“Abolish ICE” is the hot new slogan among left-wing Democrats and activists, with upstart candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez upending longtime incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley, D-N.Y., in a primary campaign that adopted the slogan, and Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., calling for the elimination or abolition of the agency.
[Related: ‘Abolish ICE’ becomes rallying cry as Democrats move left on immigration]
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the agency tasked with prosecutions and removals of undocumented immigrants from the interior of the United States. The agency has only existed since 2003 and was founded under the auspices of the newly created Department of Homeland Security. Before ICE’s existence, the kind of immigration enforcement done by ICE was mostly handled by the Immigration and Naturalization Service under the Department of Justice.
In its most basic form, “Abolish ICE” is merely an attitudinal signal, allowing its users to express disgust with the injustices of the status quo when it comes to immigration law in the United States. From former President George W. Bush, who founded ICE, to former President Barack Obama, derided as the “deporter-in-chief,” to the current border separation policies of President Trump, the left-wing immigration activism movement believes radical action is necessary to counter the policies of the past. But abolition of one government entity is not the end of the conversation, and the movement has not coalesced around a solution in regards to what will take ICE’s place.
[Also read: ICE chief Thomas Homan is retiring tomorrow, but he’s not going out quietly]
Border hawks have accused the Abolish ICE movement of advocating for open borders, but that’s not quite true. (Though a movement that contains the words “abolish immigration enforcement” can be easily caricatured this way.) The Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection and United States Citizen and Immigration Service would still exist. And some of the Abolish ICE movement’s leaders have advocated a repeal-and-replace type of plan, arguing that moving some aspects of immigration enforcement away from DHS and back to the Justice Department would result in a more humane system. (Border Patrol and CBP are the agencies at the root of the controversial family-separation politics of the Trump administration. Abolishing ICE would not do much to halt the recent spate of family separations.)
Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., has been crafting “Abolish ICE” legislation, and told NBC news that “about 20 different departments” did the functions of ICE before ICE existed. Pocan said the goal of legislation would be to “put those duties back to the other agencies.” Perhaps this divestment would make deportations processes more humane, if less efficient, and perhaps ICE needs a culture change. But merely changing which government agency handles deportations is not a shared goal of the movement.
Sean McElwee, a policy guru with Data Progress and one of the popularizers of “Abolish ICE,” has written that “the goal of abolishing the agency is to abolish the function,” and that deportation, “next to death … is the worst fate that can be inflicted on a human.” Left-wing immigration policy activists have been urging the government to focus enforcement solely on violent criminal undocumented immigrants rather than the nonviolent undocumented population.
In the age of Trump, whose campaign heavily featured immigration hawkery, and a media environment that has heavily featured stories of longtime undocumented immigrants ripped from prosperous lives in the U.S., this is a tempting message. But abolishing ICE and bringing immigration enforcement back to the 1990s and the INS has little to do with rising deportations of nonviolent undocumented immigrants.
Statistics are difficult to come by, but deportations of both criminal and noncriminal undocumented immigrants skyrocketed in the 1990s, before ICE was conceived. (For the purpose of this analysis, we’re considering criminality to be lawbreaking while in the U.S., not the act of crossing the border— a distinction made by INS in its statistics as well.) McElwee attributes this to Clinton-era policy changes, but it would be negligent not to mention immigration flows: as deportations tripled under the INS in the ’90s, the undocumented immigrant population was exploding. Estimates by the Pew Research Center found the undocumented population ballooned from 3.5 million in 1990 to 9.4 million in 2001. INS and other immigration enforcement agencies were deporting more undocumented immigrants, but they were also dealing with an explosion in undocumented immigration.
From 2000 to 2002, the years immediately before ICE was founded, the U.S. deported more than 324,000 noncriminal undocumented immigrants, far more than the number of criminals who were deported. That makes for a very wide gulf in approach for the Abolish ICE movement. While it’s portrayed by some of the more mainstream activists as merely restoring a pre-ICE status quo, some activists are committed to completely eliminating nonviolent interior enforcement of immigration law. That would a very, very radical change. INS deported hundreds of thousands of noncriminal undocumented immigrants in the decade before the creation of ICE. Abolition of ICE does not solve the question of who, if anyone, would enforce immigration law in the interior of the United States.
There are plenty of cases in which ICE has handled its duties negligently and even maliciously. And the fight over where to allocate a limited amount of immigration-enforcement resources is important. Abolish ICE, as a movement, has slogan but no consensus on what immigration enforcement in the United States is supposed to look like once the agency is gone.
Kevin Glass (@KevinWGlass) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. Previously he was director of outreach and policy at The Franklin Center and managing editor at Townhall. His views here are his own.
