Democratic Party Official Position is to Abolish ICE

Politics & Elections
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QFT, One “mistake” that was not before, but happens now with regularity:

“It’s been frustrating because in normal times, we have the cooperation between agencies,” Choi said. “Something like this has never really occurred until more recently where the requests, the lawful requests, the official requests of local investigative agencies are being ignored.”

“I don’t think there’s a question that there was a law broken,” Fletcher said. “At the minimum this is conduct unbecoming of an officer of the court. At a maximum, it’s some form of false imprisonment or kidnapping.”

125

That is an interesting question. My thought is that they would all be put on desk duty until they finished their training.

All solid ideas.

Both Biden and Obama deported quite a few. My idea is to scale back ICE and what it does to what it did under those Dem Administrations.

Makes sense.

I completely agree. ICE under the current administration has gone too far. WAY too far.

126

Yeah, I worded that badly.

127

Uh, that was before, now with Kash Patel (Appointed by Trump):

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/29/nx-s1-5327518/donald-trump-100-days-retribution-threats

This agenda of retribution has defined the early days of the second Trump administration.

The list of targets now exceeds 100, according to NPR’s review, ranging from some of the United States’ most prominent Democratic politicians to international students who were unknown to the general public. The FBI’s arrest last week of a Wisconsin judge for allegedly obstructing Immigration and Customs Enforcement has raised additional concerns that the administration may also be targeting members of the judiciary. While discussing the case on Fox News, Attorney General Pam Bondi described some judges as “deranged” and added “no one is above the law.”

Trump has enlisted a wide spectrum of major and minor government agencies in his retaliation campaign.
How Trump is using government power to target his enemies : NPR

128

Desk duty in what org? Federal Corrections?

It is 12000 personnel pulling a paycheck doing nothing. Can we just fire the 12000 ICE ERO and hire back 12000 other, productive Federal employees that we kicked out by DOGE?

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They’d stagger it out, but remember, with the budget cut, many of the new hires would be gone- yes, Corrections or whatever. They could be laid off due to budget reasons. That is legal.

Firing Civil Service for political reasons is not only illegal, but wrong.

130

A lot of people think of the police as the people who Protect and Serve, who uphold justice, and enforce the laws. And we do need people who do those things, and as long as people think that’s what the police do, abolishing them will be unpopular. But what people think of for ICE is masked thugs terrorizing the populace. If they think of the legitimate roles at all, it’s probably under a different name, like “border patrol”.

131

“They’re terrorist thugs” is not a political reason to fire them. Sure, go through a verification/investigation process so that the presumably tiny number of decent agents don’t get fired, but if you participated in MAGA ICE terrorism, you should be fired at a minimum… and many of them should probably be prosecuted.

Don’t just move terrorist thugs to corrections. They shouldn’t be terrorizing convicts either.

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Change my mind on what?

As I said before, abolishing ICE is a slogan, not a policy. Whether it is a politically good slogan is hard to say based on a poll. How good or bad of a slogan it is from a political standpoint would depend on how it was explained.

133

I see, that is clearer.

My assumption is that when Dopers, including myself, say eliminate or fire, that it is a shorthand for eliminate funding and reduction in force (RIF) – not to punish for political reasons.

134

22,000 in a country of 340 million is not that much. But if we get another four years of MAGA, and then defeat them, the number will grow and this kind of concern will have to be taken seriously. One reason the Iraq War lasted so long is that the U.S. put Saddam’s thugs out of a job.

Also, I think that, with just 22,000, a lot will be able to find a place in local police departments. While this has negatives, it should tamp down their anger as compared if they had no income or had to take jobs they would think way beneath them.

135

My understanding is that some of these ICE officers were previously unqualified to become police officers.

From AP:

"Their backgrounds stand out. And not in a good way.

Two bankruptcies and six law enforcement jobs in three years. An allegation of lying in a police report to justify a felony charge against an innocent woman — an incident that led to a $75,000 settlement and criticism of his integrity. A third job candidate once failed to graduate from a police academy, then lasted only three weeks in his only job as a police officer.

Their common bond: All were hired recently by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during an unprecedented hiring spree — 12,000 new officers and special agents to double its force — after the agency received a $75 billion windfall from Congress to enact President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign."

