Abolish ICE? Perish the Thought, Says Press

In a few short years, “Abolish ICE” has gone from a position considered far too radical to receiving serious consideration from the Democratic National Committee.

Recent articles in the Atlantic, Bloomberg and USA Today argue that abolishing ICE will result in worse outcomes for immigrants, and even debating the idea would make Democrats more vulnerable to attacks from Republicans and alienate centrist voters. They insist that — despite its record of abuses — ICE still serves an important function.

Worse outcomes for immigrants

In the past eight months, three immigrants died while detained at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey. The deaths of Jean Wilson Brutus, Jose Chajon-Raxon and Edwin Lopez-Cornejo have invigorated calls to shut down the detention center by activists and government officials alike.

In his Atlantic article, “The Problem With Shutting Down ICE in Blue States,” Nick Miroff argued that the demand to shut down Delaney Hall is misguided. He quoted three people, all of whom have professionally collaborated with ICE at some point in their careers. One of them was former senior ICE attorney John Gihon:

ICE is going to find the bed space. … A lot of time, it’s going to be farther away from a blue state, and farther away from friendly federal courts, in a place with terrible conditions.

The problem with this argument is that ICE already uses relocation to create worse judicial outcomes for immigrants. In June, I reported in Molino Informativo on the case of Aurelio Cornejo Serrano, a young Brooklyn resident with legal residency who was illegally detained by ICE. He was held at Delaney for a week before being transferred to Texas and then Mississippi, where he was detained for several months despite his legal status.

Silky Shah, executive director of the Detention Watch Network, confirmed this trend in a recent interview with FAIR: “ICE has been transferring people from detention center to detention center without any rhyme or reason since its inception.” Shah also disputed the claim that the closure of Delaney Hall would result in a worse situation for immigrants in the region: “There is a correlation between detention center capacity and [local] arrests.”

‘Calls to close the jail would backfire’

Miroff also reported in the Atlantic that Tom Homan, Trump’s top border adviser, “said protesters’ calls to close the jail would backfire.” Miroff did not examine Homan’s motivation for this claim; surely if one of the main architects of the current immigrant rights crisis thought closing Delaney would be bad for the resistance to ICE, he would be calling for its closure himself. Instead, Miroff presents Homan as offering disinterested advice to protesters as to how they can best defend immigrants.

Miroff argued that ICE’s newly expanded budget will allow it to build new detention centers in red states. However, in the same article, he mentioned the closure of Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz,” and several failed attempts by the Trump administration to build new detention centers in New Jersey and Maryland. He wrote that “the agency faced intense opposition to the plan, including in Republican-led states.”

Although ICE may have the money to build new detention centers, they have generally been unable to plan, staff and operate them, according to reporting by Time and MS Now. Miroff cited ICE’s recent hiring of 8,000 new officers, which illustrates ICE’s ability to spend money, but does not speak to its competence.

The Washington Examiner recently reported that low morale and burnout are rampant among ICE agents. Veteran ICE employees expressed frustration with new recruits’ lack of experience, and exhaustion from frequently working overtime without days off. Miroff himself reported on ICE agents’ low morale for the Atlantic last year.

‘You think ICE is bad?’

For USA Today, former Department of Justice prosecutor Michael J. Stern authored an op-ed headlined “I Worked With Ice When I Was at DoJ. Abolishing It Won’t Bring Justice.” In it, Stern argued: “You think ICE is bad? Letting Trump build a new agency from the ground up would be a disaster.”

Stern fundamentally misunderstands the meaning of the word “abolish.” When people call for the abolition of ICE, it does not mean simply an end to the agency that calls itself Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It means an end to the violent and racist practices of U.S. immigration enforcement.

On the left, opinions vary about what should happen following the abolition of ICE; some call for going back to the U.S. status quo before the agency’s founding in 2004, while others would like to see ICE’s current leadership tried in international court. But to believe that a Democratic Party with the power and principle to eliminate ICE would give Trump free rein to create its replacement is willfully obtuse.

