(RNS) — It’s a refrain we’ve heard before, but it’s been dismissed as too leftist or too radical: “Abolish ICE.” But with every passing day, the urgency behind those words becomes clearer. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency doesn’t just need reform. It needs to be dismantled completely and permanently.
ICE is not some foundational American institution. It did not exist during the Civil Rights Movement, the Great Depression or even 9/11. It was created in 2003, in the fearful shadow of the so-called war on terror, as part of a sweeping expansion of federal power under the newly formed Department of Homeland Security.
What’s happening now in Los Angeles and other cities is not immigration enforcement. It’s an assault on everything we claim to hold inviolable. ICE has become a personal police force of Donald Trump, operating like an unaccountable militia tasked with silencing the voices he finds inconvenient.
Born out of the flawed and Islamophobic logic of securitizing supposedly inherently dangerous populations, ICE was never about justice or order. It was always about control. It grew alongside the Countering Violent Extremism programs that treated mosques as possible breeding grounds for radicals and mass surveillance projects — all designed to target Muslims, immigrants, and anyone who questioned the post-9/11 security state. That same logic has now turned inward, fueling a domestic war on dissent.
In the past few months, we’ve seen ICE abduct Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student and green-card holder, for his pro-Palestinian activism; Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts scholar, for writing about genocide in Gaza; Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown, for speaking truth to power, thankfully now reunited with his family; and Leqaa Kordia, a young Palestinian woman detained for protesting the murder of her own relatives in Gaza.
None of them were accused of violence. None of them broke any laws. They simply stood for justice, and ICE came for them.
In these cases we watched as the federal government used ICE to circumvent local protections and expand the reach of a growing police state. This isn’t only about immigrants, but clearly about the erosion of basic civil liberties for us all.
Yet, somehow, many still cling to the belief that ICE is necessary. That America would fall apart without it.
That belief ignores an obvious truth: ICE was never necessary. It didn’t exist for the first 227 years of this nation’s history (which has had plenty of other abominations that should’ve never existed). The agencies that preceded it, though imperfect, still miraculously managed immigration enforcement without black vans snatching people off the streets.
In fact, multiple case studies have found that communities that limited their cooperation with ICE had crime rates comparable to or even lower than those that collaborated wholeheartedly, debunking the myth that the agency makes the country safer.
This isn’t just a Republican problem. President Barack Obama oversaw more deportations than any president before him. President Joe Biden, despite campaign promises, failed on this issue as he did on many others, furthering the deep rot within the agency. Instead of dismantling the post-9/11 apparatus, both administrations helped to entrench it.
Under Trump, the idea of abolishing ICE may seem politically impossible. But that is precisely why we must commit to it — not only to confront this moment of authoritarian overreach, but to set the standard for what justice demands. So that no Democrat ever again runs on empty promises of gradual reform, only to expand the very systems they once condemned. There is no reforming what was broken from the start.
Abolishing ICE is not about ideology. It’s about consistency. It’s about returning to a society that doesn’t criminalize entire communities for the crime of existing.
We owe it to the families torn apart by deportations. We owe it to the students and scholars now sitting in detention centers for daring to speak out against genocide. And we owe it to the future generations to ensure that this country does not slide further into authoritarianism under the guise of national security.
ICE is not too big to fail. It is too dangerous to continue.
We don’t need a gentler deportation force. We need a government that refuses to criminalize protest, weaponize immigration or suppress dissent.
We need to abolish ICE. Not someday. But now. And we must keep saying it until it happens.