Of course, there are some who want to abolish ICE who do want completely open borders, but many simply want ICE to go away because some of us have been warning people for years (I wrote about this in 2017) that ICE would be used to harass and oppress both immigrants and U.S. citizens.

In other words, one reason to abolish ICE* (and then replace it with something like the old INS) is we can then de facto fire all of the existing personnel, many of whom are jackbooted thugs. INS was not great**, but it also was not a de facto fascist paramilitary either. Abolishing ICE is a pragmatic move for a pro-democracy movement.

But as long as pundits in respectable outlets describe “abolish ICE” as equivalent to “open borders”, we won’t have the important discussion about

*Abolish ICE, I would argue, also serves as a shorthand for curtailing the authority of CBP too. Which is also a good thing.

**There is a discussion the country needs to have about increasing the amount of allowed immigrants, the need for political asylum (we should allow more asylum seekers), and so on. The reality is that we have a restrictive immigration system, which often is not enforced as brutally as it could be due to our decades long Article I crisis. Also, it’s part of a larger discussion about the size and importance of our internal security forces. That said, ICE represents a different threat entirely.