General Discussion

Calling for the abolition of ICE at this point seems like an obvious no-brainer. Most Americans had never given ICE much thought until recently, when it essentially turned into Trump's paramilitary secret police force. As of right now, most people associate ICE with images like this:



But here's an image of ICE officers taken during a time when most Americans barely gave a second thought to ICE. The image below is from 2016 -- the officers are unmasked, and they're not wearing body armor, or carrying assault rifles. During this time, ICE did not have policies that involved conducting warrantless door-to-door, dragging people out of their cars at random, firing tear gas into crowds of peaceful protestors, creeping around schools looking for kids to abduct, or murdering US citizens in the streets.



The problem with abolishing ICE is that immigration and customs enforcement is actually a necessary thing. There really are people people in the country who need to be deported, and there needs to be some kind of organization that can do that.

So when it comes to abolishing ICE, are you talking about abolishing ICE, or are you talking about abolishing immigration and customs enforcement? Because it would be very easy to conflate the two, and I hate to say this, but there are a lot of Americans out there who still have a boner for kicking out immigrants -- they just don't like the gross, violent, unconstitutional way that it's currently being carried out.

I am 100% in agreement with anyone who thinks that the current iteration of ICE needs to be abolished. We do not need a Gestapo or a Stasi in this country. And that distinction needs to be made clear. In that regard, the concept of "reform" is not necessarily a bad thing. What Schumer is proposing here is that ICE essentially return to what it was pre-Trump -- an organization bound by Constitutional rules and regulations, that has a specific and narrow mission to carry out.

But I do understand how, given the national anger about the current iteration of ICE, that use of the phrases like "commonsense reform" also comes across as milquetoast and out of touch, especially when used by Chuck Schumer, who, to put it gently, is not exactly a fire-breathing politician.

Bottom line: this is a real political minefield that the Democrats need to navigate. Americans are currently DISGUSTED by the policies of Trump's ICE, and that is a very real, and very significant political problem for the Republicans. But we don't want to let them twist themselves free of the briar patch they're caught in. I'm not saying Chuck Schumer's approach is correct here, but I am saying that Democrats really do need to be mindful of giving the impression that they don't care about legitimate immigration enforcement.

Just some food for thought.