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ICE Isn’t Old.
My elementary school is older than ICE.
The Bush administration created ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in the aftermath of 9/11, one of the many agencies born under the newly created Department of Homeland Security, like TSA, that promised to keep us “safer.” They exploited the fear and chaos following the attacks to push through their plans with minimal resistance and built a system of militarized immigration enforcement that had nothing to do with the attacks, all in the name of counterterrorism. Over two decades, “terrorism” has been defined and redefined to mean anything and everything that preyed on the public’s fears.
ICE only exists because we abolished two other agencies: US Customs Service (previously housed in the Treasury Department) and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (initially housed in the Department of Justice). New is always sold as better, until we remember that new is sometimes simply a worse product with shinier packaging. That’s the case with ICE.
Institutions create an illusion of permanence, seducing us into believing that because they exist today, they have always existed, and should exist, forever. But institutions come and go over time, as needs and political pressures change.
The Trump administration itself recently abolished USAID—cutting its budget and firing its staff overnight, even scrubbing its website. And USAID isn’t alone: Trump has administratively abolished the US Agency for Global Media, the Minority Business Development Agency, the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, and several others. He’s even called for the abolition of the Social Security Administration, which millions of Americans depend on daily.
This is not an argument that disbanding USAID was the right call—ending USAID was destructive to global development and humanitarian work. But it does expose the fundamental dishonesty in the claim that federal agencies are immutable. When Republicans insist ICE must persist because it exists, they’re selectively arguing for institutional permanence only when it serves their interests.
Institutions create an illusion of permanence, seducing us into believing that because they exist today, they have always existed, and should exist, forever. But institutions come and go over time, as needs and political pressures change.
ICE is a new, unproven agency—newer than The Sims, newer than PlayStation 2—yet it is sold to us as though it is foundational to American security. In fact, most people reading this are older than ICE.
When ICE was created in 2003, I was 18 years old, about to head off to college. I had been a youth organizer in Baltimore, but didn’t yet understand the sheer scope of the violence of the police and the systems that enable it. But August 2014 in Ferguson changed my life and changed this country. I lived it, saw it, fought against it. And I did so alongside thousands of others who were looking underneath the hood of policing with fresh eyes.
America turns 250 this year. ICE hasn’t even been around for 25 of them. But, as young as ICE is, it has been around long enough for us to ask: does it do what officials told us it was going to do? Does its work make us safer?
Does Ice Work?
The data is clear. The answer is no.
Even before the ramp up of violent ICE tactics over the past year, the agency had a track record of abuse. Reports on inhumane detention facilities [ [link removed] ] and criminal behavior by agents [ [link removed] ] have long circulated. With few guardrails and no oversight, the Trump administration identified ICE as an agency that it could weaponize against not only immigrants, but against American cities more broadly. This strategy has rested on a set of lies about what ICE is and what it does.
The central lie that Trump’s team has repeatedly made, was that immigrants without official, approved paperwork (i.e. undocumented) were committing heinous crimes in communities. Study after study [ [link removed] ] have proven this to be a lie. If anything, the consensus of the studies confirms the opposite is true—undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.
Then Trump’s team told us ICE was deployed to Minneapolis, Miami, Chicago, and other cities to uproot gang violence and that swaths of undocumented immigrants engaged in serious crime. The data is clear here, too: this was a lie.
Even in taking the remarkable step of deporting 238 Venezuelans to a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador in March 2025, the administration could produce no evidence that they posed a threat to public safety. At least 75% [ [link removed] ] of those who were illegally deported had no criminal record in the United States or abroad.
Overall, only 5% [ [link removed] ] of people detained by ICE have been convicted of a violent crime, and nearly three-quarters of people detained by ICE, 73%, have no convictions. Perhaps most shockingly, about 75,000 people arrested [ [link removed] ] by ICE have no criminal record at all. And ICE is even arresting non-immigrant citizens and simply explaining it away as a cost of enforcement.
On September 30, 2025, ICE used a Black Hawk helicopter to descend on a large apartment complex in Chicago in the middle of the night, arresting scores of people. A full 300 ICE agents raided this apartment building in the name of fighting “terrorism.” They arrested 37 people. And exactly 0 people were charged with a crime [ [link removed] ] as a result of the arrests.
This nighttime, military-style apartment raid was part of Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago that has been ongoing for months. Astoundingly, 97% of the people [ [link removed] ] arrested in these Chicago ICE raids had no criminal conviction.
