Abolish ICE? A Foolish Meltdown

I have strong concerns about how ICE is used today. Abolishing ICE, however, is an idea not even worth exploring.

To understand why, consider this brief history about how America has enforced its borders.

Before we had a national immigration service (i.e., agents), states had severe immigration laws and used local police as immigration officers. 
Arizona, for example, had a law that made it a criminal offense for an employer to have more than 20% of their employees be immigrants. A restaurant owner who had a small café was charged with a crime for exceeding the total of 20%. A German cook put him over the limit. The Supreme Court— a conservative court at that— threw out the conviction and the state law.

More generally, states passed laws that forbade the immigration of convicts (including people who broke laws that prohibited their religious worship), paupers, and free blacks.

If Democrats want to abolish ICE, that’s the type of system that we’d go back to.

But to their point, immigration officials can be instruments to enforce racist laws and policies. The first national immigration service came about after the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882.

Comparing the deportation statistics of Obama and Trump, they are not much different, at least so far. What is different, in part, is how ICE is now deployed—showing up, for example, to arrest a man who has was delivering a pizza to a military base, or using immigration laws to deport people with minor convictions from 20 years ago (while breaking up a family). 

Ironically, Obama put dangerous criminals at the top of his enforcement priorities. 

Every time Trump’s ICE arrests a peaceful person, they are taking resources away from going after violent criminals. Fox News never reports this plain fact.