Portside

Despite what Republicans and some mainstream Democrats would have us believe, half of Americans agree that ICE should no longer exist. Progressive candidates across the country have taken note and are using “Abolish ICE” as a rallying cry to organize their communities and win elections.

Rep. Analilia Mejía (D-NJ) is one such progressive. She campaigned on abolishing ICE against ten other candidates, some of whom had raised much more money, and won her primary and then the special election. The day after she was sworn in, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) announced Mejía’s appointment to the House Committee on Homeland Security, the body that oversees ICE and the Trump regime’s immigration terror campaign, joining others on the committee who have called for ICE’s abolishment and redirecting funding to community-based organizations.

More from Whitney Curry Wimbish

Shortly after her appointment, Mejía participated in a hearing of the Homeland Security Committee, asking witnesses whom immigration agents had shot and assaulted what “meaningful actions” lawmakers could take to bring them justice. Most said they wanted accountability for the agents who hurt them. But the Rev. David Black, senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, whom federal immigration agents shot multiple times in the head, face, and body with pepper balls and shoved to the ground when he protested outside an ICE prison in Broadview, Illinois, last year, had a different answer.

“With respect to the members who believe in reform, I believe that this department and administration really need an exorcist. That’s my opinion as a pastor,” he said. “I would like people to understand in this Congress and in the United States, that what we are facing, the evil we are facing from this administration, goes beyond political solutions and goes beyond reform. It requires spiritual solutions.”

Some Democrats have been more circumspect in the face of ICE’s terror or have retreated to weasel words that fall short of wholesale reform. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), for example, wants to “abolish ICE as we know it.” Political leaders like this have failed to fully internalize the political project of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and his intellectual allies in the Trump administration. They mean to have the federal government fund, arm, equip, and train a paramilitary force to roam the country as it pleases, with few or no checks on its power. They mean to institutionalize an entity that is incompatible with democracy.

Stephen Miller and his allies in the Trump administration mean to institutionalize an entity that is incompatible with democracy.

The clearest indication of Miller’s desire was when he went on state media—Fox News—last fall and gave these men with guns a directive. “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. And anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony,” Miller said. “No one—no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist—can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties.”

Miller made these comments three months before agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis; the Department of Homeland Security shared Miller’s clip on X after the Good murder, as if to confirm ICE sat beyond the reach of the law. It was a matter of time until Miller’s concept would result in death.

Scholars who study authoritarian and fascist regimes may not be calling for an exorcism or spiritual renewal. But they do say that simply erasing institutions that embody such ideologies is not enough to escape them. Inevitably, authoritarianism will more easily return if the structures that enable it remain in place, just as Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who killed Renee Good, was reassigned to another part of the bureaucracy.

They also say that while it is tempting for Americans to look to places like Argentina, Germany, or Italy for guidance, those are poor comparisons for what’s going on in America today. Instead, they suggest revisiting America’s own history, when enough people decided to take the nation away from its genocidal, slave-owning genesis, fought a war that left 620,000 dead—more than any other war in U.S. history—and then spent a century struggling to end Jim Crow laws that oppressed Black people.

“Abolishing ICE is probably not that hard,” said Yanilda María González, assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, who studies authoritarianism. “Agencies get abolished all the time.”

ICE IS A MODERN INVENTION. Its creation abolished a different immigration agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, when lawmakers overwhelmingly passed the 2002 Homeland Security Act following 9/11. That law was ostensibly meant to stop future attacks from terrorists, and all but ten senators voted for it. (Frank Murkowski, Republican from Alaska, did not cast a vote.) Enacted through democratic processes, the new law handed racist authoritarians a tool with which to terrorize immigrants, drive them underground, strip them of basic human rights, and facilitate an easily abused workforce.

The evolution of the Homeland Security Act from a response to 9/11 to one facing inward came within a matter of years. The law held that ICE would answer to the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and be responsible for enforcing immigration law, investigating the illegal movement of people and goods, and preventing terrorism. The agency it replaced had answered to the Department of Justice.

ICE had an initial budget of $3.3 billion. Funding for the new agency crept upward for years and under President Barack Obama was slightly less than $6 billion in 2015. During that fiscal year, the federal government reported that ICE had removed or deported 235,413 people.

Ten years later, the base budget is now roughly $10 billion, but it has been supplemented with a surge of $75 billion in extra funding from the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Meanwhile, the number of deportations in FY2025 hit 443,000, according to Reuters, up from 271,000 the year before. The Trump administration has stopped issuing detailed statistics on immigration, just as it has stopped issuing timely notices each time someone dies in its immigrant concentration camps. The Prospect’s nonscientific tally listed the names of 55 people who have died in ICE custody as of April 24. Immigration agents have injured dozens of people since the beginning of 2025 and killed at least 28. These are minimum numbers.

Democrats tried to at least hold up the base funding for the 2026 fiscal year, conditioning it on a series of relatively modest reforms. But at the end of April, Republican lawmakers introduced a measure using the party-line budget reconciliation process that would send yet more money to ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP): a $70 billion baseline that would fund the agencies through at least the end of President Trump’s term. Because both the surge funding and this baseline funding do not go through the normal appropriations process, this avoids certain guardrails and accountability measures, like time limits on spending and directives about where the money goes. The money becomes a slush fund for abduction, warehousing, deportation, and mass death and injury.

The vast amount of taxpayer wealth handed to immigration enforcement has spread and nurtured violence, beyond abusing immigrants and those trying to protect them. It’s also spawned a massive surveillance network that can spy on anyone, regardless of their immigration status, and acted as a jobs program for violent far-right bigots, whom it recruits with Nazi imagery at gun shows, “Ultimate Fight Club venues, rodeos, martial arts centers, and other haunts for men who tend to have a far right political vision,” as Truthout reported. Homeland Security officials are hiring at such a fast rate that they’re unable to fully vet their new recruits, an AP investigation found, filling the ranks with bankrupt people who are easy to extort and people who have previously been accused of misconduct. The rot that this represents goes beyond the existence of a single governmental agency.

THE IMPLICIT GOAL OF ICE is to eliminate illegal immigration entirely. But immigrants are always going to come into the United States, as North Carolina Justice Center senior attorney Carol Brooke explained. “Unfortunately,” she said, “the economic situation in other countries is such that people will come regardless of how difficult we make it for them while they’re here.”

At some level, Miller and his allies know this. The presence of the paramilitary force is not solely to enforce immigration laws or improve job availability for native-born citizens. It’s to project authoritarian power. And that’s made easier by the fact that such power projection is already all around us.

The brutality of rounding up and kicking out hundreds of thousands of people and imprisoning at least 60,311 (as of April 4) in immigration detention camps has infuriated people across the U.S., who have put themselves physically and financially in danger to protect themselves and their neighbors. Many have wondered how widespread violence conducted by masked agents could happen in the land of the free.

But the surrealism of such a tyrannical force existing within a democratic nation is not as odd as it sounds, González said. Authoritarian enclaves routinely exist within democratic nations, using authoritarian practices, formal rules, and informal norms, including arbitrary detention, torture, and extrajudicial killings. And while the U.S. is accustomed to denouncing these practices in State Department human rights reports, they persist in the United States just as they do in countries that have undergone celebrated transitions to democracy, including Brazil and Argentina.