‘Abolish ICE’ Is Back
History might not repeat itself, but the slogans sometimes do. And in the days since an ICE officer shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis, some Democratic candidates and commentators have joined in on a familiar refrain. “Dismantling ICE is the moderate position,” Graham Platner, the U.S. Senate candidate in Maine, said in a statement on X. “If Trump’s ICE is shooting and kidnapping people, then abolish it,” wrote Jack Schlossberg, a candidate for Congress in New York. Even Bill Kristol, the erstwhile Republican turned Trump critic, logged on to share a simple, straightforward message: “Abolish ICE.”
A growing number of Americans disagree with how the agency is handling its mission. But where many Democrats hear “Abolish ICE” as a righteous call to action, others in the party register the clanging of alarm bells. These anxious Democrats believe that such a maximalist demand plays directly into Republicans’ hands by making the party seem unserious about immigration. Some of them are pleading with members of their party to avoid adopting the motto. “Unless you truly believe that the United States should not have an agency that enforces immigration and customs laws,” reads a memo from the center-left think tank Searchlight Institute, “you should not say you want to abolish ICE.”
The slogan conjures a not-so-distant time in American politics when even the highest-profile Democrats, under pressure from progressives, embraced a host of deeply unpopular positions, including defunding the police and decriminalizing border crossings. Many members of the party blame this period, at least in part, for the return of Donald Trump—and they’re desperate not to relive it. “Oh my God. Déja vú all over again,” Lis Smith, a national party strategist, told me when I asked about the slogan. “Sigh,” Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at the center-left think tank Third Way, texted me. “Can that be my on the record quote?”
“Abolish ICE” went mainstream in 2018 amid public outrage over the Trump administration separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border. The slogan, embraced widely by progressives, quickly became a litmus test for candidates running in Democratic-leaning districts across the country. But the movement was never especially popular among the broader American electorate, and its proponents could never seem to agree about whether the phrase meant abolishing ICE forever, or abolishing it and replacing it with something else. Critics worried that adopting the phrase hurt Democratic credibility on immigration, an issue on which the party already suffered from low public trust. Eventually, even the activist who helped popularize the slogan in 2018 mostly abandoned it.
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Eight years later, as masked men patrol neighborhoods far from the southern border, calls to dismantle ICE are resonating differently. In the days since an ICE officer fatally shot 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, stories have circulated of federal agents (from both ICE and Border Patrol) pepper-spraying and tear-gassing families and students, and shoving a protester into oncoming traffic. Photos have shown neighborhoods filled with tear gas. A Texas medical examiner is likely, The Washington Post recently reported, to classify an ICE detainee’s recent death as a homicide.
Polling suggests that Americans don’t like what they’re seeing: Roughly 57 percent say they disapprove of how ICE is handling immigration enforcement; about half believe that ICE is making cities less safe. And two polls taken after Good’s killing show that support for abolishing ICE has increased about 13 percent since July 2019. Even Joe Rogan, the high-profile podcast host who endorsed Trump in 2024, seems disillusioned. “Are we really gonna be the Gestapo?” Rogan asked this week. “‘Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?” (The Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told me in a statement that ICE “will continue to carry out immigration enforcement for the safety of Americans who have been victimized by rapists, murderers, drug traffickers, and gang members.” In response to Rogan, McLaughlin said on Fox News that the agency has to have a presence in Minneapolis “because we don’t have state and local law enforcement’s help.”)
Most Democrats have not called for ICE’s outright abolition. But a few are recent adopters of the slogan. “I was of the belief that perhaps we could reform ICE. Now I am of the belief that it has to be dismantled as an entity,” Representative Adriano Espaillat of New York said last week. Michigan’s Representative Shri Thanedar, who in June was one of 75 Democrats who signed legislation expressing “gratitude” for ICE, just introduced the Abolish ICE Act. Other progressive members of Congress have been on this particular train for years. Representatives Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley have all reiterated their demands to abolish the agency in the past week. “I made this call back in 2018, and that’s because I saw where this agency was going,” Abdul El-Sayed, a U.S. Senate candidate in Michigan, told me. Trump is “trying to create an independent, domestic source of state power answerable only to him.” By now, he added, ICE is “corrupted beyond repair.”
