ICE is out of control and needs to be brought to heel

Trump has tried to turn them into a personal army, and their conduct has been horrifying over the last year. The way to deal with ICE is to recombine the agencies for immigration services and enforcement together. While ICE exists with only the mission to go after immigrants, it positions the organization and the immigrants as enemies. That naturally attracts the kind of people that hate immigrants and want to harass them. The Republican push to over-fund the agency and pay signing bonuses worth more than a teacher in Missouri makes in a year also attracts people willing to do anything for enough money. The result is that ICE has begun behaving like a state-sanctioned KKK, using race as a legal justification, lying as a matter of course, telling latinos they have no rights, systematic violence and abuse of human rights, etc.

Because ICE was staffed by people sympathetic to Trump's anti-immigrant bigotry, they as an organization have not resisted the drift towards fascism as other agencies have. If these people had to also provide support services to immigrants as part of their job, bigoted individuals would be much less likely to want to join the agency. That's what existed prior to 2002, when the department of homeland security was created and immigration and naturalization services was dissolved. The INS combined visa enforcement and immigrant support services within one agency. Its functions were split apart by Republicans into several agencies including ICE, and that change is systemic incentives was a mistake.

Restoring the INS

By reintegrating the immigration agencies together, Democrats can take the $170 billion appropriated to ICE in 2025 and redistribute it across the immigration system. To understand the sense of scale, Biden's border bill only proposed $20 billion for things like courts and migrant processing. If we simply abolish ICE, that funding level is lost and Democrats take a unpopular position when a better option was available. The downside is that this means many of the jackbooted thugs from ICE would not be fired, but integrated into the new agency until a Democrat wins the Presidency. Under the new Supreme Court directive that the executive can fire anyone at any time in an executive agency, the President would have access to logs of abuses and the power to purge those new INS employees that deserve to be purged. It would be something I would be looking for a candidate to promise in the democratic presidential primary.

This two-step isn't as immediately satisfying, but would go much further towards fixing America's broken immigration system. Visa overstays for example account for over 40% of unauthorized immigrants in the country. About another 18% are applicants for refugee status. The long processing time from months to years also creates a bigger incentive for people to come through irregular methods instead. Combine all these points and our lack of administrative capacity for immigration is really the majority of our immigration system's problem. This reintegration is a way to take the massive budget given to immigration enforcement and turn it towards actually solving the real structural problems in our system.