Abolishing ICE Is the Bare Minimum
ICE agents aren’t out of control. They are performing their designed role as fascism’s storm troopers.
"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.
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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."
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/abolish-ice-brad-lander/
