Dems Are Begging Their Own to Drop ‘Abolish ICE’
A new memo circulating on Capitol Hill urges Democratic lawmakers to instead embrace reforming the agency.
DEMOCRATS RISK FALLING into a “trap” of Donald Trump’s making if they revive calls for the abolition of ICE, warns an upstart Democratic think tank in a new memo that reads, in part, as an emotional plea to others in the party.
The memo, put together by Searchlight Institute and released on Wednesday, draws a direct comparison between the anger felt by voters following last week’s shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis and the killing of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin in the same city in 2020. The calls to “defund the police” in the wake of that tragedy, the group writes, may have felt righteous in the moment. But it constituted bad policy when adopted literally, and handed a massive cudgel to Republicans electorally. The same, writes Blas Nuñez-Neto, a senior policy fellow at Searchlight, is true of “Abolish ICE” now.
“‘Abolish ICE’ is not some proxy for more humane immigration enforcement, or to change ICE’s culture to adhere to due process, or to impose accountability on rogue officers. Itʼs advocating for an extreme,” the memo reads. “Unless you truly believe that the United States should not have an agency that enforces immigration and customs laws within our borders, and you want to increase illegal immigration, you should not say you want to abolish ICE.” Instead, the memo encourages Democrats to adopt an alternative approach toward ICE, one it calls “Reform and Retrain.”
The Searchlight memo is the latest in a growing—and increasingly frenzied—effort by Democratic-allied groups to
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