The legacy of “Defund the Police” will always be fraught for the Democratic Party. A rallying cry among activists and a smattering of politicians during the George Floyd summer of 2020, it became an albatross for Democrats afterward. And there were few tangible policy gains: The departments that were defunded eventually were, for the most part, refunded. Zohran Mamdani, the democratic-socialist mayor of New York, had to run away from the slogan as he surged to victory last year. Police reform, as a cause, soldiers on, but it’s unclear if it was aided all that much by the mass protests calling for the shrinking or outright abolishing of municipal police departments.

“Abolish ICE” may not suffer the same fate. The slogan actually predates “Defund the Police”; it came to the forefront of progressive politics in the spring and summer of 2018, when Donald Trump was trying to build his border wall while vilifying immigration as much as possible. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who had shocked the world that June by winning a primary against one of the top House Democrats, made a highly publicized visit to the border. Democrats decried the “kids in cages” and embraced, forcefully, the cause of immigration. Democratic socialists championed open borders while a handful of presidential candidates, including

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