AFF

Policy 1AC
 Criminalization

Contention One - Criminalization

President Trump has rapidly expanded ICE into a mass deportation gestapo – it is
Legally Required to fill its detention centers
Brodey, 2018 – Washington correspondent for the Minnesota Post [Sam 07/03/2018 How
‘Abolish ICE’ became the left’s new rallying cry [Link]
new-rallying-cry/]

ICE now has over 20,000 employees and is responsible for enforcing over 400 federal laws. But its main responsibility is to identify, arrest,
detain, and deport undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. It does this on a massive scale: at any given moment,
tens of thousands of people are detained at hundreds of ICE-affiliated facilities around the country. ( ICE is the only federal law enforcement

agency required by Congress to meet a quota: at least 34,000 detained migrants must fill ICE’s
beds each night.) Since its creation, ICE has also deported hundreds of thousands of people from the U.S. each year. In fiscal year 2004, it deported 241,000 people;
in fiscal year 2013, it deported 435,000 people. Arrests and deportations by ICE peaked under President Barack

Obama, but tapered off in the last years of his administration. Trump’s ICE has become more
aggressive in arresting suspected undocumented migrants, with officers carrying out raids on
homes and workplaces around the U.S., from meatpacking plants to nurseries. During fiscal year 2017, covering the first nine months
of Trump’s presidency, ICE deported 226,000 people and arrested 143,000, an increase of more than 40

percent over the same period in 2016. In addition to administering some detention centers for migrants, ICE also runs
three facilities for separated families, putting the agency under greater scrutiny as public outcry over the administration’s policy grows.

Trump has tied ICE to his white nationalist goals.

Narea, 2020 – immigration reporter for Vox [Nicole “How “abolish ICE” helped bring abolitionist ideas
into the mainstream” Jul 9, 2020, [Link]
black-lives-matter]

Immigrant advocates have opposed ICE since its inception, arguing that it has criminalized and
unjustly targeted communities of color. But the agency didn’t attract widespread scrutiny until
Trump came into office and started using the agency to enforce his hardline immigration
policies, especially the separation of immigrant families in 2018. “The view of the agency as something that was purely malignant
really happened after Trump was elected and ramped up interior enforcement in a way that was tied

pretty explicitly to the creation of a white ethno-state ,” said Sean McElwee, the co-founder of the nonprofit think tank Data for
Progress who is credited with coining the #AbolishICE hashtag. The Abolish ICE movement drew from the movement to abolish prisons in developing strategies to “defund,
shame, and create popular dissent around deportation,” Mohapatra said. Leading progressives, most notably Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, popularized the idea of abolishing
the agency, bucking the prevailing view of mainstream Democrats at the time who called for keeping the agency intact while reforming it.

ICE’s enforcement methods reinforce Criminalization – they entangle

immigration with the Criminal Justice System. Civil and Criminal systems should
be separate, but under Trump, they are not.
Schriro, 2017 - founding director of the Office of Detention Policy and Planning at
the DHS [Dora 04/27/17 The Hill “Don't make immigration custody part of the criminal justice system ‘
[Link] - TA]

Don't make immigration custody part of the criminal justice system Following fast on the heels of announcements to
deport many more immigrants, regardless of their circumstances, and to increase immigration detention capacity to carry out that plan, last week, the New York

Times reported Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would roll back detention
standards and disband its Office of Detention Policy and Planning . These reversals will make it
easier and more lucrative for correctional facilities to qualify and will entice the sheriffs and
private prison companies that operate them to contract with ICE as it expands its capacity at all
cost. Most notably, the Office’s closing signals a growing inclination towards the criminalization of
immigration. The tendency to conflate individuals in ICE custody with those in the criminal
justice system is simply wrong as a matter of law, policy and economics . ICE can hold someone until his or her
removal or release, but ICE cannot punish anyone. Period. Only the criminal justice system can do that. The majority of people held by ICE have no criminal history so there is
no basis in law to punish them, and those who have a record must fulfill any penalties the criminal justice system imposes before ICE takes them into custody. From its inception
in 2009, ODPP brought expertise to ICE in areas other than enforcement; expertise that it lacks and that led to much needed improvements in detention conditions and
the administration should rescind its
bolstered the agency’s accountability and transparency with the American public. Here are a few of the reasons why

