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.
I am convinced that the real problem is how Republicans have seized the narrative on immigration, and have somehow made it so that anyone who is against their very heavy-handed enforcement mechanisms are somehow for “wide open borders”. (Note for most Lemmings: Yes, I know you don’t feel “open wide borders” is a bad thing. I don’t either. But just roll with me for a while.)
Republicans have presented this heavy handed enforcement as the only way to “secure the border” whatever that means. Democrats need to disengage on arguments on who we let in and make the discussion on the how. Focus on how the current enforcement methods are counterproductive, and actually makes us all less safe, regardless of who we let in. Leave those discussions about who for later.
And Democrats need to remind everyone that they had a path to making this all better towards which they made real progress in 2024, until Candidate Trump called a few Senators and told them to knock it off. They can’t try to actually fix the problem, because he was planning to run on how broken it all was.
Republicans have dominated the messaging game for at least the last few decades.
Agreed til the final paragraph, but that 2024 bill was authoritarian trash that never should have been proposed in the first place
Can you tell me honestly that it would have been worse than what we have now?
Do you honestly believe we would be here right now if we hadn’t let the Biden administration and moderate Dems bungle this issue? The only thing proposing that noxious piece of trash legislation did was allow the fascists to say “see? even the libs know migrants are a problem.”
This lesser evil canard completely misunderstands politics and racism, it doesn’t work like an inoculation where doing a little racism keeps us from going full racist down the road, it works like heavy metal poisoning where the shit just builds up in our systems.
That’s an awful lot of words, when you could have just said “No, I can’t tell you that.”