This piece is a quick discussion of the practical benefits of Abolish ICE. I may discuss the efficacy of #AbolishICE in terms of PR in a separate article, but not here.
Any serious discussion about whether ICE should continue to exist or not has to start with the question “Why was it established in the first place?” ICE was established long ago, but in a very different form. It used to be called Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS and it was a part of the Labor Department. The obvious implication of this is that immigrants were seen as a part of the work force. INS was a service. It was right there in the name.
In 1940 they moved INS to the Department of Justice. Clearly someone felt that there were legal issues involved and the DOJ was better able to administer them. These decisions were made for reasons. It was not arbitrary. The reasons were not irrelevant. The culture within the agency, the perceived mission of the employees as they go to work every day is directly effected by these facts.
In 2001 Dubya ignored the previous administration’s advice about terrorism. He ignored warnings from the CIA. He refused to meet his own terrorism czar. He did a good job of covering it up, but the 9/11 attacks were easily preventable. The only thing lacking was a president who was trying to prevent them. These facts were, of course, very embarrassing to the folksy Texan and his team. So Dubya’s people set to out to find a counter narrative that the riff raff might buy into. They succeeded. The new plan was to pretend that the problem was not the breathtaking carelessness of a lazy and ignorant commander-in-chief, but that the real issue was this and that agency didn’t have the right organizational structure.
So INS got renamed. The word naturalization was removed. It also stopped being a service. It became enforcement. So the allusion to serving was removed and replaced by connotations of force. It was also taken out of the DOJ and put in the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. Immigration was not about justice, the new thinking went, but about keeping us safe. The obvious implication was that immigrants are a threat to the security of the homeland. This premise is basically false, but in the post-9/11 hysteria that Bush was stoking, nobody noticed the error. The real change however was not just a name, or an org chart. The change was also in the the culture and the thinking. It’s clear to anyone that the atmosphere in a service, which is part of the labor department is going to be different from the atmosphere in an enforcement agency of a department designed to catch terrorists.
This is not the most important issue the USA is facing today. One can easily argue that the DHS didn’t steal babies from their mothers under Obama so there’s no reason they should now. But what is the argument against abolishing ICE? What are the costs? Why not give it back to the Justice Department? Immigrants are not a threat to homeland security and we should not pretend that they are. If we really want to fight terrorism we need establish a domestic terrorism prevention agency to stop murderers like Dylan Roof.
Jeh Johnson and the Democrats freaked out by the Abolish ICE hash tag have probably bought into Dubya’s lie that the world changed on 9/11. Dubya wanted us to believe that the world suddenly became much more dangerous that day. It really seemed like it was true. It felt that way. Everybody perceived it that way. But it’s a matter of simple fact that the danger of a terrorist attack was not even a fraction of a percent higher the day after than the day before. The establishment of DHS, the renaming of INS and reorienting it towards becoming a terrorism threat reduction force were completely unnecessary and came with harmful side effects. The best course of action is to admit that there is no reason for ICE to exist in its current form, abolish it, lay off its employees and move its more beneficial activities to other agencies.