decision to close the Office and reverse its use of practices that blur bright-line differences between criminal
and civil law: 1. Punishing ICE detainees is impermissible. A criminal court can sentence a person to prison as punishment. The immigration court cannot. The legal
remedy for a person unlawfully present in the U.S. is either removal or relief. It is not detention. 2. Without the most basic protections provided in the ICE Standards and
ongoing monitoring by the Office to ensure compliance, conditions of detention will quickly deteriorate. For example, translation services, slated for elimination, may appear to
be a nicety but are in fact, a necessity. Last year, ICE held individuals from 178 countries, each with its own language and dialects. To eliminate translation services is to render
most detained persons incapable of interaction with ICE or the immigration court. 3. The people in ICE detention facilities are not the same as pretrial inmates and sentenced
prisoners in jail or prison. Their violations are civil, not criminal, and those with criminal histories typically are not dangerous. In fact, ICE classifies the majority of individuals
in its custody as low risk of escape or assault. They are working parents, school-aged children, productive members of their communities. Assigning them to secure facilities is
Despite the stark differences in case law and clientele, the administration is
excessive and excessively expensive.

doubling down, expanding its use of correctional facilities, correctional staff, and applying
incarceration’s means of control — counts, searches, shakedowns, and the like — towards the
criminalization of what is a civil justice system.

ICE raids are devastating to immigrant communities - they rip out important
members with traumatizing deportations
Mathis 2019 – freelance writer [Joel, 07-23-19, The Week, “Immigration raids are traumatising American
communities”, [Link] ACC 07-10-20]

The people of Hermitage, Tennessee are heroes. On Monday, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement tried to arrest a Hermitage man — an undocumented
migrant — as he left his home. They failed to make the arrest, however, because the man's neighbors formed a human chain to protect him. After four hours, the ICE agents gave
up. "I could see if these people were bad criminals, but they're not, they're just trying to provide for their kids," Stacey Farley, a neighbor, told reporters. "The family don't bother
nobody, they work every day, they come home, the kids jump on their trampoline, it's just a community." The people of Hermitage did what you hope Americans will do when an
outsider threatens their community: They joined together and resisted. That's what heroes do. While that was happening, though, a bigger immigration crackdown seemed to be
The federal government announced Monday that it is dispensing with  due process —
in the offing.

"streamlining" immigration enforcement — to allow ICE agents to confront suspected migrants

anywhere they can find them and ship them out of the country without so much as a court
hearing. If ICE catches you on the street and you can't prove immediately that you're a citizen, or that you've lived in the U.S. more than two years, the agency will be able
to ship you out of country in a matter of days. This new, tougher policy promises to be a disaster. To understand why, all you have to do is look at what happened in Hermitage
ICE raids are intended to remove unwanted outsiders from American communities, but
on Monday.

they often end up disrupting those communities instead . In many cases, hawkish immigration
enforcement does more harm than good: Research suggests the effects of ICE raids on local
communities can be, quite literally, traumatic and disastrous. President Trump and the immigration hawks justify these policies
by presenting illegal immigration as a disaster for America. Don't forget that when announcing his run for president, Trump said that "when Mexico sends its people, they're not
sending their best. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're
undocumented migrants have a
rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." This narrative simply isn't supported by the data: Studies show that

lower crime rate than native-born Americans. But forget the dry statistics for a second. It's true that a sudden influx of immigrants can
sometimes cause a backlash among longtime residents. Just as often, however , the lived experience of cities and towns across the

country is that migrants, documented or not, stitch themselves into the fabric of the community :
They go to church, they send their kids to school, they own local businesses. When these people are suddenly snatched away, the

