The NY Times thinks it’s highlighting something positive with this opinion piece by Sean McElwee of the ultra far left group Data For Progress, but, what it actually does is show how utterly extreme Democrats have become
The Power of ‘Abolish ICE’
In June, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Latina organizer, unseated Joe Crowley, one of the most powerful Democratic incumbents in the country, many analysts were shocked. But maybe they shouldn’t have been.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s victory came after she criticized Mr. Crowley regularly on the campaign trail for voting to establish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in 2002. She called for the agency to be abolished. And as she zeroed in on the brutality of immigration enforcement, she became a leader in the movement to abolish ICE, going so far as to spend the last few days of her campaign at the border bearing witness to the viciousness of America’s immigration system.
While some saw this as a sign of her political weakness, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was tapping into a sharp shift in the way that Democrats understand immigration. In much the same way that the Democratic Party has had a reckoning on financial deregulation, the punitive 1994 crime bill and the callous welfare reforms of the mid-90s, incumbents are now facing criticism for their votes on immigration.
From the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in 1996 to the Homeland Security Act of 2002, Democrats have voted overwhelmingly to help construct the apparatus that President Trump is using to engage in a campaign of mass deportation. And candidates like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez are forcing them to take those votes seriously. Ayanna Pressley, who is challenging another incumbent, Michael Capuano, in the Seventh Congressional District of Massachusetts, has also called for abolishing ICE. In Delaware, Kerri Evelyn Harris, running against Tom Carper, another incumbent who supported the creation of the agency, has too.
Democrats should be careful what they wish for: they might end up with a federal agency whose sole mission is to capture people who are unlawfully present in the United States and to quickly deport them, rather than doing the other things ICE does. ICE would be able to spend all their time just catching illegals.
In Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, who wants to replace Keith Ellison, who is running for attorney general, notes that ICE is relatively new. “ICE’s mission was created in 2002 — they’ve only been around for 15 years,†she told me. “In that time, they have grown to be an agency whose mission is to tear families apart and put fear into immigrant, refugee and undocumented communities. ICE has only become increasingly militarized, brutal and unaccountable.†For her, the call to abolish ICE is a demand to create an immigration policy “based in compassion.â€
At the end of the day, this is all about scapegoating the men and women who work for ICE because Democrats are looking for another avenue to make it easier for illegal aliens to come to the United States and stay here, at which point the Democrats start giving them more and more legal avenues, such as voting in local elections.
Abolishing ICE is not only a campaign issue among upstarts in primaries in deep blue districts. Mark Pocan, a representative from Wisconsin who is a co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said his concerns about ICE stem from the increasingly racist overtones of the agency’s enforcement priorities, “They’re trying to send every possible signal that there are people who don’t belong in this country, and it’s not people from Norway. This is being done almost exclusively on race. Sitting in the parking lot outside of a Head Start school is not for the security of the country.â€
Mexican and Latin American is not a race. And they are people who shouldn’t be in the country, because they failed to do it through legal channels. Oh, and there aren’t that many people coming to the U.S. illegally or overstaying their visas from places like Norway.
Anyhow, McElwee thinks this is a totally winning idea as it drives Democrats even further left, and, it might be in districts where Democrats almost never lose: how will it play in the general population? Quite frankly, Republicans and conservatives are happy they’re doing this. You have President Trump making speeches and comments about how Democrats simply want more crime with this abolish ICE push, and all the media outlets put this on TV. This might be better for the election of Republicans and Trump’s re-election than Hillary’s “Deplorables” remark
The abolish ICE movement is not just about the agency; it is also a demand that the next attempt to carry out comprehensive immigration reform doesn’t look like the last one. The next time Democrats have the power to change policy, they will have clear instructions from the base: a mandate to envision an immigration system centered on dignity. For as long as America has existed, the question of immigration has been defined through the lens of white supremacy, although that began to change with the Hart-Cellar Act in 1965. For the most part, though, we have seen immigrants as an other to be controlled and understood these “others†as a threat: of crime, of terror, of economic dislocation. Now, for the first time in American history, there is a possibility that we can build an immigration system that sees immigrants as something else: human.
See? This is all just about their typical support for illegal alien criminals.
