced to prove that they would be even crueller to immigrants than Donald Trump. After he took office, Democrats raced just as hard to pass odious anti-immigrant legislation. They wanted their hands in the blood. What could go wrong?
Well, cut to now. After a year in which ICE embraced its core Gestapo nature while most politicians looked the other way, things have escalated to the point where it keeps murdering people in broad daylight. It’s no use saying that ICE gone rogue or is somehow straying from its mission. This is what it’s for. It will always be what it’s for. There’s no way around that—no bad apples to be pruned from the tree, no little decorations or, god help us, QR codes that will make this better. It must, must, must be done away with—and doing so must be a red line, non-negotiable demand.
That brings me back to where I started. Right now, the Democratic Party is seemingly taking a bold stance, vowing to block funding for the government if that funding includes money for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. Wow, great, etc. But look closer at what top Democrats are saying.
