ICE is wrong target for outrage
The sudden call by some Democrats to abolish ICE— U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency whose multipronged mission includes deportation — makes a better bumper sticker than a blueprint for policy.
Like eradicating the InternalRevenue Service, the GOP’s own recurrent shibboleth, scrapping ICE reflects the risible notion that offensive policies can be wished away by atomizing the agency that enforces them. They can’t be.
Many Americans— we count ourselves among them— are outraged by the Trump administration’s harassment, humiliation and hounding of immigrants, including the zero-humanity policy of deterring future migrants by separating children fromtheir parents. The instrument of some (though not all) of those policies has been ICE. But it is just that: an instrument, wielded in every instance to enforce the will of President Donald Trump and his administration.
Indignant at those policies, abolitionists have seized on ICE as a convenient target for their wrath. But getting rid of the agency, or breaking it up, will not change the laws they dislike or, more to the point, the senselessways in which the administration has chosen to enforce them.
No doubt, ICE is guilty of unwarranted abuses— rounding up noncriminal migrants who have led exemplary lives for years in theUnited States; breaking up communities and families; the unforgivable mess of splitting children fromparents without any firm idea of howthey might be reunited. But those excesseswere carried out with the robust encouragement of the WhiteHouse and Secretary ofHomeland Security KirstjenNielsen, whose department oversees ICE.
Andwhy single out ICE for abolition? U.S. Customs and Border Protection, also a constituent agency ofHomeland Security, has its own track record of brutality.
And what of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, in the Department ofHealth and Human Services? It served as a co-conspirator in the splintering-without-accountability of more than 2,000 migrant families this spring, many of whom, did not even commit the misdemeanor of illegally crossing the border.
A few Democrats have riled their bases with the abolish-ICE applause line; they includeNewYork Mayor Bill de Blasio, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, N.Y., and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young firebrand whowon a congressional primary inNew York.
None has proposed an alternative or a replacement. None has acknowledged that ICE’s pre-9/11precursor agency overseeing deportations, the Immigration andNaturalization Service, was itself often accused of militarizing the border and mistreating migrants.
As it happens, ICE, an agency with 20,000 employees and an annual budget exceeding $6 billion, manages more than deportations. Its investigative division handles cybercrime; human trafficking; narcotics; counter-proliferation involving nuclear materials and other militarywares; child exploitation; even stolen art. Those are all vital and legitimate functions of government, as is deportation. They aren’t going to be abolished, nor should they be.
The problem with ICE isn’t its existence or its mission. It’s that the Trump administration, in its xenophobic zeal, hasweaponized it to go beyond protecting the United States and into the darker realms of oppression.