Trump Already Gave Us the Blueprint for Abolishing ICE
I don’t know who the next Democratic president will be. What I do know is that they’ll be forced almost immediately to decide an important question: What shall become of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE?
The agency, which has been tasked with immigration enforcement since its creation in 2003, is beyond redemption. Thousands of its agents are currently roaming Minneapolis and the Twin Cities in a massive armed operation, leaving terror and chaos in their wake. They are seizing and arresting people merely for being non-white in what is ostensibly a campaign to find deportable immigrants. A local newspaper reported earlier this week that agents had knocked on the doors of St. Paul residents and asked them to identify their Hmong and Asian neighbors.
One of ICE’s agents, Jonathan Ross, shot and killed Renee Good, a mother of three and a U.S. citizen, after moving in front of her car while she was turning around to leave the site of an ICE raid. At the Trump administration’s direction, federal officials have refused to assist in the murder investigation. Multiple prosecutors resigned from the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota earlier this week after they were ordered to open an investigation into Good’s widow.
The siege of Minneapolis is a disturbing escalation of its past tactics. ICE and its associated agencies also targeted cities like Los Angeles and Chicago over the past year. The goal this time appears to be something closer to collective punishment for a city and a state that rejected President Donald Trump in three presidential elections and whose governor, Tim Walz, ran against him in 2024.
“t’s a very corrupt state,” Trump recently told reporters. “I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times. Nobody has won it for—since Richard Nixon won it many, many years ago. I won it all three times, in my opinion. And it’s a corrupt state, a corrupt voting state.” There is no evidence that Trump’s claims about voting are true.
At the same time, Trump’s campaign has further soured the American public on ICE. A recent Economist/YouGov survey found that 46 percent of voters support abolishing ICE, while 43 percent oppose it—the first such poll to find more support for dismantling the agency than keeping it. The same poll found that 80 percent of Democrats would support ICE’s abolition, signaling that the next Democratic president will face significant pressure to do so.
Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill have balked at the idea so far. Some have floated better training—the agency is reportedly only giving 47 days of training to new hires, an apparent reference to Trump’s numbering on the list of presidents—or fewer resources. One lawmaker proposed a bill that would require ICE agents to carry a QR code that people could scan and use to identify the agent, which is about as ineffective as it gets.
Fortunately, the blueprint already exists for how the next Democratic president could shut down the agency. As part of his campaign to remake the federal government in his personal image, Trump has asserted vast powers to decide the fate of federal agencies created and funded by Congress. In his first few months as president, for example, he effectively abolished the U.S. Agency for International Development by firing its employees, halting its expenditures, and transferring any surviving programs to the State Department.
Legal efforts to save the agency were unsuccessful, except for a Supreme Court order on the shadow docket that required the agency to pay contractors for work that had already been completed. USAID’s destruction, despite a congressional mandate for its existence, was a signature victory for Trump, South African-born billionaire Elon Musk, and legal conservatism. It also likely killed tens of thousands of people in developing countries.
An even better example of Trump’s blueprint for abolishing ICE would be the Department of Education. Trump campaigned on the notion that he would dismantle the department and end federal influence in education, a goal echoed by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick for secretary of education, told employees after taking up her post that the president had “tasked us with accomplishing the elimination of bureaucratic bloat here at the Department of Education—a momentous final mission—quickly and responsibly.”
The “final mission” phrasing, which sounds more appropriate for an Imperial Japanese kamikaze squadron than for the federal civil service, reflected the department’s later decisions to downsize the agency. Last March, McMahon announced that she would be enacting a “reduction in force” to lay off half of the department’s workforce. In a statement, she hailed the move as a “significant step toward restoring the greatness of the United States education system.”
Trump’s own moves sought to transfer some of the department’s powers to other parts of the federal government, such as the Department of Health and Human Services and the Small Business Administration. Lest there be any doubt about his intent to flout Congress’s decision to create a functional department to carry out statutory obligations, Trump titled one of his executive orders as “Closing the Department of Education and Returning Authority to the States.”
A coalition of states sued McMahon last year to stop the de facto closure, arguing that it violated federal law and prevented the department from carrying out its duties as required by Congress. Lower courts agreed and issued orders to stop the reduction in force from taking effect. The Trump administration went, as usual, to the Supreme Court to beg for help, ironically claiming that the separation of powers was in peril.
“The Constitution vests the executive branch, not district courts, with the authority to make judgments about how many employees are needed to carry out an agency’s statutory functions, and whom they should be,” the Justice Department claimed in its stay application. “Federal courts lack equitable authority to compel reinstatement outside of express statutory schemes.”
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority overrode the district court and allowed the RIF to take effect without explanation. As usual, the move drew strong criticism from the court’s three liberal justices. “That decision is indefensible,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissenting opinion. “It hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out. The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave.”
While Sotomayor’s views are persuasive, her dissents are unfortunately not the law of the land. A new Democratic president could adopt the same approach that was sanctioned by the Supreme Court to effectively destroy ICE. There will be plenty to target right off the bat. The agency reportedly hired 12,000 new agents over the last year, thanks to a large infusion of cash from the omnibus spending bill that Congress passed last summer. All of these could be laid off immediately, which would be particularly justified given the extremely low hiring standards that brought them in in the first place.
Older, more competent agents could be detailed or reassigned to other priorities for a new Democratic administration. Perhaps the Internal Revenue Service could use new investigators for a division targeting tax fraud by billionaires. The FBI will likely need an infusion of agents who could revitalize its white-collar crime focus, especially since the Trump administration’s practice has been to de facto legalize it. Maybe the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the anti-fraud agency that Republicans and their donors seem to fear the most, could use some new blood to energize its enforcement operations.
Ideally, a new Democratic president would work with allies in Congress to comprehensively defund the agency and provide for its orderly dissolution. Events in Minneapolis have shown, however, that there is no real reason for taxpayers to keep paying an armed, pseudo-militarized agency that gleefully terrorizes Trump’s political opponents. Thanks to Trump and the Roberts Court, a new Democratic president can begin to solve the problem on day one.