Before abolishing ICE, just make the cowards take their masks off. See how many of the goons just quit.
He made the claim, he needs to back it up.
Good point.
About half. Today, after some shootings. How about 2 years from now?
Right.
That is already the law. There are no convicted felons in ICE or any similar US agency.
In a few states.
I suspect that some are bigots, and again, subverting the Civil Service for political reasons is a trump move. The excess agents can be transferred top other agencies, such as Federal Corrections, which has a large turnover- because the job is pretty nasty.
Right.
We’ll see, but why would it improve? Do you seriously suggest that the Trump administration will improve ICE’s behavior?
In the 2028 Democratic primary, voters will be howling for the (rhetorical) blood of MAGA. No chance in hell that some milquetoast, cautious position like “let’s just make ICE better”, for an agency full of thugs with an administration mandate to terrorize and brutalize people of color, is going to get through the primary. Candidates will be scrambling to be the candidates that are seen as toughest on ICE and toughest on MAGA in general, because that’s what Democratic voters will demand.
In my opinion, anyway. We’ll see.
Hardly, unless the Dems win Congress and cuts back the budget for ICE back to Biden levels. But do you thing the current administration is going to Abolish ICE? No, that would be up to the next President- two years for now - or so.
Maybe. But even so, they wont “abolish ICE”- they will re-organize and rename and say that they abolished it. They will not subvert the Civil Service. The budget will likely be cut before then, and the new Dem President will fire all the MAGA appointees.
Which will be different from what they’ve been saying for the last 20 years… how, exactly?
ICE is a failed agency. Replace it with a working agency that follows the rule of law and serves communities rather than terrorizing them.
That is what I think the message should be. Start with a statement of the problem, and follow up with a positive solution.
I disagree. The issue isn’t where there are located in the Federal government. It is the expansion of their scope and the unrestrained hiring with a “butts in seats” mentality. Prior to the expansion, they didn’t do much active enforcement via traffic stops and raids. The issue isn’t where ICE EOR is, it is what they do.
Keep in mind that previously the enforcement sub-org, EOR, was only 1/3rd of ICE. The larger sub-org was Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) focused on trafficking, customs, and other crimes. HSI doesn’t belong in CPB at all.
What needs to happen is eliminate the paramilitary force operating inside US borders that is the current incarnation of ICE EOR. The first two steps outght to be to fire the 12k new personnel and cut the budget.
FWIW: Both CPB and ICE are already part of NHS just like they used to both be part of INS.
I already suggested- twice- to cut the ICE budget back to Biden era levels, and the Dems can do that easily if they take congress this year.
If a Civil Service employee has been in a whole year, you can not fire them for political reasons. But since ICE will have a much smaller budget, the new agents will have to be transferred out or they can be laid off. In effect, they will no longer be ICE agents.
Quite true, and I think it’s too far to say with any certainty what particular breed of malcontents ICE has been hiring.
But they’ve certainly been hiring in a haphazard manner that has alarmed experts.
So I also don’t think it’s fair to say that it’s “not true” that ICE has been hiring violent police department rejects. The fact is, ICE agents used to wear polos and deliver paperwork to people who overstayed visas, and now the mission very publicly involves violence. That’s going to either attract violent people, weed out reasonable people, or both.
Best we can say is there’s not much evidence about what ICE agents look like now because the most transparent administration in history is weirdly opaque about everything.
I objected to the idea to move ICE into CPB. I fear that these suggestions would get watered down in implementation and we would end up with the same function, same issues in a different part of DHS.
“See, the Democrats are doubling down on their embrace of illegal aliens - it’s right in their party platform!!!”
Maybe it’s not a good idea to give them more ammo while throwing raw meat to the “progressive” wing?
I don’t think hating ice is just a progressive wing thing anymore. In 2026 I think the closest equivalent is the war in Iraq in 2008. The ICE murders and concentration camps have been a national embarrassment. ICE approval is almost a mirror image of Trump approval.
Send them to the fields to pick the crops (in place of all those they’ve deported). They can’t do too much violence there. Though I suppose they could spit on the lettuce.
Yes, this.
This is a good message for Dems. “Put it back the way it was before, when it worked well” short-circuits the “Dems want to abolish all law enforcement” lies so beloved by the Republicans.
“ICE is broken. Replace it” is smarter than “Abolish it.”
And we do need to be smart.
These are the people calling James Talarico a vegan soyboy gay transwoman because he ate a potato-egg-and-cheese breakfast taco and making AI-generated videos of him torturing children. We need to stop moderating our positions because of people who are never going to talk about us in good faith anyway.
According to the previous cite, 78% of Democrats support abolishing ICE. That’s a helluva wing.
That said, I really think the verb we use needs to be “replace.” Very very few people are calling for open borders, and necessarily we’ll have a different border agency in place if ICE is abolished, so let’s put that right in the verb. I don’t think the left should soften positions in fear of Republicans who are going to lie about us no matter what, but I do think we should be intentional in the language we use.
I don’t think anyone is arguing that THOSE people can be reached with the truth.
It’s the much larger group of independents who may be reachable, and the closer we can come to presenting policy positions that sound reasonable, the better.
They’re going to say that no matter what. They fundamentally do not care if what they are saying is true or not. So why bother trying to cater to them?
In one sentence, you say that we shouldn’t subvert the Civil Service for political reasons. In the very next sentence, you say that we should subvert the Federal Department of Corrections. Get it straight; what do you want?
So, independent, reasonable positions like abolishing ICE, then? Because that’s what centrists want.
I wonder if politicians in postwar Germany spent this much time worrying about reforming and replacing the Gestapo.