communities they leave behind are wounded. That's why neighbors fight back. It's not just Hermitage. In Lawrence, Kansas, where I
live, hundreds of residents mobilized last year when immigration officials grabbed a longtime local resident off his front lawn. Thankfully, that man was eventually returned to
his family and the community. In Granger, Indiana, an uproar ensued when a longtime resident — the owner of a popular local cafe — was deported. The town of Mount
Pleasant, Iowa, meanwhile, has a plan to protect children caught up in deportation efforts. These are just a few examples — not of political correctness run amok, but of
communities protecting themselves and their people. Immigration hawks will, no doubt, be angered by what happened in Hermitage. The man who evaded arrest is in the
United States illegally, they will say. If he wants to live here, he should have tried to come to the country through approved means. That argument isn't entirely wrong. The law
matters. But it's not entirely right, either. It assumes that U.S. immigration law, as currently constructed, is correctly constituted, that the process is reasonable, and that it
reflects the democratic will of the American people. In fact, polls show American voters generally think that immigration strengthens the country. Meanwhile, efforts to reform
immigration laws have been consistently blocked by a small minority in Congress since the administration of former President George W. Bush. So, in the absence of wise and
just lawmaking, residents of towns and cities across the country are right to use legal means of resisting ICE's enforcement efforts. They probably have a better sense than Trump
about who really belongs in their community. Just ask them. "We don't want to see anything happen to them," Hermitage resident Angela Glass said of the family ICE agents
tried to disrupt. "They're good people. They've been here 14 years, leave them alone. To me, they're considered Americans."
ICE brutally terrorizes immigrant communities with detention and family
separation
McElwee, 2018 – Co-Founder of Data for Progress [Sean, March 9, The Nation “It’s Time to Abolish
ICE A mass-deportation strike force is incompatible with democracy and human rights”
[Link] Acc 7/4/20 TA]

Dan Canon is running for Congress in Indiana’s ninth district this year. A career civil-rights lawyer, Canon filed one of the cases against gay-marriage bans that eventually became the landmark Obergefell v.
Hodges, and he proudly wore a Notorious RBG shirt under his suit to the Supreme Court. He is currently representing individuals suing Donald Trump for inciting violence at his rallies. Canon has also defended
clients swept up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, and fought a Kafkaesque deportation system that, at one point, wouldn’t even disclose the location of his client. Now Canon believes ICE should
be abolished entirely. “I don’t think a lot of people have any kind of direct experience with ICE, so they don’t really know what they do or what they’re about. If they did, they’d be appalled,” Canon told me.

“ICE as it presently exists is an agency devoted almost solely to cruelly and wantonly breaking
up families. The agency talks about, and treats, human beings like they’re animals. They scoop up
people in their apartments or their workplaces and take them miles away from their spouses and
children.” The idea of defunding ICE has gained traction among immigrant-rights groups horrified by the speed at which, under President Donald Trump,
the agency has ramped up an already brutal deportation process. Mary Small, policy director at Detention Watch Network, said,
“Responsible policymakers need to be honest about the fact that the core of the agency is broken.” Her group led the charge to defund ICE with its #DefundHate campaign last year. Groups like Indivisible Project

ICE is terrorizing
and the Center for Popular Democracy have also called for defunding ICE. Brand New Congress, a progressive PAC, has the proposal in its immigration platform. “

American communities right now,” said Angel Padilla, policy director of the Indivisible Project.
“They’re going into schools, entering hospitals, conducting massive raids, and separating
children from parents every day. We are funding those activities, and we need to use all the
leverage we have to stop it.”

