The big strategic and policy argument among Democrats at the moment is whether the increasingly popular slogan of “abolish ICE!” makes sense politically, or is even the right position morally. I weighed the pros and cons at New York:

For two overriding reasons, Democrats are intensively debating what to say and do about the future of ICE. First and most obviously, that agency is running wild in Minneapolis and other cities, pursuing a very deliberate policy of terrorizing immigrant communities and their allies in order to (a) encourage “self-deportation” and (b) titillate Donald Trump’s MAGA base. ICE has become the tip of a spear that seems aimed not only at mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, but at the military occupation of politically hostile territory by an increasingly authoritarian administration.

Second, an appropriations package that includes money for ICE (along with the rest of DHS, plus multiple other federal agencies) has become the flash point in another potential (if partial) government-shutdown cliff on January 30, which is when the stopgap-spending bill that ended last year’s total government shutdown expires. Many Democrats within and beyond Congress want to dramatize their opposition to what ICE is doing by voting against the new money, even though (as other Democrats argue) it won’t stop ICE for a moment thanks to the special slush fund for mass deportation created by last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

While nearly all Democrats oppose both current ICE tactics and Trump’s entire mass-deportation regime, the funding fight has exposed an increasingly large gulf between those who advocate abolishing ICE and those who seek to reform the agency. The latter camp isn’t necessarily a solid bloc; there’s language in the above-mentioned spending bill that authorizes body cameras and other measures for ICE accountability that some reformers consider inadequate. But without question, ICE abolition advocates have a lot of momentum among congressional Democrats and ICE resisters nationally (including, notably, Mayor Zohran Mamdani). One very recent poll from Economist-YouGov showed self-identified Democrats favoring the abolition of ICE by a margin of 77 percent to 19 percent (Americans generally were split right down the middle on the proposition). So is this the line in the sand the party generally should draw? Has Trump’s toxic immigration crackdown now made ICE abolition a mainstream position with little political downside?

While “Abolish ICE” may be the only position emotionally consonant with justified outrage over its agents’ conduct, it’s not necessary at all if the goal is simply to radically change the immigration-enforcement status quo. ICE has been around since 2003. Its agents weren’t masked until March 2025. ICE (along with the allied Border Patrol and Homeland Security Investigations agencies) wasn’t deployed to achieve mass deportation until a Trump executive order one year ago yesterday. The administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden didn’t publicly defend brutal tactics or accuse immigration-enforcement protesters of being “terrorists.” Columnist Will Bunch recently spoke out in opposition to Democratic efforts to reform ICE on grounds that “You can’t reform fascism.” Were the Obama and Biden administrations “fascist”?

More than a few progressives (and particularly advocates for undocumented immigrants) did indeed believe that enforcement of immigration laws generally, and deportation practices specifically, were too harsh during past Democratic administrations. In 2020, famously, most Democratic presidential candidates called for the decriminalization (or, in some cases, abolition of felony charges for immigration violations) of illegal border crossings. The national debate over lax immigration enforcement then played an unquestionably major role in Trump’s return to power in 2024. And as recently as September, a Washington Post–Ipsos survey showed only 29 percent of Americans trusted Democrats more than Republicans on immigration policy.

So despite widespread and steadily increasing public disapproval of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, Democrats aren’t on such solid ground that they can embrace some total abandonment of immigration enforcement without courting political peril. There’s no evidence that Americans actually want the “open borders” stance that Republicans have falsely accused Democrats of embracing in the past. Embracing it now makes little sense. The broadest and strongest position for Democrats right now is the abolition of both mass deportation and ICE terror tactics, alongside a new path to citizenship for noncriminal immigrants and fairer and more uniform enforcement of immigration laws without the sort of violence and cruelty perpetrated and celebrated by Trump, J.D. Vance, Kristi Noem, and Stephen Miller. If they need a slogan, it might be: “End ICE As We Know It.” Anyone who thinks such a position represents a surrender to MAGA needs to remember how and why these terrible people rose to power in the first place.