This Year’s First Big Stupid Idea: “Retrain ICE”

One of the consequences of covering American politics is that it forces you to have frequent close encounters with some of the dumbest people alive and their terrible ideas. Cutting taxes on wealthy people will eventually enrich the middle class. Invading and occupying Iraq will spread democracy throughout the Middle East. Michael Bloomberg should be president. The list goes on. Anyway, here’s the latest, greatest hit from the terminally stupid: We can fix ICE by retraining them.

The idea that a right-wing goon squad can somehow be reformed through the magic of Powerpoint presentations is squarely rooted in the fear among the Beltway-brained that proposing to abolish this rogue agency is going to cost Democrats a winnable election. I’m not sure where these fears find their foundation given that when “Abolish ICE” was in vogue, Democrats did great: They won in 2018 and 2020 and surprisingly overperformed in 2022. Then they got to 2024 and lost, not long after they took a rightward turn on immigration in an attempt to prove that they could be tougher on migrants than Trump was, as if his main failing was that his draconian immigration policies weren’t dressed up in enough management consultant–speak.

The Searchlight Institute, the Beltway consultant class’s latest rebrand of gelatinous centrism, recently released a sternly worded memo tsk-tsking everyone who believes that it was a mistake to resurrect the Stasi and turn it loose to terrorize liberal cities. “Let’s be clear that advocating for abolishing ICE is tantamount to advocating for stopping enforcement of all of our immigration laws in the interior of the United States—a policy position that is both wrong on the merits and at odds with the American public on the issue,” the memo bleated. “Instead, Democrats should embrace an aggressive plan to rebuild ICE based on two concepts: Reform and Retrain.”

This is all written at a significant remove from what’s actually happening in places like Minneapolis or even Washington, D.C.—and it’s no mean feat to be out of touch with a community of which you’re ostensibly a member. To have a real-world understanding of what ICE has been doing makes calls for its reeducation land in the ears with a cloddish thud. These are marauding, fascist thugs who enjoy terrorizing people. They’re in their dream job. They raid churches. They abduct people. They abduct children. They use children to abduct other people. They shot a woman in the face. They tear-gassed a car of children. They grabbed an elderly man from his house and dragged him outside in his underwear in the freezing cold simply because he wasn’t white. They detained a 5-year-old, used him to bait his parents, and then took them all away.

Here’s a disturbing fact: When Minneapolis parents started putting stuffed animals on their dashboards so that kids could identify safe cars driven by the volunteers assigned to ferry them safely home from school, ICE started doing the same thing. What I’m trying to say is that ICE—from Secretary Kristi Noem down to the lowliest desk jockey—really, really has a fixation on abducting children. This is irredeemable beyond measure.

ICE misrule isn’t happening because someone skipped a meeting during their onboarding process. This is a deeply ingrained and incurable corruption—not that anyone at ICE wants to be “cured.” ICE agents already receive comprehensive training, which they comprehensively ignore. In the latest instance, we’ve learned from a whistleblower that agents have claimed the right to break into homes without a judicial warrant, directly countermanding their vaunted legal training. No one can or should trust a retrained version of this agency. A root-and-branch teardown is in order. Mass firings are in order (I guess the leakers and whistleblowers can stay in some capacity). The clawback of billions of dollars is in order. Damnation, in every sense of the word, is in order.

One of the problems with the argument that this mob of sickos can be retrained into something sane and decent begins with the fact that people misconstrue what ICE actually is and does. Searchlight’s statement, for instance, assumes that ICE is performing the task of enforcing immigration law. But ICE is not an immigration enforcement agency. It’s a rotted tentacle of the war on terror that’s been turned against the American people. A real immigration enforcement agency would be operating in places like Texas or Florida, which have large numbers of undocumented immigrants, and not Minnesota, which has relatively few. It also wouldn’t be targeting Minnesota’s Somali population, most of whom are American citizens and thus not subject to immigration enforcement. In addition, a real immigration enforcement agency would have a decent working relationship with local law enforcement. As Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley recently explained, ICE is impeding Twin Cities cops from doing their jobs—and harassing them to boot.

The road back to a competent, humane, and lawful immigration enforcement agency necessarily begins with the elimination of the agency that’s absorbed all the money to perform those tasks while putting it toward an army of jackbooted thugs who harm innocent people. Don’t want to call this “Abolish ICE”? That’s fine, I’m invested in action, not slogans. Whatever gets us to the point where we’re firing all of the paramilitaries doing enforcement and removal operations, re-vetting all the people doing laptop jobs so that we can fumigate the agency of all its cryptofascists, and perhaps housing the enforcement agency at the Justice Department, alongside a bunch of other lawyers and bureaucrats working on immigration and naturalization processes—some kind of Immigration and Naturalization Service, maybe?—would do the trick.

Retraining ICE isn’t just a stupid idea from an intellectual or moral perspective. It’s also really bad politics. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that for the first time, a bare majority of respondents—46 to 43 percent—were in favor of abolishing ICE. But what’s more important, from the perspective of Democrats, is that 80 percent of Democrats were in favor of it. That puts “Reform ICE” at the business end of an electoral shellacking. The wine moms Democrats need to win anywhere aren’t having it with going soft on Trump’s hoodlums. If you bring a timid, half-measure response on ICE to the people whose bonds to one another have been forged in the fires of protecting their own neighbors from state violence, I promise: You will eat no small amount of shit.

It’s no wonder that a pretty broad swath of Democratic officials, from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton, have reached the correct conclusion that ICE is beyond redemption. Here we have a simple example of people who have seen what this agency is all about and understand what needs to be done. To be out here making the case that an outlandishly malevolent gang of brownshirts can be reformed will require a lot of explaining. And when you’re explaining, you’re losing.

The salient fact is this: What most of us see in ICE are people who are not fit to serve in any governmental capacity, many of whom should probably be in jail for serial violations of citizens’ constitutional rights and lawless corporal violence on the residents of major American cities. If you want sane and effective immigration enforcement that doesn’t shame the nation on a daily basis—well, ICE is standing in the way of that. They are a force for misrule. I’m not going to entertain the stupid notion that any of ICE’s current workforce can be meaningfully reeducated, and neither should you. It’s like suggesting a rabid dog can be retrained.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.