Abolish ICE: Where the Slogan Came From and What It Means

On March 1, 2003, the Immigration and Naturalization Service stopped existing. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 dissolved it, dissolved the U.S. Customs Service alongside it, and divided their work among three new agencies inside the new Department of Homeland Security: Citizenship and Immigration Services took the applications, Customs and Border Protection took the border and the ports, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement took the interior of the country. Abolish ICE asks Congress to do to ICE what it already did to the INS: end the agency by statute, then decide where the work goes.

That is the demand in one sentence, which is why it fits on a shirt. The rest runs through a tweet, a summer, a bill, and a set of numbers that has moved a long way since 2018.

What ICE actually does

The two agencies get confused constantly, so: CBP has the border and the ports of entry, and ICE has everywhere else. That is why ICE arrests happen at workplaces, courthouses, and front doors. Inside ICE are two operational arms. Enforcement and Removal Operations arrests, detains, and deports. Homeland Security Investigations is the criminal investigative side, working smuggling, trafficking, and financial crime. By the National Immigration Forum’s July 2018 accounting, ERO was running on $4.8 billion a year and HSI on $2 billion, out of an agency budget that had grown from $3.3 billion at founding to $7.5 billion in fifteen years.

What interior enforcement looks like in practice: on May 12, 2008, ICE agents raided the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa and arrested 389 workers, about half the plant’s workforce in a single day. The United Food and Commercial Workers had been trying to organize the plant since 2005. The raid ended that drive and interrupted an Iowa Department of Labor investigation, which reported three months later that it had found 57 child labor violations at the plant and recommended prosecution. One day, one town, and a union drive that did not come back.

Congress has ended an immigration agency before

The INS was an assembled thing too. Executive Order 6166, signed June 10, 1933, merged the Bureau of Immigration and the Bureau of Naturalization into one service under the Labor Department. Roosevelt moved it to Justice in 1940, and it stayed there for sixty-three years, collecting critics the entire time.

Congress went looking for a fix in the 1990s. The U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, chaired by former Representative Barbara Jordan, told Congress in its 1997 final report that “fragmentation of responsibility leads to conflicting messages from the various agencies [and] unnecessary delays in adjudication,” and recommended shipping legal immigration and naturalization processing to the State Department and worksite enforcement to Labor. A Congressional Research Service report updated May 1, 2002 laid out the bills then in front of the House, including the ones that would dismantle the INS outright. Congress dismantled it later that year in the Homeland Security Act, and a Republican president signed the bill.

That history is the argument’s floor, and Sean McElwee made it explicitly in 2018:

Moreover, abolishing it would only take us back to 2003, when the agency was first formed.

Where the slogan came from

McElwee, a researcher who went on to co-found the polling outfit Data for Progress, tweeted “Abolish ICE” on February 23, 2017. It drew 200 retweets, and BuzzFeed News later called it the first tweet with those words to take off. He argued the case at length in The Nation on March 9, 2018, and he was not asking for a new org chart:

But the goal of abolishing the agency is to abolish the function.

Then came the summer. On April 6, 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions sent a one-page memo directing federal prosecutors on the southwest border to adopt, in the memo’s words, “a zero-tolerance policy” toward every illegal-entry referral the Department of Homeland Security sent them. Prosecuting the adults meant taking the children who came with them. On June 20 the president signed an executive order directing DHS to stop separating families except where a parent was judged a risk to the child, and on June 26, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw issued a preliminary injunction ordering most separated families reunited within 30 days and children under five within two weeks. The HHS inspector general reported on January 17, 2019 that the department had “thus far identified 2,737 separated children who were in ORR’s care as of June 26, 2018,” that the refugee resettlement office “received and released thousands of separated children prior to the June 26, 2018, court order,” and that at least 118 more separated children arrived between July 1 and November 7, 2018.

June 26, 2018 was also primary day in New York’s 14th district, where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat the incumbent, Joe Crowley, 56.7 percent to 43.3. Roll Call’s story that night listed Medicare for All and abolishing ICE among her signature positions. She had spent the closing weekend of the race at a child detention center in Texas rather than in New York. Her win put the phrase in front of an audience no Twitter argument reaches, and attached it to Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who took office the following January as one of the first two DSA women elected to Congress.

