Abolish ICE? Absolutely -- and DHS too

[marmar]

Abolish ICE? Absolutely — and DHS too
No reform can fix Trump’s corrupt secret police — and the whole bureaucracy of repression should go as well

By Mike Lofgren
Contributing Writer
Published February 28, 2026 6:45AM (EST)


(Salon) We might as well get this out of the way first, to preempt any swooning by the milquetoast wing of the Democratic Party: Yes, abolishing ICE would leave immigration statutes on the books, and those laws should be enforced. Anyone proposing to abolish ICE must also propose replacing it with a vastly improved successor organization.

....(snip)....

To understand why that’s necessary may require a fuller examination of the history of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency’s full title. It was conceived in a lie, birthed through political logrolling by panicky politicians who didn’t know what they were doing, and housed within an equally dysfunctional parent bureaucracy. As a professional staff member of Congress, I was present at the creation. It didn’t make much sense to me at the time, except as a congressional effort to be seen as “doing something,” and an attempt to divert attention from George W. Bush’s failure to take seriously the many warning signs that preceded the worst terrorist attack in our history. In retrospect, it looks even worse than that.

....(snip)....

As a new agency staffing up rapidly, DHS wanted to hire people fast. Thus it became a dumping ground for everybody’s brother-in-law or the sons of rich donors to the Republican National Committee. This aspect received national exposure after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, when we could all witness the sterling performance of FEMA director Michael D. Brown, whose previous disaster-relief experience consisted of breeding Arabian horses. His accomplishments also provided a catchphrase that summed up the competence of the Bush administration: “Heckuva job, Brownie!”

ICE itself was a classic bureaucratic creation. The legacy organizations dealing with immigration were the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Border Patrol, both under the Department of Justice. It would have been logical to consolidate them into one agency within DHS, but some administrative genius made the Solomonic decision to form two different agencies with overlapping functions, Customs and Border Protection and ICE. CPB has gone on to greater infamy for its corruption (for instance, agents taking bribes from drug smugglers) and even for its cameo role in the Jeffrey Epstein saga: providing concierge service to the serial abuser during his frequent trips to Little St. James Island (which became known to Caribbean locals as Pedophile Island). .................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/02/28/abolish-ice-absolutely-and-dhs-too/

[Historic NY]

1. It got too big even for itself.

before individual agencies grappled for funding

[dutch777]

2. Politically we may want to be careful. While the current Trump/ICE approach is wrong, immigration is still an issue...

...for many Americans. So how we frame an approach that make enforcement humane and accountable but still supports the idea of controlling illegal immigration and embracing a logical path to those needing asylum and allowing legal immigration will be the trick. We want to win in 2026 and 2028 and illegal immigration will not go away as a concern for many even if they agree the current approach is way over the top.

[Jilly_in_VA]

3. DHS needs to go away, period

and its departments need to go back to the departments they were in before this ill-thought-out, ill-devised, and poorly named department was brought to bear on the American people. You can still have your INS and CBP, but NOBODY needs a bunch of cosplay cops in masks and tactical gear roaming the streets picking up people at random. NOBODY. Absolutely abolish them! If you need to buff up CBP. well, then, by all means, but do it the right way. Make sure the people who are hired are qualified, vetted, and above all, properly trained. If that doesn't take care of some people's "immigration fears", well then, Im sorry, they'll just have to stew in their own juices. We can't have a bunch of cosplay cops LARPing about the streets doing what they want. It's unconstitutional, just for one. UnAmerican, for another.

[pat_k]

4. The horror show started with the formation of DHS in 2002 and the vast expansion of private immigration prisons.

Pulling the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) into the 2002 mega-security agency that was to be known as DHS served as a declaration that immigrants posed a risk to national security. The dissolved INS was divided into three agencies within DHS: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). And with the separation, there was a corresponding diminution of benefits and services (USCIS) and robust expansion of enforcement (ICE and CBP).

That was the first step down an immoral and deeply Un-American path.

And labeling the new agency the "Homeland" Security Agency was a declaration that America was, not a Nation founded on shared ideas, but rather an ethnic homeland -- specifically, a WHITE ethnic homeland.

What could possibly go wrong?

Tom Barry, who founded the IRC (International Relations Center) in 1979 and then joined the Center for International Policy as the TransBorder Project Director in 2007, wrote an excellent 2009 article on our destructive immigration policies and the exponential growth of immigration prisons: A Death in Texas: Where profits, poverty, and immigration converge.

Things were already intolerable then. I still have trouble fathoming the magnitude of the hell we are descending into.