ICE relies on the Fear of Immigrants – their rhetoric labels All immigrants as
Criminals. Our deportation culture scapegoats and dehumanizes All immigrants
Loffman 2018 – PBS politics producer [Matt, 07-6-18, PBS, “What’s driving the movement to Abolish ICE?”,
[Link] ACC 07-13-20, AR]
To understand the current fight over ICE, here’s what we know about the agency’s history, its role under Trump and what’s next. How was ICE created? Immigration became a federal responsibility and priority in
the late 1800s and was formalized as a division of the Treasury Department in 1891. In the more than 100 years since, immigration has been shuffled among several federal agencies, including the Commerce,
Labor and Justice Departments, before landing in the newly-created department of Homeland Security in the years after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. “Whatever federal government agency handles immigration is a

great window into how we think about immigration and its role in the United States,” said Erika Lee, the director of the Immigration History
Research Center at University of Minnesota. ICE’s recent home inside DHS signals a decades-
long “shift in America as nation of immigrants and thinking about immigration as a good to
immigration as a national security threat.” The most recent home inside DHS signals a decades-long “shift in America as nation of immigrants and thinking
about immigration as a good to immigration as a national security threat,” she added. While Lee says it may seem like there’s a newfound outsized

fear of immigrants, she sees echoes of the nation’s complicated history and response to outsiders, one that stretches back more than a century to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the
backlash against Irish Catholics in the mid-1800s. The current Immigration and Customs Enforcement was one of three agencies established in 2003 from what used to be the Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS). ICE’s mandate is to enforce approximately 400 federal immigration and labor-related statutes, primarily in the nation’s interior, and work to remove people for immigration violations. One duty
includes monitoring businesses for undocumented workers, but patrolling the border itself is left to Customs and Border Protection, another agency formed in the 2003 shakeup. ICE and immigration under

Trump Since Trump took office, historians like Deborah Kang, a professor at California State University San Marco and author of “The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on
the US-Mexico Border,” have seen a wholesale shift in ICE’s priorities. “They’re focused on removing green card holders

— legal permanent residents,” Kang said. The current ICE policy stems from the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, a 1996 law signed by then-
President Bill Clinton. It says immigrants can be deported for committing any crime, including misdemeanors. The country’s network of 200 ICE detention centers began to pop up in the years after Sept. 11, when
there was a surge of funding for immigration enforcement. That funding has more than doubled since 2005, according to the Center for Migration Studies. The average daily population of immigrant detainees has

Amy Gottlieb, an
also surged since the 1996 law was enacted, from around 9,000 a day in 1996 to more than 38,000 a day in 2017, according to CMS. In addition to new enforcement priorities,

immigration lawyer and activist currently working for American Friends Service Committee,
sees a new trend in language, too. “There’s been a lot of rhetoric and a lot of anger and a lot of
suspicion and a lot of scapegoating around immigrants,” Gottlieb said . She points to Trump’s election as something that “really
opened up language that people were sitting on, holding onto, not willing to put out there publicly,”

Gottlieb said. “Trump made it okay to suddenly talk about an invasion and talk about
immigrants as criminals.”

ICE’s Purpose is dehumanization, which is the first step in genocidal cleansing.

Abolition allows us to reform immigration to support humane treatment
Hong 19 - professor of law at Boston College Law School [Kari E., 10 Reasons Why Congress
Should Defund ICE's Deportation Force (March 11, 2019). 43 NYU Review of Law & Social Change Harbinger 2019, Available at
SSRN: [Link]
Ninth, the ERO deportation force’s overly-aggressive deportation strategy dehumanizes
immigrants, which undermines public support for needed immigration reform. As a candidate and president,
Donald Trump has called immigrants, “rapists,” “criminals,” “thieves,” “MS-13” gang members, “murderers,” “terrorists,” and “animals.”86 President Trump’s claims

that immigrants have bad character and have committed criminal acts are more akin to propaganda than
terms within reasonable parameters of a policy debate. 87 It is critical to recognize that President Trump’s repeated defense of—and
call for the expansion of—ICE’s powers is premised on the same falsehoods that immigrants are criminals

