Abolishing ICE Is the Bare Minimum

You have probably seen the video of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents violently arresting New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander.

The footage is disturbing not just because of the thuggish way Lander is manhandled but also because of the brazenness. Here are federal agents—not local police officers—essentially kidnapping a high-profile elected official in the biggest city in the United States, on camera as he loudly points out that they have no jurisdiction or legal grounds to hold him. The message is clear: If they can do that to him, they can do that to anyone. (Lander was released a few hours later.)

Lander’s arrest was so out of line that even his rivals in the city’s upcoming mayoral primary had to defend him. Among them was prince of darkness Andrew Cuomo, who weighed in thusly:

This is the latest example of the extreme thuggery of Trump’s ICE out of control—one can only imagine the fear families across our country feel when confronted with ICE. Fear of separation, fear of being taken from their schools, fear of being detained without just cause. This is not who we are. This must stop, and it must stop now.

On the surface, Cuomo’s response is just about hitting the required beats. This is bad, it has to end—yes, all true. But there’s one phrase that jumps out: “out of control.”

The implication is that ICE has somehow slipped the bonds of respectability and is rampaging around with no supervision. Nobody’s minding the store! Everything’s chaos! Where are the rule followers!?

But this isn’t what ICE looks like when it’s “out of control.” It’s what ICE looks like when it’s in control—when it’s doing the job that it has been asked to do. That job, more or less, is to be the chief enforcement arm of US fascism.

And that’s why the agency should be torn down—and why abolishing ICE must be part of the platform of any politician who identifies as a progressive or leftist in this country. If you’re watching what’s happening right now and not demanding that this structure of repression be dismantled, you don’t deserve my vote.

Lander will be fine. Being a big-deal politician isn’t enough to prevent your detention these days, but it is still enough to be allowed to get on with your life. But the same can’t necessarily be said about the people detained at their US citizenship hearings or rounded up at their workplaces or shipped off to a gulag in El Salvador or seized in their homes or kidnapped off the street. The same can’t even be said of Edgardo, the man Lander was escorting when the comptroller was assaulted; he remains in ICE custody. They are the real targets of the Trump administration, which has explicitly told agents to abduct as many people as they can, on any possible pretext. And there are no signs that anyone in ICE has a problem with any of this. Quite the contrary: The agency’s goons appear to be enjoying themselves. Just after Trump won reelection, a Fox News reporter spoke to a bunch of unnamed ICE and Border Patrol agents about his imminent return to office. His sources were ecstatic.

“It’s a total 180, troops are finally feeling like the sun is coming out after a very long storm,” one ICE officer gushed. “I feel that people know now they will get to do the work they signed up to do. And that they want to do. They know they can get the bad guys now,” another one crowed. “Oh dude, people who were going to retire are not, and everyone is happy,” a Border Patrol agent said.

While it’s tempting to point to this and say, “The problem is Trump,” that’s simply not true. The problem is ICE. It was created in the post-9/11 fever of 2003—another time of rampant human rights violations at home and abroad—and set up specifically to be a quasi-police force that could detain and deport immigrants. It has played a malevolent role for as long as it’s existed, carrying out abuses under Democratic and Republican administrations, including the Biden administration. It’s not an accident that Tom Homan, Trump’s psychopathic “border czar,” rose to prominence under President Barack Obama. It’s a measure of the fascist cancer at the heart of ICE. That cancer may have metastasized under Trump, but it’s been there the entire time.

There is no accommodating such an organism. There’s no way to make such a virulent thing better. There’s no way to make ICE fit comfortably within a democratic society. Just the opposite: The only kind of society something like ICE breeds is an antidemocratic police state. The targeting of democratically elected officials like Lander lends this an especially literal air, but ICE’s assaults on everyday people are no less malignant to the functioning of a civilized country. The only decent, moral solution is to do away with it—something people have been strategizing about for years. We do not have to consign ourselves to be ruled over by a depraved agency that, as Working Families Party press secretary Ravi Mangla pointed out the other day, is younger than Shrek. There’s no line in the Constitution that forces us to keep ICE around. This isn’t to say that tearing it down would be simple or easy—just that we’re talking about pruning a very young branch of government, not trying to shift the earth’s orbit.

And that is where “Abolish ICE”—two words that were everywhere during the last Trump administration—comes in. The Abolish ICE movement faded when Joe Biden took office—a victim of the partisan tendency to stop caring about an issue once “your” guy is in charge—and was sent deeper into the political wilderness as Democrats stampeded to the right on immigration over the course of Biden’s term. But if what we’re witnessing right now shows us anything, it’s that abolishing ICE remains as important as ever. Not only that—it is an obvious litmus test for anyone seeking political office. You can’t proclaim to fight Trumpist extremism and dodge its most visible, horrifying manifestation. You can’t run for local office as a progressive and collaborate with this project. You can’t vote to fund it and expect grassroots support. You can’t say you’re a supporter of immigrants and fail to stand up to their tormentors.

This isn’t a wild ask. It’s the least we should expect. Anything less is unacceptable. Anything less is a win for fascism.