But what about Minneapolis? The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security said ICE has arrested 3,000 people since they started Operation Metro Surge, their current program in the Twin Cities. But they won’t release the names [ [link removed] ] of the 3,000 people arrested. They’ve only released the names of 240 immigrants they’ve arrested, of which about 80% had serious felony convictions—but had already gone through the justice system. This subset of people was arrested by ICE after being released from jail or prison, sometimes on parole. They had already been held accountable by the justice system before ICE ever showed up. ICE added nothing to the safety equation in Minneapolis. In fact, by killing two people, wrongfully arresting others, and terrorizing even more, it’s undeniable that they have made the city more dangerous.
There is a reason the federal government will not release the full list of the names of the people arrested in Minneapolis. They know what we know—the majority of people they’ve arrested have not actually committed any crime and/or have all the required immigration paperwork.
But what about all of the “undocumented” people in the country? That’s not fair, right?
There is nothing quick about the American immigration system. It is a complicated web of applications, hearings, deadlines, and fees. It can take up to 20–30 years to become a United States citizen through the current process. The best-case scenario for most people still takes years.
The vast majority of “undocumented” people are individuals who had legal immigration statuses that either lapsed or were removed. Think of it as needing to renew your driver’s license. If you don’t do it before it lapses, you are driving illegally. The same holds for someone’s visa status. Insidiously, this administration is even arresting and deporting people who show up to court to renew their paperwork. They don’t want people to be in compliance with immigration law, nor do they want to fix the immigration process; they simply want to get rid of certain types of people.
Sometimes, ICE agents are removing people’s immigration status, making them suddenly “undocumented.” For example, last March, the administration arbitrarily ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Somalis, abruptly removing legal status for as many as 2,400 people. In all, this administration has cancelled TPS status for over 1.5 million mostly black and brown people [ [link removed] ] from Venezuela, Honduras, Haiti, Afghanistan, Burma, Nicaragua, Syria, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Nepal, and South Sudan.
None of these changes in status reflect any understanding of why these migrants were granted TPS status in the first place, undermining arguments from centrist politicians that our asylum and refugee programs are being exploited. The administration has no interest in building a more coherent immigration system. They see the flaws in it as an opportunity to stoke racialized fears for political gain.
And they’ve all but ended the refugee resettlement program for everyone but white South African people. The abrupt cancellation of TPS is meant to strip people of legal status based on who the administration wants in the country, not based on whether it’s safe for people to return home. It would be like if I destroyed your driver’s license then made you drive home from the DMV—only to then follow and arrest you for driving without a license.
In addition, this administration has also revoked over 100,000 visas [ [link removed] ], making 100,000 people, overnight, suddenly “undocumented.” Indeed, this administration has made more people undocumented than any administration in US history.
At the same time, the Trump administration has fired 100 of the 700 immigration judges [ [link removed] ]—more dismissed than ever before—making it less and less likely that people will even be able to get a hearing. There simply won’t be enough judges to conduct them. The administration is deliberately creating a system so backlogged, it can’t function—which becomes the justification for deporting people without hearings at all, bypassing the due process protections guaranteed by the Constitution.
The administration has no interest in building a more coherent immigration system. They see the flaws in it as an opportunity to stoke racialized fears for political gain.
So, What Is Their End Goal? Remigration.
The Trump administration has openly embraced a policy of mass removal—targeting immigrants, people of color, and anyone deemed a threat to be forcibly deported, even pursuing denaturalization of citizens. There’s a term for this: ‘remigration,’ borrowed from Nazi ideology and promoted by senior advisor Stephen Miller. Remigration’s explicit goal is achieving and maintaining a white majority population. It’s a sanitized word for ethnic cleansing.
To say that the Trump administration endorses remigration is not a conspiracy theory. It is a fact. The highest-ranking members of the Trump administration are deeply steeped in these theories. Trump’s team has openly espoused it [ [link removed] ].
And who will do the removals? ICE. Remigration isn’t possible without ICE.
I have heard non-immigrant people of color say that ICE doesn’t impact them because they are not “undocumented immigrants”. They fail to realize that any non-white person is an “undocumented immigrant” to a white supremacist. “Undocumented” is just another way to say we-decide-if-you-can-be-here, an age-old sentiment of white supremacy. This also explains why this administration wants to end birthright citizenship. The goal is for them to be able to decide, at their will and with no obstruction, who is—and who is not—a citizen. And to decide, at their will and with no resistance, who is protected by the Constitution and who is not.