and undocumented immigration threatens our nation’s safety. President Trump is defining his presidency with this rhetoric,
but he did not start it. In 1996, Congress enacted the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (“IIRIRA”), which eliminated numerous avenues that
people previously had to legalize their status. This law also codified the wrongful conflation of immigration and crime by using the term “Illegal Immigration” in its title.
IIRIRA’s irrational end to providing legal status to immigrants created the size and permanence of the undocumented population,90 and its false reification of “illegal
immigration” as a matter needing the intervention of criminal law enforcement laid the foundation for ICE to come into being. When ICE was created in 2002, its mandate was
to deport all people who were deportable. If the government suddenly made it very difficult to obtain driver’s licenses and then described anyone who drove without a license as
“illegal drivers,” the public might be more inclined to spend billions of dollars each year to arrest and jail the drivers—which has been our country’s immigration policy for the
past 20 years. The term “illegal” would distract the public from realizing that it is not the drivers who are lacking good character, but it is the government that suddenly and
The ERO deportation force brings into full view the impact of this false
irrationally stopped issuing driver’s licenses.

rhetoric that dehumanizes all immigrants as criminals. Hannah Arendt observed that Nazi
Germany achieved its goals in part because it had convinced the public that if a group of people
were criminal, they deserved whatever punishment the government meted out. She wrote, “[T]he inclusion of
criminals [among the targeted groups of undesirables] is necessary in order to make plausible the propagandist claim of the movement that the institution exists of asocial
elements.”93 Stated another way, if our government is spending billions of dollars each year on a hammer that is the ERO deportation force, few will question why every single
Most Americans support immigration
immigrant is treated as a nail, a criminal and dangerous element for which removal is warranted.

reform. This fact is not surprising when people understand who in fact is immigrating, regardless of whether their entry is by plane or swimming the Rio Grande. In one
of his last formal speeches, President Ronald Reagan eloquently paid tribute to how immigration shapes and renews our country’s values. In his words, We lead the world
because unique among nations, we draw our people, our strength, from every country and every corner of the world. . . .Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of
But
opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge; always leading the world to the next frontier.

ICE’s tactics of force perpetuates myths of dangerousness and obscures the reality that
immigration, and policies that welcome immigrants, are among our nation’s critical
underpinnings. The ERO deportation force’s theatrics of force and the dehumanization of
immigrants give the ERO a false legitimacy. Moreover, the excessive and relentless arrests of
immigrants distract Americans from the truth, which is that it is irrational of our government to
refuse to offer legal status to those who contribute to our country. This distraction further keeps our politicians from
pursuing the needed, common sense immigration reform that will legalize status of the undocumented. The sooner the ERO deportation force

is defunded, the sooner we can achieve real immigration reform . As demonstrated by President Reagan’s words, a president
lionized by the contemporary Republican party, embracing immigrants is not a new or trendy liberal idea. It is an American one, deeply rooted in our past and critical to our
country’s future.

The criminalization of immigration is a strategy of “attrition through

enforcement.” It is nothing less than an intentional policy of Nativism and Ethnic
Cleansing. Dehumanizing and terrorizing communities leaves them vulnerable to
elimination.
Michalowski, 2013 -prof of Criminology, Northern Arizona University [Raymond Journal
of Crime and Justice Volume 36, “Ethnic cleansing American style: SB 1070, nativism and the contradictions of neo-liberal
globalization” [Link]

US history shows that whenever high levels of immigration have collided with economic
recession, the results have been a rise in Nativist sentiments, populist backlash against both
immigrants and the government for letting them in, and major reformulation of immigration controls. This dynamic has occurred four times since the late nineteenth century. These were the Asian
exclusion movement in the 1880s, deportations and the creation of ethnic quotas favoring Northern Europeans in the 1920s, Operation Wetback in the 1950s to deport braceros back to Mexico, and the

