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It’s Easy to Imagine a World Without ICE

By
Ben Burgis

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has only existed since 2003. There’s nothing extreme about the idea of disbanding the rogue agency.

Even if a new president with better intentions inherits this sanctioned gang called ICE, it’s far from clear that it would ever be reformable. It’s really not crazy to suggest it just shouldn’t exist. (Victor J. Blue / Bloomberg via Getty Images

In 2024, Donald Trump won a 49.8 percent plurality of the popular vote. Many different kinds of voters pulled the lever for him for many different reasons, but he certainly made no secret of his desire to carry out mass deportations. At the 2024 Republican National Convention, delegates waved professionally printed signs calling for “Mass Deportation Now.”

After seeing what those mass deportations look like in practice, though, there’s been a sea change in public opinion. There was a period early last year when immigration and border policy was the only issue where Trump’s poll numbers were above water. Since then, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has torn through American cities brutalizing people with abandon and impunity, Trump’s immigration policy has become less and less popular. By December 2025, the share of Americans expressing disapproval of the administration’s deportation actions had grown from 44 percent in March to 53 percent. And that was before ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot American citizen Renee Good three times in the face for trying to drive away.

The shooting of Good may be one of the best-documented murders in human history, with multiple videos from various angles painting a picture of what happened that isn’t seriously debatable. Polls show that only 28 percent of Americans believe the shooting was justified. Trump supporters may be tempted to blame liberal media bias, but the same polls show that the vast majority of respondents have seen video footage for themselves. The first polls after the killing show it dealt a major blow to ICE’s already declining favorability.

The Trump administration’s full-throated defense of Ross has had the predictable effect of emboldening ICE agents to engage in ever more thuggish behavior on the ground. This, in turn, continues to generate a nonstop stream of horrifying footage and makes it implausible that the slide of public opinion against ICE will stop any time soon. This week, even talk show host Joe Rogan, who endorsed Trump for president with great fanfare in 2024, said that ICE was acting like “the Gestapo.”

Increasing numbers of Americans even want to entirely eliminate the agency tasked with carrying out the mass deportations. For the first time since pollsters have asked the question, more Americans want to abolish ICE (46 percent) than keep it (43 percent).

To some ears, the demand to disband the agency might blend together with far more radical ideas that are also advocated in some corners of the Left, like “abolishing” prisons or the police. It’s important to remember, though, that ICE has existed for less than twenty-two years. It was founded in March 2003, the same month as the invasion of Iraq, as part of the George W. Bush administration’s aggressive reorganization of the federal bureaucracy for “war on terror” purposes. If you were born in, say, 1983, it should be very easy to imagine a world without ICE. Just imagine the world as it was when you were nineteen.

What Is ICE, and Do We Need It?

Bush established ICE, part of the newly founded Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as a larger, more aggressive, and more militarized replacement for the older Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).

Its operations ramped up further under the administrations of Bush’s successors. Barack Obama was derided by the American Civil Liberties Union and immigrants’ rights groups as the “deporter-in-chief.” Under the first Trump administration, the brutality of a policy of separating undocumented parents from their children led to widespread outrage and the first high-profile calls to abolish ICE. Joe Biden did nothing to curb the agency, whose budget considerably increased during his time in office.

Under the second Trump administration, though, ICE has become something altogether different and qualitatively worse. As Senator Bernie Sanders put it, ICE increasingly looks and acts like “Trump’s domestic army.” More and more, the agency is dispatched in force to cities where there have been mass protests against the administration’s policies as an intimidating show of force, with the apparent mission of bullying critics of the Trump administration into submission.

Until Trump took office, it wasn’t common practice for ICE agents to wear masks on the job. Now it’s so routine that many Trump supporters accused the media of “doxing” Jonathan Ross by identifying him and printing his name. The administration itself has often (falsely) suggested that it’s illegal for citizens to document the agency’s abuses by filming them.

ICE agents themselves have been referencing Renee Good’s murder to threaten people who monitor their activities. In Minneapolis, one agent asked a woman filming him, “Have y’all not learned from the past couple of days?” As she queried his meaning, he said something about “filming federal agents” while snatching the phone from her hand. Another banged on an observer’s car window and yelled, “This is your warning. Stop f—ing following us, you are impeding operations. Did you not learn from what just happened?”

Democracies aren’t supposed to have secret police forces. In many state and local police departments around the country, officers are required to display a badge or name tag on their uniforms with their last name and/or an identifying number. If an officer mistreats you or violates your constitutional rights, you know exactly who to file a complaint about. If a masked ICE officer does the same, you have no such recourse.

A typical social media post from the official DHS account last year called for Americans to join ICE to “defend your culture.” Note: Not “enforce the law,” not even “defend our safety” against some imagined horde of violent drug-running narcoterrorists streaming across the border. But defend American culture against the grave threat of too many people living here who supposedly have the wrong ethnic background. This is just one among many recruitment posts that explicitly evoke white nationalism and historical fascism.

As for vetting the people who heed this call, recruitment standards are so low that anti-ICE commentator Laura Jedeed, who applied to the agency as a test, was offered a job without having to sign any paperwork or pass a background check. In December, one DHS official expressed concern that the rushed hiring of unqualified ICE agents had resulted in onboarding many recruits who “can barely read or write.”

Put all this together, and you get an agency full of people who increasingly haven’t even gone through cursory background checks, who have been recruited on the basis of flagrant appeals to racism, and have gotten a taste for being able to push around and physically brutalize citizens with the blessings of the administration.

ICE has evolved into a rogue, thuggish paramilitary force. In the greater scheme of things, it’s a brand-new addition to the American state, and it’s highly volatile. Even if a new president with better intentions inherits this state-sanctioned gang, it’s far from clear that it would ever be reformable. It’s really not crazy to suggest it shouldn’t exist.

It’s not clear why a free society would require a whole law enforcement agency dedicated to hunting down and deporting otherwise law-abiding people for the crime of unauthorized residence (which, at least for a first offense, is usually treated as a misdemeanor rather than a felony in any case). Even if we did need a new, less militarized agency to handle these immigration functions, though, it would be better to start over with a new force that hadn’t been recruited with appeals to “defend your culture” and the promise of “absolute immunity.”

In 2002, when ICE didn’t exist, the U.S. was far from having an open border. You had to pass through a checkpoint to drive into the country. (A completely separate agency, the Border Patrol, handled that then and continues to handle it now.) And there were even deportations, if not at anything like the mass scale we’ve become accustomed to in the era of ICE. But the basic institutions of a free society were in far better shape than they are now. It’s easy to imagine going back.