Human rights nightmares show ‘the crazies’ who wanted to abolish ICE were right

Even after 100 days of nightly headlines about federal immigration cops gone wild — smashing car windows, descending on schools and courthouses, wrongly deporting dads, or donning masks and handcuffing stunned university students on the sidewalk — the latest story out of Oklahoma City is so shocking it might prove a tipping point.

There, a shell-shocked and weeping U.S. citizen and mom who gave reporters only her first name, Marisa, told journalists about the recent night when 20 federal agents raided her family’s new home, forced her and her two daughters out into a rain-soaked street in their underwear, ransacked the place, and took all their electronics and cash.

“I told them before they left, I said, you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here,” the distraught Marisa told an Oklahoma City TV station, KFOR. “I have to feed my children. I’m going to need gas money. I need to be able to get around. Like, how do you just leave me like this? Like an abandoned dog.”

The search warrant brandished by the agents sought someone else, who wasn’t at the home where Marisa and her daughters had moved a few weeks ago. As is often the case in 2025’s stepped-up immigration raids, it wasn’t exactly clear who the agents were or even which agency they worked for. Although initial news accounts attributed the operation to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, subsequent reports suggested the officers were from ICE’s sister agency, the little-known Homeland Security Investigations. The 6,000-member HSI is a cornerstone of an ascendant secret police in America.

One of the federal raiders who busted up the Oklahoma City home almost sounded apologetic, telling Marisa: “I know it was a little rough this morning.” That doesn’t really cut it.

In the 21st century, America has created a monstrous immigration security apparatus — a toxic alphabet soup that’s led by ICE but also seasoned by mysterious HSI agents, or the customs officers who’ve been strip-searching German teen tourists — that is broken well past the point of any possibility of reforming it.

Once upon a time, near the end of the 2010s — in a decade when political movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter powered ambitious dreams of a more progressive United States, at least for some — the first wave of Donald Trump-led abuses, including the forced separation of families at the southern border, sparked a brief rallying cry:

Abolish ICE.

This sound argument — that America had been better off before 2003, when it wasn’t spending billions of dollars to criminalize desperate refugees — was quickly shushed by leading Democrats after their party lost a few 2020 congressional races it had expected to win. They blamed “abolish ICE” and its less-vocalized first cousin, “defund the police” — the slogan of leftists who wanted to redirect money from law enforcement to social programs after a cop murdered George Floyd.

Five years later, how many citizens like Marisa must be thrown out into the rain, how many 4-year-old U.S.-born pediatric cancer patients need to be deported without their meds, how many refugees with innocuous tattoos need to be shackled and flown to a Salvadoran concentration camp, and how many grad students need to be snatched off the street for coauthoring an op-ed, before people admit that maybe the “left-wing lunatics” actually had a good point?

Kari E. Hong, a former Boston College law professor who writes frequently about immigration issues, told me this week in an interview that she now regrets an article in the late 2010s that called for a radical overhaul of ICE, adding quickly, “Can I tell you why?”

“I regret that article because I wish I had called for the full abolishment [of ICE],” Hong said. “At the time, I thought I was staking out a middle ground … Quite frankly, after seeing the horrors, I think abolishment is a middle ground. I think the proper course of action is to explore criminal prosecution against these agents, based on what they’re doing.”

What Hong and other advocates for a total overhaul of U.S. immigration enforcement say the broader American public has forgotten, after a generation of orange terror alerts and jingoistic political rhetoric, is that a vast system of arrest and imprisonment for those crossing our border or arriving on our shores is a new phenomenon.

Hong said that during the 1980s — when Ronald Reagan was president and most of today’s anti-immigration right-wingers thought America was on track — U.S. immigration detention was as low as 35 people. “Not 35,000, or 3,500,” Hong said. “35!” Since ICE was created two years after the 2001 terror attack, the detention number has spiked to today’s nearly 48,000, with hellhole facilities like Miami’s squalid Krome Detention Center that were designed for 600 detainees now holding about 1,700, many sleeping on filthy concrete floors.