Trump’s goal is to remove as many non-white people from the country as possible and to punish disobedient white people who oppose him. “Immigration” is the cover for this plan. White nationalism will always punish white people who refuse to participate in its program. There is a long arc to this. We cannot forget Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two white men killed during Freedom Summer by the KKK. The killing of Alex Pretti and Renee Goode and the subsequent defaming of her name, targeting of her wife, and refusal to even investigate the officers involved are examples of this administration continuing to target disobedient white people. They punish these white people publicly to send a message to other white people to fall in line, hoping that white people will choose the safety and comfort of whiteness over justice.
This is an exercise in power.
Trump’s Personal, National, Militia
To support ICE today is to support the President of the United States having a personal police force that is able to arrest citizens without judicial warrants, whose agents can hide their identities from citizens and the press, damage property and assault citizens at their will, and, importantly, operate with the full expectation that there will be no oversight or accountability, even as they kill people while the world watches.
This administration has already made clear that the Department of Justice will not hold individual officers or ICE leadership accountable for any of their actions.
You might have heard that members of Congress are discussing passing a ban on ICE officers wearing masks? A ban only matters if it’s enforced. The administration has already told us that they’re not enforcing the current laws.
What about making the Use of Force standards stronger for ICE agents, as some have suggested? The Use of Force standards already prohibited the officer’s actions [ [link removed] ] that led to his even being in the vicinity of Renee Goode. We wrote those standards as a part of our 8 Can’t Wait campaign. They are good standards. But this administration has already said that it will not enforce any use of force policies. Just days after killing Renee Goode, Border Patrol killed Alex Pretti. Alex was also a legal observer, volunteering to protect his community by recording federal officials to ensure that they complied with the law. And he was killed, too, in violation of the Use of Force standards.
Accountability mechanisms only work if there’s faith that oversight and accountability will actually happen. The Trump administration has made clear that they have no intention of providing either. In another administration, the DOJ might function as an impartial agency, but under Trump, it’s nothing more than a political arm of the White House, targeting critics and dissenters. US Attorneys are no longer ambassadors of the law or the Constitution. They’re Trump’s ambassadors.
This administration has even said that ICE officers operate with absolute immunity (they walked the claim back after public pressure). They have said that officers do not need search warrants signed by judges and that ICE staff can now sign them instead. They are arresting children in Minneapolis and flying them to Texas and leaving them there. They are randomly “deporting” people to Venezuela. How do you file a petition to the court from Venezuela or a counterterrorism prison in El Salvador? You don’t. And the Trump administration has made it clear that ICE’s mandates are not limited to issues of immigration, but that they can police anyone, anywhere.
This is only the beginning.
So, what?
We have not been given much choice here: you either support the President having a personal police force with no oversight or accountability, or you don’t. If you don’t support the President having this personal police force, then you support the end of ICE. It’s that simple. Ending ICE does not mean ending immigration law—it means ending a militarized, unaccountable enforcement apparatus.
Just on Wednesday, January 28th, Trump sent out a fundraising email [ [link removed] ] with the opening line: “Are you a proud American Citizen or does ICE need to come and track you down?” Trump is clear that ICE is his personal police force and that none of this is an honest debate about immigration policy.
In the last decade, our team at Campaign Zero has led the change of laws in 25 states regarding Use of Force, the repeal of the nation’s first-ever Law Enforcement Officer Bill of Rights (e.g. Maryland), led the passage in every state of statewide limitations on no-knock raids and the citywide restrictions on no-knock raids in Minneapolis, and have staved off dozens of changes to felony theft thresholds. We currently lead 15 other campaigns nationally and locally to end the violence of the police and mass incarceration. Every day we work on issues that people said were impossible to fix and every day we prove them wrong.
And remember, we’ve disbanded police departments before in this country. Both Compton, CA (2000) and Camden, NJ (2013) disbanded their police departments to root out corruption. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again. Our task is to make sure that once ICE ends, it doesn’t reappear under a different name.
The end of ICE is the common sense, practical position to adopt. We’ve seen ICE in action. We’ve seen what fails. We’ve witnessed a refusal to take accountability. We’ve endured the agency’s leadership lying to the public, time and time again. The end of ICE is overdue.
In the coming days, we will release a roadmap of how to end ICE. After all of my years in organizing, I know that it’s possible. But it begins with being crystal clear about the story we tell each other about what’s happening and what’s possible.
We were safe before ICE existed, and we will be safe(r) once it is gone.
#AbolishICE

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