Abolish ICE
Why “Abolish ICE” Is a Moral Baseline, Not a Messaging Trap
Author’s Note: Just one section today. This one took a lot out of me, and I want to sit with it, and I hope you will too.
Why is it so hard to just say “Abolish ICE”? I’m genuinely asking.
This isn’t a Twitter-provocation question. It’s a serious one, asked in the wake of a woman being shot in the face multiple times by a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis. An act that, according to video evidence and even internal law-enforcement standards, appears wholly unjustified. If that moment does not at least allow elected officials to say the words, then it’s fair to ask what those words are being protected from.
Over the past few days, a familiar fault line has reopened inside the Democratic coalition. On one side are centrist (or self-described “moderate”) Democrats warning that the phrase “Abolish ICE” is politically toxic, a slogan that plays into Republican hands and undermines public trust in law enforcement. On the other side is a growing wing of the party asking a simpler, more moral question: if Democrats cannot say “abolish” after people have been killed, brutalized, and terrorized by an increasingly untrained and partisan federal force roaming civilian spaces, then what do they stand for?
I’ve been reading the Searchlight Institute memo circulated on Capitol Hill and the Bulwark article, “Dems Are Begging Their Own to Drop ‘Abolish ICE’.” I’ve also listened closely to Lauren Egan’s conversation with Sam Stein, where she lays out (honestly and in good faith) why she finds the Searchlight argument persuasive. The memo’s case is not frivolous, and it argues that abolition rhetoric risks repeating the political backlash against “Defund the Police” and proposes a “Reform and Retrain” framework focused on accountability, training standards, and oversight.
On the merits, some of that is reasonable.
The memo rightly acknowledges that ICE has become lawless, that training standards were slashed from months to weeks, that political operatives were embedded into enforcement roles, and that civilian harm has followed. It even admits that American citizens have been wrongfully detained and that the agency’s legitimacy has cratered.
But here’s the problem: the memo (and much of the centrist commentary around it) treats this as a messaging crisis when it is, in fact, a violence crisis.
The “Emotion” Problem
One line that keeps resurfacing in these discussions is the idea that people are “emotional right now” and may feel differently later. That framing is doing more work than it appears.
For marginalized communities like immigrants, Black Americans, Muslim Americans, and women whose constitutional rights have been rolled back, this is not a temporary emotional spike. It is accumulated trauma and a continuation of a Trump-era project that never ended, only institutionalized itself further through budgets, courts, and enforcement agencies.
Calling that response “emotional” subtly delegitimizes it, while treating suburban discomfort as sober political realism. That asymmetry is not accidental. It’s a hallmark of what I’ve described elsewhere as White centrism: a political framework shaped in racially homogeneous, professionally insulated environments, where state violence is abstract, and patience is always counseled to those bearing the brunt of enforcement.
Law and Order Is Not Race-Neutral
There is another premise that goes largely unspoken in these debates: that “law and order” rhetoric around immigration is somehow neutral, detached from race. It isn’t.
American immigration policy has always been racialized. The Immigration Act of 1924 was explicitly designed to preserve a White, Northern European demographic majority through national-origins quotas. Nearly a century later, the Trump administration’s Muslim Ban operated on the same logic, just with modern legal language and national-security theater layered on top.
ICE is a post‑9/11 creation, born out of fear politics and expanded through bipartisan neglect. Under Trump, it became something more explicit, which is an enforcement arm animated by identitarian grievance, empowered to treat entire communities as suspect with masked agents, unmarked vehicles, and raids untethered from serious criminal targets.
These are not optics problems.
They are structural features of a racialized enforcement regime.
The Polling Reality Centrists Keep Tiptoeing Around
Centrists often justify caution by invoking “the public.” But the public is not saying what many assume it’s saying.
Recent polling tells a more complicated and more inconvenient story. A YouGov/Economist poll shows 46% of Americans support abolishing ICE, compared to 43% who oppose it, with independents leaning in favor. Separate polling shows a majority of Americans believe ICE’s tactics are too forceful, and a clear majority viewed the Minneapolis shooting as an inappropriate use of force. Approval of Trump’s immigration handling has declined as deportation tactics have escalated.