Most voters forgot, or never heard, the 2003 argument by some advocates that the creation of ICE to more aggressively hunt down undocumented immigrants on U.S. soil would create a “monster” agency that would warp the entire national conversation around refugees. While it’s certainly and sadly true that waves of anti-immigration fervor are as American as cherry pie, from the anti-Irish “Know Nothings” of the 1850s through the KKK resurgence of the 1920s and beyond, the “national security” lens of ICE has taken us to a new low.

Twenty-two years later, those “monster” predictions feel understated. There’s no quick fix for the human rights nightmare of ICE and its sister agencies, because this warped experiment has gone off the rails in so many different ways. It starts with the simple fact that what ICE is doing today goes well beyond the supposed initial, publicly supported mission of removing criminals from among the undocumented migrant population. Nearly half of those nearly 48,000 current detainees — some 46.4% — have no criminal record at all.

That hasn’t stopped ICE or HSI agents from using tactics that remind viewers of the worst days of East Germany’s Stasi — appearing in plain clothes without warning, or visible badges, wearing ski masks even in warm weather. Immigration cops have smashed an asylum-seeker’s car window with a hammer, strip-searched those teen German girls at the Honolulu airport because they lacked a hotel reservation, and arrested a student at what was supposed to be his final citizenship interview.

» READ MORE: The disappearing of Rumeysa Ozturk is something I never thought I’d see in America | Will Bunch

When these migrants are deprived of their freedom, the government increasingly ships them to detention centers that make America’s overcrowded penitentiaries seem like a Four Seasons hotel. For example, Yale Law School students who investigated the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center for women, where Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk was sent for the ostensible “crime” of that student paper op-ed, found hostile treatment and a lack of “necessities like adequate food, hygiene supplies, warm bedding, communication with the outside world, and medical care.”

While it’s undoubtedly true that good people have worked in U.S. immigration enforcement, including some who resigned in moral outrage during Trump’s first term, whistleblowers like the former Border Patrol agent Jen Budd have described a warped work environment among colleagues “where racism, rape culture, and bullying were encouraged.”

You can’t “reform” this. You can only tear it down and start from scratch. You have to create a new humanitarian approach to immigration management that appreciates the vital role that new arrivals have played in boosting the 21st-century U.S. economy, grants a fair hearing to asylum-seekers, and promotes positive change in places like Central America that today’s refugees are so desperate to escape.

And yet, the Democratic leaders who could win an election or two and make these all-American changes happen continue to cower in fear. Texas Rep. Greg Casar, who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus and forcefully supported abolishing ICE in 2018, now tells Semafor’s David Weigel that “I’ve changed,” adding, “We should be talking about our issues in a way that the broadest number of people can agree with.”

I think it’s past time for Casar and other left-leaning Dems to change back, because a broad number of people would actually support abolishing ICE, firing and even prosecuting its worst agents, and starting over. The rural Iowa voter who yelled at his senator, Chuck Grassley, “Are you going to bring that guy back from El Salvador?!” was the cutting edge of a public that’s been telling pollsters it’s horrified by ICE tactics and doesn’t want noncriminal immigrants deported.

Hong, an amateur hockey player, said most of her teammates told her they want a T-shirt that reads: “Hockey — the only place where ICE belongs.” She added: “Not only am I surprised how many people are aware of the abuses, but they’re very concerned. My phone is off the hook with college friends, law school friends, neighbors, acquaintances, friends of friends — asking for information about whether they can even leave the country if they’re married to a green-card holder.”

“Where does the ‘Abolish ICE’ movement go to get its apology?” asked the Bulwark’s Bill Kristol, an anti-Trumper Republican who seems to understand the zeitgeist better than most Democrats. The reality is that America thrived during its first 227 years when neither ICE nor its gulag archipelago existed. When our current national nightmare is over, let’s punish the lawbreakers, abolish ICE, and go back to the future, to an idea that wasn’t so crazy or radical after all.

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