current wave of anti-immigration politics targeting Latinos that began in the late 1990s, reached fever pitch after
September 11, 2001, and remains high as at the time of writing in the summer of 2012. The current moment provides an ideal window into the contradictions between capital accumulation and state legitimacy.
Between the early 1970s and 1994 the US federal government followed a relatively ‘open’ immigration policy. Formal immigration policies favored family reunification, while IRCA had significantly increased the
number of legal immigrants who could sponsor residency applications by close relatives outside the country. At the informal level, the US border with Mexico remained relatively porous, with migrant farm labor
easily crossing into the United States for harvest seasons, and others finding their way into the country for more permanent jobs and residences with the help of a coyote at the cost of a few hundred dollars.
Anyone involved with the labor pool, particularly in the Southwest, during the latter decades of the twentieth century knew that the employment of undocumented workers operated according to a wink-and-a-nod
system. Under IRCA, employers were required to obtain documentation of citizenship or legal residency from workers. In response, undocumented workers would buy relatively inexpensive false documents, often
of poor quality. Employers dutifully copied the numbers from these fake papers, and deducted Social Security, Medicare and income taxes that workers would never be able to collect. In 1996, I interviewed a
document dealer operating out of the back of a 1970s era Pontiac station wagon parked in an empty corner lot adjacent to a restaurant on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles. He offered me a Xeroxed Social Security
card for 75 dollars. For an additional 50 dollars I could purchase power company bills, a library card, and rent receipts sent to a common address and matching the name on the Social Security card. For a mere 125
dollars I could have everything I needed to get a job under a new identity. The system worked. Immigrants had jobs. Employers had workers. Capital accumulation grew. As the millennium drew closer, the system
began to unravel. In 1994, after a heated political campaign, California voters passed Prop 187, which would deny unauthorized immigrants a suite of public services, from primary education to health care. After a
four-year battle, the American Civil Liberties Union succeeded in having Prop 187 ruled unconstitutional (ACLU 1999). Nevertheless, politicians took an important lesson about the political benefits of promoting
anti-immigration sentiment. Recognizing the volatility of the immigration issue in California and the Southwest more generally, in 1994 President Bill Clinton implemented Operation Gatekeeper, a strategy to
close off easy transit points from the Tijuana region into the westernmost portions of San Diego county by dramatically increasing the level of border surveillance, interdiction of border-crossers and stepped up
internal enforcement, that is, enforcement beyond the border region (Nevins 2001). At the very moment Clinton moved to harden the Mexico-San Diego border, however, the passage of the North American Free
Trade Agreement sparked a steep devaluation of the Mexican peso and a subsequent sharp rise in Mexicans seeking entry into the United States (Blecker 1999). From 1994 forward the federal government pursued
a strategy of incremental growth in border and interior immigration enforcement in an effort to keep growing anti-immigration sentiment from turning into a hot-button election issue. Many others have detailed
the legal and human consequences of immigration restriction policies, so I will not go into detail here (see for instance: Massy et al. 2003, Michalowski 2008, Nevins 2008, Dunn 2009, Rodriquez 2012). Suffice it
 the political Right had molded the populist and Nativist backlash fuelled by
to say that by the turn of the millennium

economic concerns and cultural fears into politically effective demands for hyper-militarization of the US-Mexico border and removal
of illegalized immigrants from US soil. At the level of cultural fear, native-born, non-Hispanic whites of European heritage living in Arizona, California, New Mexico,
Nevada, Texas and Utah found themselves becoming an ethnic minority, while Whites as a whole were on track to loose their role as a majority of the national population (Tavernise 2012) This led, among other
things, to a widely held belief within the anti-immigration community that continued immigration would eventually lead to a Mexican ‘reconquista’ of the territories taken from Mexico after the US-Mexico war. As
more and more Mexicans become US citizens and voters, so the theory goes, they will constitute electoral majorities in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. They will then use their electoral power to take
over State governments. From that position they will then lead their states to secede from the United States and rejoin Mexico (Hansen 2003). As bizarre as this scenario may sound to anyone who understands
national and State politics, many anti-immigration activists in Arizona that I interviewed believe deeply that reconquista is a real threat to the integrity of the United States. At the same time that anti-immigration
activists in the Southwest feared a Mexican reconquista, residents of once nearly all-white midwestern towns found the ethnic composition of their communities changing as Latino immigrants increasingly took

