ICE was created in 2003 as a more aggressive and militarized replacement for the old Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Under the second Trump administration, it’s turned into something qualitatively worse and more dangerous, a masked paramilitary force that openly recruits angry racists without vetting them.
ICE is such a recent addition to the American state that disbanding it outright would simply return us to the pre-2003 status quo. That’s exactly what should happen. And any remotely defensible version of the Border Patrol needs to confine its activities to actually patrolling the border.
There is NO reforming ICE and if/when corporate establishment Democrats insist on tacking to some hallucinated center that doesn’t exist on reforming ICE they will lock in an inevitable trajectory towards an even more brutal fascism.
DHS was created as a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11, and it started doing unconstitutional shit from the get-go.
Back then many people predicted that a frontal attack on America wasn’t Al-Qaeda’s goal, but rather causing America to self-destruct from within. Those people were totally right: the self-destruction process started with the USA Patriot Act and is almost complete today, 25 years later.
Al-Qaeda has won.
Absolutely, 9/11 could not have gone better for Al-Qaeda if they had scripted our reaction themselves. We took the bait hook line and sinker. Especially the sinker part.