This is not fringe sentiment. It’s ambivalence at worst and openness at best. The idea that even saying “abolish” is electorally radioactive is, at minimum, an unproven assumption, and at maximum, a projection of consultant anxiety onto the electorate.
What the Searchlight Memo Gets Wrong
The Searchlight memo warns that abolishing ICE would create “lawlessness.” But lawlessness is what we are watching now: federal agents operating without transparency, accountability, or meaningful civilian oversight. Reform proposals that rely on future implementation by figures like Kristi Noem or Stephen Miller ask the public to suspend disbelief in ways that are no longer credible.
Even more telling is what the memo concedes without fully grappling with: the $75 billion allocated to ICE is effectively untouchable. The debate has already narrowed from whether that level of funding is justified to merely how it should be spent. That is not moderation, it’s capitulation to a shifted Overton window where ever-expanding enforcement budgets are treated as inevitable.
Why This Is Breaking the Democratic Coalition
This is why so many people of color, especially Black women, are becoming disenchanted. They have been loyal to a party that routinely asks for their votes, their labor, and their patience, while refusing to stand with moral clarity when state violence becomes undeniable. The constant hair‑splitting over phrasing, even as bodies pile up and rights are stripped away, reads less like prudence and more like indifference.
To be clear: I’m not interested in bashing people who are genuinely frightened by America’s lurch toward authoritarianism and are trying to navigate it with tools forged in the 1990s. And I don’t pretend that dismantling an agency like ICE would be easy or politically cost‑free. It would require courage, leverage, and instability that our power centers have spent decades avoiding.
But that avoidance has consequences.
If Democrats continue to prioritize consultant-approved language over moral clarity, while expecting marginalized voters to show up anyway, the risk is not just electoral loss.
It’s institutional hollowing because a party that cannot name injustice in plain language eventually loses the authority to confront it at all.
There needs to be a major institution willing to stand up for Americans’ basic rights in this moment. If the Democratic Party cannot (or will not) do that, something else will eventually try. History is not patient with parties that confuse restraint for wisdom while violence escalates.
The Imagination Deficit
There’s one more thread worth pulling, and it’s about political imagination.
The centrist tendency to reject phrases like “Abolish ICE” often stems from a belief that it’s prudent, incremental, and strategic. But what it frequently reveals is something else: an inability to imagine systems other than the ones we’ve inherited. It’s a politics of reaction, not creation, and it’s forever on defense, forever negotiating with a bad-faith opposition, and forever afraid of its own shadow.
This isn’t a moral failing. It’s a structural one that is rooted in the social and institutional environments that have shaped much of the White political class in both parties. When you’ve been buffered from the most aggressive forms of state power, it’s easier to believe that systems just need tweaks. But for those who have always lived with surveillance, profiling, exclusion, or targeted enforcement, that system has never felt neutral, and its reform has never been a guarantee of safety.
Marginalized communities often carry what W.E.B. Du Bois called a “double consciousness,” the ability to see the nation as it presents itself and as it truly operates. That consciousness is a resource and not just a burden. It produces not only justified skepticism, but also expansive imagination: the ability to envision institutions that actually protect rather than punish, that build rather than extract.
That’s what’s missing from so much of the current debate. Not just courage, but creativity, and not just stability, but actual vision.
If the pro-democracy coalition wants to earn the trust of the people most threatened by rising authoritarianism, it must learn to do more than poll-test slogans. It has to see the system clearly, and be willing to change it, not just navigate it.
Because the future doesn’t belong to those who merely survive. It belongs to those who imagine something better.
There is a concern that "abolish ICE" is counter productive and has the same baggage, that scares middle America, as "defund the police". I don't buy it though. The suggestion is to reform ICE, but you can't reform a racist, fascist organization. All ICE Agents need to be fired, then hire qualified people that can do the job as it was done before Trump. Armed thugs are not needed.
The frog has been boiled, virtually all Federal departments have their own armed agents, we are already living in a police state. Even the Department of Education's Office of Inspector General special agents carry firearms to investigate fraud and other crimes against the department's programs.