Abolish ICE: A litmus test for Democratic presidential hopefuls
If you’re a Democrat who even remotely harbors aspirations to be the next President of the United States, then the call to Abolish ICE should be your new shibboleth. Like presidential candidates past, your candidacy will inevitably demand a large-scale, bi-partisan immigration reform package. Do that. Knock yourself out. Please. But if any Democrat’s proposal doesn’t include the immediate de-funding of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and a radical realignment in the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) priorities and scope of work, they do not deserve the party’s nomination—nor a place in American history books beyond a footnote that they were a wanna-be on the wrong side the biggest moral fight of our era.
ICE is a failed project. It was always doomed to be, but now that its systemic cruelty and incompetence is a major headline in newspapers across America, we have all the evidence we need to toss it in the proverbial ash bin of history. Since its inception, ICE has always been the government’s clearest expression of punitive otherness. Its greatest source of power is the fear it strikes in people like me, my family, and those with fewer privileges than my family and I have been afforded. ICE plans to spend $5.6 billion dollars this year arresting and deporting American citizens, terrorizing border towns, promoting modern-day American Nazism, ripping thousands of children from their parents and driving them towards suicide, per a Los Angeles Times report:
The caseload is straining a facility he described as understaffed and unequipped to deal with children experiencing trauma... During his time at the shelter, children were running away, screaming, throwing furniture and attempting suicide, Davidson said. Several were being monitored this week because they were at risk of running away, self-harm and suicide, records show.
If ever again a Democratic presidential candidate hems and haws at the question of Should we abolish ICE?, the next seven follow-up questions should be Why not? Milquetoast answers demand the full weight of scrutiny. Ambiguity should be given no quarter. Democratic candidates should be forced to either make the case in the affirmative for ICE or categorically reject it. And the only acceptable answer is the full-throated support for the dissolution of this wreck of a government agency.
Not only is abolishing ICE the right thing to do, it is an easily fulfilled campaign promise. Whereas immigration reform falls into the purview of Congress, the daily enforcement work of ICE and DHS resides in the President’s cabinet. Which is to say, the Executive—more than any other individual—can abolish the waste and cruelty we’re witnessing in real time and begin to restore the fundamental ideals that made this country a city on a hill for so many of us.
Make no mistake: like the calls to abolish slavery, Jim Crow laws, and modern prisons, abolishing ICE is a radical position. But we are so far beyond the point that the radical-ness of a solution invalidates it. Nazi sympathizers run the White House. The world is on fire. And the very same America that served as a beacon of hope for starry-eyed, wistful immigrants like my parents is ripping newborns, infants, and toddlers from their parents only to be detained in abandoned Wal-Marts.
It’s easy over the course of a normal life to assume that this latest iteration of human tragedy belongs on the long list of things that we have no control over and will never change, to give in to the disillusion, to accept that this is our new normal—or maybe even that it always was. But that would be wrong.
We can and we should radically re-imagine the way immigrants arrive to America — to say nothing of what happens after they get here. It’s not like sudden changes to immigration enforcement mechanisms aren’t without precedent. In fact, the very fickleness of our political winds have been the primary animating force behind immigration enforcement policy.
The policy, history, and politics of modern immigration has been written in our lifetimes. Robot vacuums are older than ICE and DHS. The notion of “illegal crossings” and “strong borders” are wholesale fictions written in the shadow of the Vietnam War. The now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service came to the fore of American political life when a Vietnam-era general whipped what was then the archetype of ineffective government bureaucracy into shape.
Ironically, the 50-year attempt to “secure the border” has stopped the natural flow of migrant workers, increasing net migration to the U.S. It turns out that’s what happens when we conceive of immigration as a security issue. When immigration was seen as an economic and labor issue and migrant workers were allowed to cross back and forth as the seasons changed, our nation was better for it. A return to that basic policy framework is the path towards building an inclusive economy that works for everyone.
2,000 immigrant children newly orphaned by the U.S. government is the inevitable outcome of a policy trajectory created by national-security priorities. To be sure, it was super-charged by a white supremacist President with a predilection for casual cruelty and a disregard for our individual or institutional leadership. But it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s easily fixable. The case for abolishing ICE shouldn’t exist separate from the politics of it — it never has. If you want to lead America, if you’re going to ask its people to make you the steward of our ideals, you must be willing to do what’s needed and destroy ICE before it destroys what’s left of us.
