The Anti-'Abolish ICE' Crowd is Living In the Past

It's not 2018 anymore.

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In the aftermath of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent senselessly killing 37-year-old Renee Good, a coalition of think tank staffers, political journalists, and media-obsessed members of Congress has identified the most pressing problem: abolishing ICE. Or rather, the suggestion that we should abolish ICE.

What was once a rallying cry during President Donald Trump’s first term took a backseat when Joe Biden took over. Biden presided over a confused and erratic border policy that ultimately saw ICE deport more people in Biden’s last year in office than any of Trump’s first four. The call to eliminate ICE, however, is now resurfacing after a full year of unconstitutional raids, brutal roundups, and the killing of Good and 43-year-old Keith Porter by federal agents.

This is a disturbing development for a particular crew of scolds who keep insisting they have the only answers for how the Democrats can win elections again. On Wednesday, multiple outlets reported on a new memo from the Searchlight Institute, a think tank run by Adam Jentleson, a former chief of staff to Sen. John Fetterman and aide to the late Sen. Harry Reid. The memo, written by a former Biden DHS official, claimed that “advocating for abolishing ICE is tantamount to advocating for stopping enforcement of all of our immigration laws in the interior of the United States.” (Third Way, the longstanding policy shop of Democratic centrism, put out a similar memo this week.)

Instead, the report called for replacing the “abolish ICE” slogan with “reform and retrain,” and the policy of abolition with one that bans masks, prosecutes agents who break the law, and promotes community policing. In case this didn’t remind you enough of the Democratic proposal to reform police after 2020, one part of the reform proposal reads: “Identify and weed out the rotten apples.”

Other Democrats are singing the same tune. Sen. Ruben Gallego — who last year was instrumental in making a Republican messaging bill official government policy and then got key details of what he voted for wrong — told the New York Times: “The last thing we need to do, again, is to make the same mistake when it comes to ‘Defund the Police’ rhetoric…people want a slimmed-down ICE that is truly focused on security.”

This is an apples-and-oranges comparison; the concept of law enforcement has been around for thousands of years, while ICE is barely older than the average college senior. But in any case, it’s wrong, and the reason why it’s wrong is that it does not reckon with what ICE has become—or rather, what it was always destined to be.

To be clear, the ICE of 2018—when the abolish ICE movement first rose to national prominence—was a deeply destructive presence in American communities, conducting sweeping raids that rounded up large numbers of non-criminal offenders and generally serving as a pillar of Stephen Miller’s first draft of immigration policy. It had a budget of more than $7 billion, more than double what it got after it was created in 2003, and more than 20,000 people in its workforce.

But if it was right to call for ICE’s abolition back then, it is even more right today. ICE in 2026 is a nightmarish monstrosity. Its budget is now nearly $30 billion, roughly four times what it was eight years ago and more than the budget of the entire FBI, meaning that deportations are a higher priority for the Trump administration than all other crimes combined. The number of agents has doubled, and in several cities across the country, both ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection have operated in a brutal manner more akin to an invading army than a law enforcement agency. The Department of Homeland Security is still recruiting more officers, and the groypers in the department’s press office are gesturing toward the exact kind of psychopaths they want to hire. Miller and Vice President JD Vance have told ICE officers they can do whatever the fuck they want, extending a standing offer to join Republican felons and wealthy criminals in being shielded from consequences.

The recruitment of thousands of ideologically committed reactionaries and outright fascists to terrorize communities populated by immigrants and people sympathetic to them is not something you can just turn off with a memo and a few prosecutions (at most) of the most egregious open-and-shut cases of abuse. “Right-sizing” ICE to “refocus on its “core mission,” as Searchlight calls for, will not change the fact that the culture of white nationalism has now been made explicit not just internally but in how ICE represents itself to the public.

Public opinion on ICE now, as opposed to 2018, has reflected this new reality faster than Democratic deep thinkers can adjust. One July 2018 poll following Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s election upset — which popularized “Abolish ICE” for a national audience — found that just 25 percent of Americans supported abolishing ICE while a majority opposed it. In the immediate aftermath of Renee Good’s killing, one poll found that abolition was running statistically even with maintaining ICE, and that a majority of Americans disapprove of ICE. Another found that just 4 percent of Democrats and a third of independents back the agency. It’s true that public opinion is elastic, and Democrats and the left have shown little discipline to make any scandal stick to Trump, with the possible exception of the Epstein story, so these numbers could shift away from abolition as time passes.

But ICE will likely remain in the spotlight because it is unrelenting in its cruelty and unconcerned about ramifications. Since Good’s killing, officers in Minneapolis have shot another man, federal officers shot and partially blinded a young man during an anti-ICE protest in California, and Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota. What ICE is doing — has been tasked to do — to these communities is retribution for riots in 2020. For more extreme reactionaries, it’s retribution for Reconstruction.

And the forces implementing this campaign of terror are beginning to engender, among liberals and leftists and some who consider themselves neither, the sort of bitter resentment that reshapes political landscapes. Trump has already provided a roadmap for unilaterally slashing agencies to the point where they can hardly be called operational, and if Democrats take power again, arguments that they are bound by precedent will convince no one.

If deporting violent criminals was truly the priority for these centrist groups — as opposed to preempting Republican framing that Democrats are “soft” on immigration enforcement — they might admit that a thoroughly tainted agency like ICE makes that goal more difficult; the people who suffer most frequently in these situations become increasingly reluctant to report to any kind of authority for fear they’ll be punished with deportation. And the agency’s obscene levels of funding could be redirected to other parts of the government in ways that directly respond to the concerns that fueled Trump’s rise in the first place. The Department of Labor, to use one example, could finally have the resources to tackle the companies that screw over American workers and exploit foreign laborers, and simultaneously prosecute these companies in court and in public.

ICE, with the billions it’s been given and amid the responsibility to the public that it’s abandoned, doesn’t make any of this possible, and it is a profound mistake to think the agency can one day become a fairer and more just version of itself. ICE’s problem is not, as Searchlight insists, one of “rotten apples.” The crisis is the tree itself.