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Trump Already Gave Us the Blueprint for Abolishing ICE

7 12
yesterday

I don’t know who the next Democratic president will be. What I do know is that they’ll be forced almost immediately to decide an important question: What shall become of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE?

The agency, which has been tasked with immigration enforcement since its creation in 2003, is beyond redemption. Thousands of its agents are currently roaming Minneapolis and the Twin Cities in a massive armed operation, leaving terror and chaos in their wake. They are seizing and arresting people merely for being nonwhite in what is ostensibly a campaign to find deportable immigrants. A local newspaper reported earlier this week that agents had knocked on the doors of St. Paul residents and asked them to identify their Hmong and Asian neighbors.

One of ICE’s agents, Jonathan Ross, shot and killed Renee Good, a mother of three and a U.S. citizen, after moving in front of her car while she was turning around to leave the site of an ICE raid. At the Trump administration’s direction, federal officials have refused to assist in the murder investigation. Multiple prosecutors resigned from the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota earlier this week after they were ordered to open an investigation into Good’s widow.

The siege of Minneapolis is a disturbing escalation of ICE’s past tactics. ICE and its associated agencies also targeted cities like Los Angeles and Chicago over the past year. The goal this time appears to be something closer to collective punishment for a city and a state that rejected President Donald Trump in three presidential elections and whose governor, Tim Walz, ran against him in 2024.

“It’s a very corrupt state,” Trump recently told reporters. “I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times. Nobody has won it for—since Richard Nixon won it many, many years ago. I won it all three times, in my opinion. And it’s a corrupt state, a corrupt voting state.” There is no evidence that Trump’s claims about voting are true.

At the same time, Trump’s campaign has further........

© New Republic