A common belief among ICE’s critics is that no amount of funding or training can fix the agency. Abolition “is the baseline at a certain point,” Usamah Andrabi, the communications director at the progressive group Justice Democrats, told me. The organization works to unseat Democratic incumbents who aren’t sufficiently progressive, and will be focused on that goal as the 2026 primaries intensify. Democrats “need to heed the calls” of the people they represent, Andrabi said, and many of those people “are demanding that we abolish ICE.”
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All of this is nightmare fuel for a certain type of Democrat—namely, the kind who is focused on winning elections in swing states and purple districts. These Democrats believe that the mayhem caused by ICE’s raids gives the party an uncharacteristic upper hand over Republicans on immigration—and that demands to eliminate the agency erase that leverage. Americans mostly support immigration-enforcement efforts and, in particular, the deportation of unauthorized immigrants with violent criminal records.
“When you say ‘Abolish ICE,’ that means you’re abolishing the agency that’s in charge of enforcing immigration law in this country,” Tré Easton, the vice president for public policy at the Searchlight Institute, told me. “Especially in a time when Democrats don’t have a lot of credibility on the immigration issue, it’s really, really, a fraught path that they should not go down.” Easton and others argue that the demands to abolish ICE are akin to the calls to “defund the police” that progressives made in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd. Both slogans appeared in response to terrible abuses of power, they say, but both were overcorrections. As with police, “the question is not whether ICE should exist; the question is whether they should follow the laws and be held accountable,” Erickson, from Third Way, told me.
The fight over “Abolish ICE” can feel like semantics—and it sort of is. Strategists at the Searchlight Institute and Third Way have asked their fellow Democrats to please avoid saying “Abolish ICE” and instead to advocate for reforming it and retraining agents. They argue that Democratic leaders could use subpoenas, congressional hearings, and appropriations riders to hold ICE to account—and to make a broader argument about public safety. Some of them point to Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona as an example of an effective messenger: ICE is “out of control,” Gallego said in a recent interview. “People want a slimmed-down ICE that is truly focused on security.”
Somewhat surprisingly, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who ran for Congress in 2018 on a promise to abolish ICE, has in recent days reframed the issue as a question of funding. “The cuts to your health care are what’s paying for this,” she said of Congress letting health-care subsidies expire and increasing funding for ICE and other agencies. “You get screwed over to pay a bunch of thugs in the street that are shooting mothers in the face.” That interview “is what highly effective messaging on ICE can look like—without saying ‘abolish ICE,’” Adam Jentleson, the president of the Searchlight Institute, wrote on X. (Ocasio-Cortez says she does still support shutting down the agency.)
The overarching concern for Democrats like Jentleson is that members of their party seem not to have absorbed a crucial lesson from recent elections: that Republicans can and will use Democrats’ own words against them. In 2022, for example, former Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes lost his challenge to Senator Ron Johnson by only a hair, after it came to light that Barnes had previously signaled support for abolishing ICE and defunding the police. (Barnes, in his current campaign for governor, has steered clear of the issue.) Vice President Kamala Harris’s own mixed record on immigration was fodder for Republicans. During the 2024 election cycle, which famously did not turn out well for Harris or her party, Republicans spent $741 million on immigration-related ads, according to an estimate from the nonpartisan policy organization America Forward.
Now, as then, Republicans are eager to exploit “Abolish ICE.” Democrats “don’t want our border secured or criminal illegal aliens being removed,” and want to defund “federal law-enforcement agencies who are protecting public safety,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a press briefing after Good’s killing. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters this week that Democrats “have been for open borders” for years.
Notably, none of the leading 2028 presidential contenders has demanded that ICE be dismantled. Aside from Platner and El-Sayed, Democratic Senate candidates have stuck with calls for reform and for an investigation into Good’s killing. Still, as ICE expands operations in Minneapolis and beyond, and as anti-ICE protests intensify, it’s reasonable to anticipate more viral videos, outrage, and allegations of violence. Which means it’s also reasonable to expect that Democratic primary candidates will face pressure to condemn the agency in the strongest possible terms. How these Democrats decide to respond may help determine their party’s fate in November.