The cry “Abolish ICE” reverberated through the streets of America last year, along with “Black Lives Matter,” “I Can’t Breathe,” and so on. Now that a new regime has come to power in Washington, the virtual abolition of ICE may be impending.
ICE, or the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, was created after September 11, 2001, by the passage of the Homeland Security Act of 2002. The new agency absorbed the duties of the United States Customs Service and the criminal investigative, detention, and deportation resources of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and became the largest investigative arm of the newly formed Department of Homeland Security.
ICE was thus the creation of Congress and its actual abolition would seem to be up to Congress. Yet according to a February 21 piece in the Washington Times, the new Homeland Security secretary, Cuban native Alejandro Mayorkas, is considering a unique administration approach that would gut the enforcement role of ICE while technically leaving the agency intact. It might therefore not need Congressional approval.
The Times article quotes participants of an internal ICE conference call that took place over the weekend, where Mayorkas discussed his idea. Basically, according to the unnamed sources, he is couching the proposal as an upgrade to the pay scale of many of ICE’s enforcement officers, in particular those in “Enforcement and Removal Operations,” which handles arrests and deportations of illegal aliens. That upgrade would take some or all of the 4000 officers in that force off the streets and convert them into criminal investigators, which would then handle investigations of smugglers, street gangs, and the like. Such a move would effectively remove from ICE’s mission the enforcement of immigration-specific laws, i.e., those forbidding illegal entry or presence in the U.S.
Although Mayorkas is casting his plan as a promotion for the officers involved, those officers speaking to the Times felt it would actually push them out of the jobs they signed up for. According to one, “It’s all spin. We’re not going to abolish ICE, but we really are going to abolish ICE as you know it.”
In the words of the Times writer: “Deportation officers said it would be akin to a city police department converting its beat cops to detectives, leaving nobody to patrol the streets for basic crimes.”
DHS officials were unavailable for comment on the proposal.
For more, see the Washington Times.
Abolishing ICE would be a big MISTAKE!