I’m not sure why anyone would want these thugs in their police department. They are a lawsuit waiting to happen.

136

…it wasn’t a “snafu.”

There are lessons to be learned from it though.

One of those lessons is that establishment Democrats and old-school Republicans are much more in alignment than the establishment Dems are with the progressives. And when the defund movement started to get traction, the establishment Dems essentially joined forces with old-school Republicans and MAGA to make “defund the police” poison.

That wasn’t organic. You don’t get grown politicians trembling on TV while they announce that “no, I absolutely do NOT support defunding the police.” It was the result of well-funded disinformation and propaganda campaigns.

“Defund the police” wasn’t magical words. They really didn’t hold that much power. But when the Democratic president of the United States stood up at the State of the Union and said we should “fund the police,” the establishment had drawn its line in the sand. This wasn’t just a rejection of those words but the shutting down of the movement.

When we talk about the “boiling frog” and how authoritarianism creeps up on you its stuff like this we are talking about. The defund movement is dead. Not just those three words, but Black Lives Matter as well.

The same with the campus protests of the last few years: they were shut down in a way that will likely change the way students protest forever. Because it wasn’t just “the state.” Students were doxxed. They had vans driving around with student names on them. Students were rounded up by ICE. Counterprotesters were allowed to smash them up. Students were kicked out of accommodation. Blacklisted by employers.

In Texas they are jailing protestors for between 30 and a 100 years. These all aren’t separate discrete things. They are all in service of the very same ideals.

So the lessons from “defund the police” aren’t that we should spend the next three years debating whether or not it’s a good slogan. It’s that the establishment is the real problem here, and the establishment needs to go.

Because the establishment really doesn’t want to “abolish ICE” at all. That’s why they don’t support the slogan. It’s as simple as that. So they will do the very same thing as they did with defund: throw out alternatives like “reform ICE” where their version of reform will be to just go back to the way it was a few years ago that was still very very bad.

The lesson from “defund” is that opponents to fixing society are ruthless. And you shouldn’t let them control the narrative. You can abolish ICE as easily as DOGE abolished USAID. There are no “rules” any more. Not in the way it used to be. If you want to fix what is broken, you need to be prepared to move at the same speed as the people who did the breaking. Because otherwise the baseline just keeps getting reset.

And the final lesson from Defund is something I’ve been saying for years: just do the thing. Just say and do things you believe in. Just stand for something, for goodness’ sake. Stop letting the opposition or the establishment set the agenda. If you let the debate over a slogan derail an entire movement, then you are doing something wrong. Don’t do the same thing here.

137

“Abolish ICE” Is craven pandering to a group of primary voters. As a general election message is squanders broadly agreed upon (even a sizable minority of Republicans) disgust at current ICE tactics and strategies with a message that even a sizable number of Democrats would disagree with.

And practically it well, isn’t practical. There is actual cause for detention and removal of violent criminals, that is being used as an excuse for xenophobic and racist thuggery. Building something else fresh that does that in a more just and humane professional manner, dealing with various extant contractual obligations, would take huge in investments of energy and funds. An expensive bit just for show. While the actual goals would be met with new (well the old) standards of behavior immediately put in place with zero tolerance for noncompliance (immediate dismissal) and investigation with prosecution when the case can be made for past and any current or future abuses of power.

Even “Replace ICE” is in fact not a realistic thing to do.

Setting immediate zero tolerance for abuse of power, eliminating masks and the current mass detentions policy, is.

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Enforced by…?

139

Yup. And trying to turn a terrorist organization into anything functional and law-abiding would be an order of magnitude more expensive. Just because it’s going to be hard to fix the government doesn’t mean we should just give up and not even try.

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Were there calls at the end of WWII to convert the SS and/or Gestapo into a law abiding peaceful organization?

141

Good points. Cut back their funds to Biden era levels- that means they can not support all those stupid raids and new agents. Some new agents can be transferred- others laid off.

What are your ideas?

What does this have to do with the OP? Do you have any useful ideas here?

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Your proposal, not mine, so how do intend to enforce your ideas?

143

Who is the OP?

and your

was in response to -