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Escalating opposition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, and beyond is pushing renewed debate within the Democratic Party about Donald Trump’s war on immigrants. From rallies and ICE watch trainings to mutual aid and coordinated strikes, countless people are demanding an end to ICE’s deadly regime. In response to this robust organizing and the high-profile immigration agent-perpetrated murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, Democrats are refusing to approve the current Department of Homeland Security funding bill without the inclusion of ICE reforms.
Yet while “Abolish ICE” serves as a unifying chant in the streets, Democrats are once again seeking to temper and co-opt people’s demands into a narrow version of reform. The demands outlined by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer could not be more toothless: requiring ICE agents to unmask, wear body cameras, and to follow a code of conduct modeled on other law enforcement agencies.
In addition, Democratic leadership is calling for an end to roving patrols of ICE agents, tightening requirements around warrants, and closer collaboration with local authorities. These watered-down ICE policy reforms do not serve as a break from the Democrats’ years-long rightward shift on immigration, but a repackaging of immigration enforcement to maintain the status quo.
Underlying these demands are two key assumptions: First, that ICE can be reformed into a fair and just agency through greater oversight and professionalization. And second, that the problem with ICE is its arrest, detention, and deportation of the “wrong” kinds of people — U.S. citizens, immigrants without criminal charges (or at least those with nonviolent charges), and children.
The mainstream Democratic Party position, as summed up by Democratic Congressman Troy Carter, is that the goal should not be to abolish ICE, but to “abolish ICE as we know it today.” Under this logic, the problem with ICE is not the state violence inherent in immigration enforcement, detention, and deportation but the spectacle of state violence.
Watered-down ICE policy reforms do not serve as a break from the Democrats’ years-long rightward shift on immigration, but a repackaging of immigration enforcement to maintain the status quo.
It is no coincidence that the Democratic establishment’s policy proposals are eerily similar to what they espoused in the face of the 2020 uprisings against police violence. Seeking to defang and delegitimize organizers’ demand to defund the police, Democrats pushed forth training and oversight alongside short-lived lip service to Black Lives Matter as the pragmatic answer to stopping police-perpetrated killings. The liberal conceit that racism and brutality can be trained out of law enforcement has been a hallmark of the Democratic narrative since at least the Kerner Commission response to the 1960s urban uprisings.
Yet such an approach has proven over and over again to not stem the tide of police violence but to validate the centrality of policing in U.S. society. As African American Studies Professor Naomi Murakawa has documented, “In the six months following the murder of George Floyd, state lawmakers enacted nearly one hundred laws addressing use of-force standards and police accountability” — an unprecedented wave of legislative actions.
Despite the optics of these reforms, they have not stopped the police from killing people. Research from Mapping Police Violence has demonstrated that since 2020, police-perpetrated killings in the U.S. have only grown: from 1,163 in 2020 to 1,314 in 2025. And these numbers do not include the harder to track (but still important) forms of law enforcement violence such as harassment, brutality, and sexual assault. Oversight and training do not reduce law enforcement violence but shore up the legitimacy of police at the exact moment that the public clamors for meaningful change.
Democrats’ turn to this playbook in our current moment of collective outrage and activism is precisely because it worked to blunt the edges of people’s organizing and deflect national attention away from the daily realities of law enforcement violence. We cannot let that happen again.
Rather than allowing Democrats to exceptionalize this moment as an aberration by the Trump regime, we must stay clear-eyed about what is new or different right now without forgetting the broader structures and ideologies that gave rise to this crisis.
Oversight and training do not reduce law enforcement violence but shore up the legitimacy of police at the exact moment that the public clamors for meaningful change.
We should not downplay the fact that ICE is now the largest law enforcement agency in the nation, with an unprecedented $170 billion increase in funding over the next four years. Not only does this funding intensify the U.S. government’s ability to terrorize, detain, and deport, it also cements the centrality of immigration enforcement to the infrastructure of the U.S. state. Furthermore, the wielding of immigration policy as a tool of state repression against Palestine solidarity activists should not be overlooked but seem as the next step in the government’s march toward fascism.
At the same time, while it is critical to maintain resistance to the mass deployment of ICE agents in the streets of Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, and elsewhere, it should not come at the expense of resistance to more commonplace forms of immigration policing. According to ICE, there are currently 1,415 287(g) agreements with local police and sheriffs’ departments across 40 states. These agreements — initially created under the Clinton administration’s Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 — allow for the deputization of local law enforcement as immigration authorities. 287(g) agreements expand ICE’s reach and power by authorizing cops to check people’s immigration status and serve administrative warrants.
While a longstanding feature of immigration enforcement, under Trump, 287(g) agreements have exploded. Since his return to office, the number of local law enforcement agencies participating in 287(g) task force agreements has grown almost 40 percent. Upwards of 13,000 local law enforcement officers are now deputized as ICE agents. When taken alongside the record growth of ICE from 10,000 to 22,000 agents over the past year, it becomes clear that ICE’s actual manpower stands at 35,000 officers. Resisting these agreements is a vital site of immigration justice organizing.
Under Trump, the number of local law enforcement agencies participating in 287(g) task force agreements has grown almost 40 percent.
Hundreds of jails have also come to quietly serve as detention centers. Under 287(g) agreements, sheriffs are required to hold immigrants in their jails for 48 hours past their official release date so that ICE can decide whether they want to take that person into federal custody or not. In addition, jails across the U.S. have contracted with federal immigration agencies to detain immigrants for decades — beginning with the Immigration and Naturalization Service and now ICE. While 287(g) agreements with police and sheriff’s departments have increased under Trump, ICE’s mechanisms of deportation and detention long predate his arrival to the White House.
This is all to say that a city, suburb, or small town does not need to be a direct target of Trump’s high-profile deployment of immigration agents for communities to be ravaged by the kidnapping of family, friends, and neighbors. We must use this opportunity to make clear that there is no such thing as a “just” or “fair” form of immigration policing. “Abolish ICE” is the floor, not the ceiling. Immiseration, family separation, and premature death cannot be reformed out of an agency and a system predicated on the very idea that only certain kinds of people deserve to live here. Taking on ICE terror in this moment requires taking on state violence in all its forms — whether it’s ICE agents gunning people down in the streets, the medical neglect that defines detention, or the arrest and deportation of someone who did break the law.
Instead of pushing for milquetoast policies that reify immigration jails and deportation as “good governance,” Democrats should be taking heed of frontline organizers and activists who have long contested the everyday and extraordinary violence of immigration enforcement. For instance, Rep. Delia Ramirez’s Melt ICE Act, developed in collaboration with immigration justice organizations, aims to disinvest federal dollars from ICE and reduce detention capacities. This proposal and other calls to defund and abolish ICE make it clear that there is no stopping the violence of ICE without a radical transformation of the U.S. approach to immigration. We must end the policing of anyone: immigrant or citizen, guilty or innocent. There is no other way forward.
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