A handful of high-profile Democrats in the Senate and House previously supported the notion of abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — the agency tasked with enforcing immigration law in communities and at the border.
Despite their previous calls for ICE to be scrapped, there has been little resistance or pushback from Democrats about ICE enforcement under President Biden as the border crisis continues to wreak havoc on U.S. citizens, cities and communities.
Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — two Democrats who sought their party’s nomination for president in 2020 — are prominent leaders who previously led calls for ICE to be abolished outright, or broken up during former President Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House.
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Several Democrats called for ICE to be abolished during Trump’s tenure in the White House. (Getty Images)
In 2018, during an appearance on CNN, Gillibrand said: “I don’t think ICE today is working as intended. . . . I believe that it has become a deportation force, and I think you should separate the criminal justice from the immigration issues.”
“I think you should reimagine ICE under a new agency with a very different mission and take those two missions out,” she added at the time. “We believe that we should protect families who need our help and that is not what ICE is doing today, and that’s why I believe you should get rid of it, start over, reimagine it and build something that actually works.”
Warren also took issue with the agency in 2018, writing in a Facebook post in June 2018: “[Trump’s] deeply immoral actions have made it obvious that we need to rebuild our immigration system from top to bottom, starting by replacing ICE with something that reflects our values.”
Though he didn’t directly call for ICE to be abolished, a 2019 plan released by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an…
