While fighting Trump deportations, Democrats still avoid ‘abolish ICE’

Democrats have overwhelmingly aligned in opposition to Trump’s second-term deportation policy, especially after the president put aside the Supreme Court’s upholding of a lower-court order to “facilitate” the return of a Salvadoran man improperly sent to CECOT.

But the party is still puzzling over how to talk about illegal immigration, one of Trump’s weakest issues in his first term that became his biggest strength after rising migration stoked frustration with perceived abuse of the asylum system under President Joe Biden. Among party strategists, the “Abolish ICE” debate is remembered as an early mistake by the first anti-Trump resistance, a slogan that Republicans used to portray Democrats as the “open borders” party.

Abolition advocates said at the time that Trump was abusing an agency that previous presidents had made too easy to turn into a deportation force. The demand to simply break it up rumbled through 2018’s congressional primaries, especially the contest between New York’s Joe Crowley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 

When Crowley tried to carve out a different position — that Trump was using ICE for “fascist” purposes, but the agency could be reformed — Ocasio-Cortez wondered if he was being naive.

“If this organization is as fascist as you’ve called it, then why don’t you adopt the stance to eliminate it?” Ocasio-Cortez asked Crowley in their sole televised debate.

This year, as the New York congresswoman and Bernie Sanders hold massive rallies around the country, “abolition” hasn’t come up. Ocasio-Cortez’s official online store sells just one “Abolish ICE” item, a black-and-white “dad hat” that’s sold out and no longer shipping.

In an interview after one recent rally, when Semafor asked if Sanders still wanted to “break up” ICE as he did during his 2020 presidential campaign, the Vermont senator didn’t answer directly; instead, he pivoted to talk about broader immigration policy.

“Do we want to get criminals and drug dealers out of the country who are illegally here? Yeah, we do,” said Sanders. “The bottom line is, we need, and we’ve always needed. comprehensive immigration reform and a path toward citizenship of undocumented people.”

That might mean major changes to ICE itself, but Democrats don’t often talk about that, either. 

In 2018, when the “abolish” campaign was at its apex, Wisconsin Rep. Mark Pocan and other CPC members introduced the Establishing a Humane Immigration Enforcement System Act, which would have created a commission to study ICE alternatives and ordered the agency to “terminate” after the fix was ready.

The bill wasn’t reintroduced after Democrats won the House that fall. Pocan’s office did not say whether he would put it forward again this Congress.

After a Saturday march in San Antonio, which Casar briefly joined and spoke at, a counter-protester stood near the rally point in a “Trump 2028″ baseball camp and an unofficial ICE T-shirt. The marchers kept their distance.

The odd Democratic debate about how to discuss Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s deportation — an issue that some in the party, anonymously, wish the party would move on from — is about Trump building credibility on immigration after Biden lost it.

Back in 2018, the most passionate voices in the party and in immigrant rights groups believed that Barack Obama had become “the deporter-in-chief” for no political benefit. He’d used his border policy to remove non-citizens and create the space for Congress to pass a compromise immigration bill, only to watch the Republican-led House bury his previous chance at one in 2014.

It was time to try something new. It was time to take advantage of what was, in the early Trump years, a weak issue for Republicans.

Democrats now see the pithiness of the “abolish ICE” slogan as its undoing. Just as “defund the police” was the wrong way of starting a discussion about community safety resources, they say, “abolish” was the wrong way to say that no president should abuse executive-branch power over deportation and border enforcement.

There are and were “open borders” advocates in politics, but no mainstream Democrat was among them — not even a democratic socialist from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats.

And the media environment of the first Trump administration looks like heaven to today’s Democrats. They worry far more often now that the president can bypass “legacy media” and its shrinking audiences to pummel them with distorted allegations about their border agenda, and that millions of voters never hear their message without a filter.

Democrats’ developing border policy is closer to the end of the Biden-Harris administration, when it tightly restricted asylum, than to the beginning, when it put a temporary moratorium on most deportations.

“Their effort to do mass deportations without due process is a major damn problem,” said Colorado Rep. Jason Crow, the main candidate recruiter for House Democrats, at a recent roundtable hosted by Third Way.

I was asking Crow how Democrats should talk about cases of apparent deportation abuse; his basic answer was that they needed to convince people that Trump’s policy was so capricious that it wasn’t keeping Americans safe.

The idea of abolishing ICE has lived on not with Democrats, but with activists and writers who worry that the movement was right all along in light of Trump’s aggressive deportations.

“Where does the ‘Abolish ICE’ movement go to get its apology?” asked Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark, highlighting some of the over-the-top arrests made by the agency this year. The center-right magazine’s co-founder, William Kristol, repeated the question on X.