Senators followed. On CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time in June 2018, Kirsten Gillibrand said ICE had “become a deportation force,” argued for separating criminal enforcement from immigration enforcement, and called to “reimagine ICE under a new agency with a very different mission.”

What the bill actually said

On July 12, 2018, Representative Mark Pocan introduced H.R. 6361, the Establishing a Humane Immigration Enforcement System Act, with eight cosponsors including Pramila Jayapal, Adriano Espaillat, Nydia Velázquez, and Yvette Clarke. It creates a “Commission to Study and Establish a Fair and Humane System of Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” gives that commission 180 days from its first meeting to report to Congress on where ICE’s functions should go, and sets a clock:

On the date no later than 1 year after the enactment of this Act, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement shall terminate.

FactCheck.org reviewed the proposals on July 3, 2018 and found the members calling for abolition were proposing to move ICE’s functions to other agencies rather than to stop enforcing immigration law. Seven members of Congress supported abolition at that point, five representatives and two senators. Pocan’s own pitch was administrative. Before ICE existed, he pointed out, about twenty different departments did this work.

Six days later the House Republican majority put Clay Higgins’s resolution supporting ICE on the floor and made everyone vote on it. H.Res. 990 passed 244 to 35 on July 18, 2018, with 133 Democrats voting present, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and James Clyburn among them.

The most interesting endorsement of a split came from inside the agency. In June 2018, nineteen special agents in charge at Homeland Security Investigations, by the Texas Observer’s count, wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen asking her to separate HSI from Enforcement and Removal Operations, because the association was wrecking their casework:

HSI’s investigations have been perceived as targeting undocumented aliens, instead of the transnational criminal organizations that facilitate cross border crimes impacting our communities and national security.

They wanted a reorganization rather than an abolition, and they wanted the same line drawn that Gillibrand had described on television that month.

The case against, from the woman who ran the agency ICE replaced

Doris Meissner was commissioner of the INS from 1993 to 2000 and is now at the Migration Policy Institute. Government Executive asked her about abolition in August 2018, and she did not think structure was the problem:

The issues being talked about now are fundamentally issues of policy and leadership, not structure.

Congress writes the immigration statutes and an agency enforces what it is handed, so in her account the fight over ICE is driven by “the policies it is being called upon to enforce.” Ur Jaddou, chief counsel of Citizenship and Immigration Services under Obama, told the same reporter that reorganization was “a red herring at the moment.” Both were describing the same trap: a new name over the same statute books.

The numbers moved

Congress went the other direction, hard. The reconciliation law signed July 4, 2025 appropriated more than $75 billion for interior immigration enforcement through September 30, 2029, including $45 billion for detention capacity and $29.9 billion for enforcement and deportation operations, with more than $70 billion more for CBP.

Detention followed the money. The Vera Institute of Justice, which rebuilds a daily detention record from ICE’s own data, found the population passed 73,400 people on a single day in mid-January 2026, a record, and that ICE was using 456 facilities in February 2026 while listing 220 on its website. TRAC, which analyzes the same underlying records, counted 65,765 people in detention on July 11, 2026, of whom 46,436, or 70.6 percent, had no criminal conviction. Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights counted 52 deaths in ICE custody between January 20, 2025 and June 4, 2026 in a June 25, 2026 report, 39 of them in the first twelve months, which they called the highest annual death toll since ICE was established in 2003.

Where the demand stands

Representatives Delia Ramirez and Yvette Clarke introduced the Melt ICE Act in late January 2026, days after Congress voted on January 22 to keep funding the Department of Homeland Security. FOX 32 Chicago described the bill as defunding ICE and its detention centers and redirecting the money to housing, health care, and community-based services.

The party that spent 2018 voting present has not resolved anything since. At the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting in Austin, the resolutions committee advanced an abolition resolution 25 to 12, over objections from members who preferred reform. DNC member Marge Hoffa argued against running both:

We shouldn’t contradict ourselves by also introducing a resolution that would now call to abolish something that we have a well-established track record of calling to be drastically reformed.

The INS lasted seventy years, from an executive order in June 1933 to a statute that took effect in March 2003. ICE turned twenty-three this year with more than $75 billion appropriated through 2029. And on August 15, 2026, the Democratic National Committee passed a resolution to abolish ICE and a resolution to reform ICE on the same afternoon, both unanimously, both by voice vote.