On Jan. 7, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis as she attempted to drive away. Statements from ICE and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claim that Good was attempting to hit Ross with her car. Multiple videos show the events in Minneapolis, from several different angles, and they all reveal the same thing: ICE is lying. Good’s wheels were turned away from Ross, proving that she was fleeing, not attempting to hit him. In one of the videos, Ross is heard calling her a “fucking bitch” after he shot her. Only a week after shooting Good, ICE agents in Minneapolis fired tear gas into a car containing a six-month-old baby, who had to be taken to the hospital and revived by CPR. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior is not uncommon for ICE. Since September, ICE and Border Patrol agents have shot 11 people and killed three of them.
Since the start of the second Trump administration, ICE has acted less like a law enforcement agency and more like the type of secret police force used by authoritarian regimes. Agents wear masks to hide their faces and drive around in unmarked vehicles. They stop people at random and demand to see their papers. When they kill people, top government officials provide excuses rather than an independent, thorough investigation. On occasion, ICE is even used to go after “‘enemies” of the regime, such as Mahmoud Khalil or Rumeysa Ozturk, whose only crimes were publicly opposing the Trump administration. To put it simply, ICE operates as an arm of a fascist government, not as a legitimate law enforcement agency.
ICE is also a fundamentally racist organization. Republicans and centrist Democrats may pretend that ICE exists to go after criminals and gangs, but its primary purpose is to reduce the number of people with brown skin who live in this country. Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, was reportedly screaming at ICE officials for not conducting raids at Home Depot and 7-11, locations where employees are disproportionately Latino. Less than five percent of people in ICE custody have been convicted of a violent crime, and more than 73% have never been convicted of any crime. A Minneapolis pastor was released from ICE custody after being told that “you’re white” and “wouldn’t be any fun anyway.”
Although this won’t be published until a few days later, I started writing this piece on Martin Luther King Day. Almost six decades ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. shared his dream with the country: a world where “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Over the past several decades, we have made great progress towards achieving Dr. King’s dream, passing landmark legislation such as the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, ending segregation, and even electing our first Black president. But over the past year, we have taken a great step backward, unleashing the unthrottled power of the U.S. government against immigrants, not for the contents of their character, but for the color of their skin. Dr. King’s dream can never be achieved in a world where ICE agents are allowed to target people because of their skin color and release white people because they “wouldn’t be fun anyway.”
At this point, many of you are probably wondering why ICE needs to be abolished entirely rather than simply reformed. After all, every incident that I have pointed out occurred under the leadership of the Trump administration. With a president in power who has fewer authoritarian tendencies, people might expect ICE to behave more like a regular law enforcement agency than the Gestapo-like secret police force we’ve seen for the past year. Sadly, this expectation is misinformed. A federal agency, at the most fundamental level, is nothing more than the sum of its employees. Using funding from Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, which passed in July, ICE is in the process of hiring 10,000 new agents, bringing the total number from 6,000 to 16,000. Simultaneously, the time that new recruits spend in training has been cut in half, and age requirements have been lowered in order to attract more recruits. The people that the Trump administration is bringing in are far from top-tier talent befitting America’s now-largest law enforcement agency; instead, people are being offered jobs without even undergoing the required background checks. The result is that poorly-trained fascist-supporting thugs outnumber real law enforcement agents within ICE by an almost two-to-one margin.
But even prior to the current administration, ICE was a fundamentally evil organization unfit for actual law enforcement duties. Under the Biden administration, ICE was criticized for preventable deaths among people in their custody. Under Obama, ICE was accused of racially profiling Latino individuals. Jonathan Ross, the agent who murdered Renee Good, was not some bad apple who slipped through the cracks of the agency’s recent hiring spree, but was instead a 10-year veteran agent who had served under three different administrations. ICE has always been a racist organization of untrained thugs. This administration did not create that problem; it simply allowed ICE to show its true colors for the whole world to see.
ICE’s supporters will try to convince you that if ICE were abolished, the country would somehow be overrun with criminal illegal aliens. This argument, like most made by the current administration and its supporters, is nothing more than fear-mongering propaganda with no basis in reality. ICE did not exist until 2003, when it was created as part of the post-September 11 reorganization of the federal government. Prior to 2003, immigration law was handled by Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), which was split into three separate agencies during the reorganization, including ICE. In addition to handling deportations, INS reviewed immigration applications and asylum claims. Having immigration enforcement handled by the same agency that reviewed the claims made the system more efficient: people would not be arrested for being undocumented while their claims were still under review. INS, rather than deporting people who were swept up in raids at workplaces, churches and even immigration courts, would arrest and deport specific individuals who had committed crimes or were deemed ineligible for legal status. In fact, ICE has not even reduced the number of people living in this country illegally. Since 1990, the number of undocumented people has quadrupled, from 3.5 million to 14 million.
Dr. King warned us that “a time comes when silence is betrayal.” That time is now. We cannot claim to honor his legacy while tolerating a federal agency that kills unarmed people, terrorizes families, targets communities of color and operates with impunity under the protection of political power. ICE has proven repeatedly that it is incapable of reform and unfit to exist. Its violence is not an aberration; it is the predictable outcome of a Gestapo-like organization designed to target an immigrant population consisting almost entirely of people with dark skin. Enough is enough. If we truly believe in a nation where people are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, then we must fully dismantle the machinery that does the opposite. Abolishing ICE is not radical. It is the moral minimum required to move this country closer to justice and achieve Dr. King’s dream.
