There’s been a lot of pearl clutching about calls to abolish ICE. Advocates are not calling for open borders or an end to immigration enforcement. They are calling for an end to an agency that has lost all moral authority and legal credibility to actually enforce those laws and instead to reform and rebuild it from the ground up with input from the communities it is tasked with working with. That may sound radical to some, but it sounds a lot like common sense to me.
Examples abound. ICE itself was the direct result of a changed mandate and renaming of INS after a series of incompetence and mismanagement at that department. DHS and the DNI folded and renamed around 90 different agencies after the widespread government failure that led to 9/11. Let us also not forget calls from a Republican Congress after WACO to abolish the ATF or their annual call to kill the IRS. Locally, the MDC was long viewed as a bastion of patronage and finally gutted down to its core functions, merged with state agencies and renamed in the early 2000’s as the DCR.
It is time we stop holding immigration rights advocates to a double standard of advocacy where they cannot renamed or reform agencies in the government that are clearly failing their mandates. Any good government advocate can see why ICE is an objective and costly failure in dire need of a top to bottom reform and rebranding.
Abolish ICE is political suicide.
First of all, it’s just an incredibly unpopular position, polling at around 21%. Green Party territory.
Second of all, although you say it’s a rebranding/refocusing effort, the proponents including Alexandria Ocasio Ortiz DO want to get rid of the border. Not only will they go on saying it, but they are going to lambaste YOU for claiming it means something else. Confusion and fighting to divide that 21%.
Third, Trump will bring it up every day, every time there is an immigration issue, because he is on the majority side. Not only that but he irritates the divisions within the Democrats every time he does it.
The Resistance strategy of countering everything Trump does vocally and forcefully is leading you to take on losing positions just because they are the opposite of Trump’s positions.
Nobody is saying get rid of the border as if there is no distinction between countries. Some of us just think it should be as open as possible allowing for public health and safety concerns. Besides, if something is the right thing to do, being popular isn’t the goal.
And we have reporting that ICE is being militarized – https://tytnetwork.com/2018/07/03/ice-training-officers-in-military-grade-weapons-chemical-agents/
It has gone so far off mission in such a short amount of time (only been around since 2002), that abolishing it and scaling back its functions under different agencies is the only sensible way forward. We have created a monster.