Abolish ICE? Senate Hopeful Drops Bomb

U.S. immigration and customs enforcement seal on American flag — Photo: chrisdorney / Shutterstock

The real dispute is not whether Abdul El-Sayed wants ICE gone; he plainly does. The deeper question is whether his claim that “ICE is not about immigration” describes the agency as an institution, or whether it is a deliberately provocative political diagnosis of how immigration enforcement has been transformed into a coercive domestic force.

Key Points

El-Sayed’s position is not ambiguous: he has repeatedly called for abolishing ICE and has framed the agency as a “paramilitary force” rather than a conventional immigration bureau.
His rhetoric belongs to a broader abolitionist tradition that treats some institutions as structurally harmful and beyond repair rather than merely in need of reform.
ICE’s own mission statements, annual reporting, and government descriptions directly contradict any literal reading of the claim that the agency has nothing to do with immigration.
The strongest reading is that El-Sayed is not denying ICE performs immigration enforcement; he is arguing that its practical function has been politicized, militarized, and separated from any neutral administrative mission.

What El-Sayed Is Actually Saying

El-Sayed’s words are not hard to find, and they are not accidental. In an extended interview, he said, “ICE is not about immigration. ICE is not about the southern border. ICE is about normalizing paramilitary force on our streets. … It just has to be abolished,” which is the clearest statement of his thesis. In other campaign-related material, he describes the agency as “irredeemable” and says “we need to abolish the ICE part and start fresh when it comes to immigration enforcement”. The point is not subtle: he sees ICE as a vehicle for state violence, not as a neutral administrator of migration law.

That is why the shorthand “ICE has nothing to do with immigration” is both revealing and misleading. It captures the polemical edge of his argument, but it is too blunt to serve as a literal description of the agency. El-Sayed is not saying ICE processes no immigration cases. He is saying the agency’s public role, organizational culture, and enforcement style have turned immigration policing into something more politically charged and more coercive than the ordinary language of administration suggests. That distinction matters, because most of the controversy comes from opponents hearing a literal denial of ICE’s mandate when the argument is really about institutional purpose.

ICE’s Actual Mission: What the Record Says

On the other side of the dispute, ICE’s own descriptions are straightforward. DHS materials and ICE reporting identify the agency as the investigative and enforcement arm of DHS for immigration-related laws, with responsibilities that include border control, customs, trade, and immigration enforcement. ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations component is described as the part of the agency responsible for arrests, detention, supervision, and removals in civil immigration cases. The agency’s annual reporting also documents sustained removal activity, including approximately 2.32 million book-ins returned to their country of citizenship between October 2014 and November 2024.

That evidence decisively defeats any literal claim that ICE is unrelated to immigration. It is built into the agency’s structure, budget, and public function. Even critics of ICE generally acknowledge that it detains, deports, and investigates people under immigration authorities. So if the question is whether ICE performs immigration enforcement, the answer is yes, plainly and abundantly. The argument is over what that enforcement has become and whether the name of the agency still describes its real institutional character.

The Abolitionist Frame Behind the Phrase

El-Sayed’s formulation makes more sense when placed in the broader abolitionist vocabulary of American politics. In that tradition, “abolish” does not always mean instant disappearance with no replacement; it often means dismantling an institution’s current form because reform is seen as inadequate, then rebuilding a different system around different priorities. Scholarship on police abolition describes this as a strategy aimed at ending or radically transforming institutions understood to be structurally harmful, sometimes by replacing them with alternative public-safety systems rather than abolishing all public order functions outright.

That is the interpretive key to his ICE rhetoric. He is using “abolish” the way abolitionist movements usually do: as a declaration that the existing institution is illegitimate in its current form. The comparison with police abolition is useful because the same rhetorical fight appears there. Supporters often mean replace the mission; critics hear eliminate the function. ICE is subject to the same collision of meanings. In practical politics, that collision is not a semantic footnote; it determines whether a candidate sounds like a reformer with a hard edge or a maximalist who wants to burn the institution down.

Why Critics Push Back So Hard

Critics have an easy rejoinder because the institutional record is on their side. ICE describes itself as a homeland-security agency carrying out immigration enforcement, and that is not a cosmetic claim. It has statutory authority, organized operational units, detention infrastructure, and a documented removal pipeline. If one insists that the agency “has nothing to do with immigration,” the statement is vulnerable on its face. That is why opponents can clip the phrase, strip away the surrounding context, and present El-Sayed as denying the obvious.

But critics are also responding to a deeper threat embedded in his framing. If ICE is understood not as a neutral immigration agency but as a politically weaponized domestic force, then the argument for abolition becomes much stronger. El-Sayed’s language about “paramilitary force” and “state violence” places the debate in that register. The agency’s visible enforcement tactics, its association with deportation politics, and its place in broader battles over federal power all make it easy for opponents to read the abolition demand as extremist even when it is really a claim about institutional drift.

What the Evidence Supports, and What It Does Not

The record supports three conclusions with confidence. First, El-Sayed has indeed taken an abolitionist line on ICE, repeatedly and explicitly. Second, ICE undeniably performs immigration enforcement and says so in its own mission language. Third, the fight over his statement is not about whether the agency does immigration work, but whether that work has become inseparable from a militarized style of domestic policing that should be dismantled rather than reformed.

What the record does not support is a forensic proof that ICE is “not about immigration” in any strict operational sense. The sources provided are rich in rhetoric, interviews, campaign framing, and institutional self-description, but they do not supply the kind of program-by-program audit that would quantify how much of ICE’s activity is immigration enforcement versus other functions. That absence matters. It leaves El-Sayed’s claim in the realm of political judgment, not empirical demonstration. His case is a normative indictment of what ICE represents, not an evidentiary audit of its budget lines.

Why This Argument Persists

The reason this debate endures is that both sides are speaking to different layers of reality. ICE is, administratively, an immigration enforcement agency. It is also, in the eyes of many critics, the sharp end of a broader punitive state that treats migrants as targets and uses enforcement spectacle to project power. Those are not identical propositions, and the tension between them is exactly where abolitionist politics lives. El-Sayed’s message is effective because it collapses that tension into a single sentence; it is politically dangerous for the same reason.

That makes his claim more than a slogan and less than a factual description. Read carefully, it is an argument about institutional legitimacy: that an agency can remain legally tasked with immigration enforcement while becoming so associated with coercion, intimidation, and political theater that its original mission no longer describes what it is for in any morally meaningful sense. Whether one agrees is a matter of judgment. But the evidence leaves no doubt that this is the argument he is making, and no doubt that opponents will keep answering it with ICE’s own mission statement, budgeted powers, and removal statistics.