Republican attacks and centrist voters

Whenever the Democratic Party is pushed to the left, the media can always rely on a classic rebuttal from the establishment playbook: This radical position will alienate centrist voters and make us an easier target for Republican attacks. This essentially summarizes David M. Drucker’s op-ed for Bloomberg.

Drucker wrote, “Voters’ opposition to bad immigration enforcement doesn’t mean they want lax enforcement.” However, in this same article, he referenced a March YouGov poll that found that 77% of Democrats and 52% of independents are at least “somewhat” supportive of abolishing ICE. This indicates that the Democratic Party’s base — the main group the party depends on to win elections — is generally open to the idea of eliminating the agency.

Even among independent voters, whom establishment Democrats frequently use as a talking point to make the party more conservative, a slight majority views the possibility of abolishing ICE favorably. This poll — as well as the results of the 2024 presidential election — illustrate that taking a more ICE-friendly stance is not guaranteed to result in more support from independent and undecided voters.

This did not stop Drucker from using Joe Biden’s administration and Kamala Harris’ campaign as examples of why being anti-ICE would be detrimental for Democrats: “The perception of chaos, crime and unfairness sent voters scurrying back to the current president.”

Though he did mention Biden’s extreme asylum restrictions and Harris’ “tough on the border” platform, he did not explain why they did not lead to success in 2024, or how Democrats taking a similar stance in 2026 would lead to a different outcome.

He continued:

Republican campaigns are sure to air advertising this fall that accuse Democrats of opposing the deportation of immigrants in the U.S. illegally who have committed violent crimes.

Again, such accusations were made against both Biden and Harris, despite their extremely ICE-friendly policies. The reality is that unless Democrats run on a platform that is just as racist and barbaric as theirs, Republicans will continue to make these claims.

Though Republicans have made violent crimes by undocumented immigrants a major part of their platform, research has shown time and time again that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than citizens, and that immigration does not result in higher crime rates overall. By focusing on immigrant criminals, Democrats would be perpetuating a completely baseless panic fabricated by conservatives.

ICE sometimes does good things!

Despite the fact that ICE has publicly executed at least 10 civilians in the last year, establishment media encourage the public to believe that the agency still has value. To illustrate this, Stern in USA Today told a story about how, in his capacity as a federal prosecutor, he collaborated with ICE to catch and convict an American citizen who was trafficking child sex abuse materials into the U.S.

Stern somehow does not see this as an indictment of all of the other agencies that should have stopped this man long ago. Rather, he chooses to portray it as a potential benefit from the existence of ICE, implying that the lives lost and families separated are a small price to pay for catching a single criminal who wasn’t even an immigrant.

Media are not only lauding ICE’s past “successes,” they are also laundering its current human rights abuses. In his Atlantic piece, Miroff recounted Homan’s visit to Delaney Hall, during which the border adviser described the spaghetti served at the facility as “good.” Miroff did not mention the complaints from health inspectors about contaminated food.

‘We should not waste our efforts’

In his USA Today op-ed, Stern made the outlandish declaration that calls to abolish ICE meant that there would be no federal immigration oversight at all. He wrote to his detractors:

If your response is to suggest that we have no immigration agency at all, that’s a political nonstarter. Even most Democrats are not foolish enough to call for open borders.

The United States, of course, managed to exist for more than two centuries without ICE.

Stern summarized the underlying belief that fuels corporate media’s arguments against the abolition of ICE:

If we want to wrestle our country back from the grip that fascism has on America’s throat, we should not waste our efforts trying to abolish ICE. We must abolish Trump.

A year and a half into Trump’s second term, Stern still holds the misguided belief that the president is an anomaly, rather than a representative of a powerful movement with the potential to outlast Trump himself.

Silky Shah describes the steps that led us to the current immigrant rights crisis as “fully bipartisan”: “Democrats’ involvement and complicity in all of this helped fuel the far right.”

The assumption that American politics will go back to “normal” after Trump’s presidency is a dangerous delusion. If Democrats don’t acknowledge that the Bush, Obama and Biden administrations’ handling of ICE facilitated Trump’s actions, they leave the door open for another xenophobic leader to come along and do the same — or worse.