Mussolini Had His Blackshirts, Hitler Has the SS, and Trump Has ICE |
On Tuesday ofthis week, The Economist and YouGov released a poll finding, for the first time, that more Americans want to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) than don’t.
According to the poll, 46 percent of people support getting rid of ICE, compared to 43 percent who oppose its abolition. This represents a major shift in public opinion—this same polling outfit found only 27 percent support for abolishing ICE as recently as July. Today’s survey also found that most Americans believe ICE is making them less, not more safe, by a margin of 47 percent to 34 percent.
In perfect form, this morning the centrist advocacy group Third Way released a memo warning Democrats not to call for dismantling ICE, arguing that “politically, it is lethal.” Their evidence includes a focus group they conducted in October, which…is dumb. ICE’s execution of Renee Nicole Good has broken through—69 percent of Americans report having seen video of the shooting. This has clearly impacted public opinion in a way that makes information from months ago significantly irrelevant.
We cannot let the Third Ways of the world—the centrist establishment muckety mucks whose version of the Democratic Party already lost to Trump, twice—win this debate. It’s simply too important.
There are lots of reasons to dismantle ICE. There’s a functional argument: We do not need ICE to enforce immigration laws; the U.S. handled this just fine for 227 years prior to the creation of this specific agency. There’s a fiscal argument: ICE is now larger than every other federal law enforcement agency combined. It’s larger than the militaries of all but 15 countries in the world! It’s annual budget, $37.5 billion, could pay for the health insurance of every needy child in the country!
But the core reason for abolishing ICE is that it poses a structural threat to American democracy. This is an unaccountable agency, by design. ICE is not subject to........