The sense that the ‘face of America’ was

jobs in meatpacking and construction no longer attractive to native-born residents (Kandel and Parado 2004).

changing became an important breeding ground for fear, anxiety, hostility toward immigrants and
increasing vocal calls to ‘close the border’ as exemplified by the extremist views of Congressmen such as Hayworth (2006) of Arizona and Tancredo (2006) of Colorado. These sentiments had already taken hold in

The 9/11 attacks threw a seemingly never-

many parts of the country by the time 11 Al Queda militants destroyed the World Trade Center in New York.

ending supply of gasoline on the fires of anti-immigration sentiment. From that time until now, the claimed ‘terrorist’ threat has
served as an effective moral shield behind which many restrictionists have been able to promote racially motivated anti-immigrant policies directed not at Muslims, but at Latinos (Alden 2009). As a whole,
American workers saw little economic benefit from globalization. From 1980 until 2008, wages of American workers remained stagnant, and then dropped with the onset of the Great Recession. Middle-class life
styles could only be sustained by two incomes, with subsequent loss of at-home caretakers for children and the aged (Drum 2010). Meanwhile, American households began taking on increasing debt in order to
afford the perceived components of a middle-class life for themselves and their children (Livingston 2011). As personal debt grew and economic security shrank, the sense of personal vulnerability increased
(Sheirholz and Mishel 2011). These negative economic forces were not felt equally throughout the society. Instead, the wage gap between those with college educations and those without higher education grew
substantially (Jones and Weinberg 2000). Equally important was the rise of a small sector of super-well-paid workers in finance, high-tech, and corporate management, while well-paying industrial jobs that had
once been the core of a blue-collar, middle class were being destroyed at a fierce rate (Krugman 2011). As those who once had a ‘fear of falling’ actually began to fall, they provided a fertile arena for anti-immigrant
sentiments and calls for restrictionist laws (Ehrenreich 1990). Not all White workers outside the most privileged occupations shared these anti-immigration sentiments. Many continued to believe and behave in
solidarity with workers in general, whatever their ethnicity or citizenship status. A number of unions argued that the solution lay not in immigration restrictions and deportations, but in a new labor law regime
that would enforce fair labor standards for all workers, regardless of citizenship status (Bacon 2008). These proposals fell on deaf political ears. The Conservative turn in US politics had already set an American

Conservative believers held that if the country would only return to

revitalization movement in motion. Like the Ghost Dance,

the ways of the forefathers, in this case an imagined era of nativism, racism, White hegemony
and closely guarded borders, the problems of the present would be resolved . It was in this climate that SB 1070 and the
wider policy of attrition through enforcement seemed poised to spread throughout the country. SB 1070: the basics The Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, commonly known as SB 1070,

a
was passed into law by the Arizona State Legislature and signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer in April, 2010. SB1070 was more than a case of eccentric law-making by right-wing Arizonans. It was part of

national movement to establish ‘attrition through enforcement’ as a centerpiece of US

immigration policy. According to Mark Kirkorian, head of the anti-immigration Center for Integration Studies, and one of the policy's architects, attrition through
enforcement is designed to make ordinary life so unlivable that illegalized immigrants and their
families will ‘self-deport’ (Kirkorian 2005). The central strategy of attrition through enforcement, I contend, is a form of
ethnic cleansing based on using local police to enforce immigration laws, thereby creating
sufficiently widespread fear of detection among illegalized immigrants that they wil l, as is most commonly
claimed, ‘be driven out’ of the state, and hopefully the country. In June 2011, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney endorsed SB 1070, saying he favored enforcement strategies that
would promote ‘self-deportation,’ thereby declaring clearly (if perhaps, unknowingly) his support for ethnic cleansing (Boroff and Planas 2012). In order to compel irregular immigrants to self deport, SB 1070: 1.
Defined the federal civil violation of failing to possess appropriate immigration documents as a criminal act under Arizona state law. 2. Authorized local police to question and arrest without a warrant anyone they
suspected of being an illegal immigrant. 3. Made it a crime to ‘harbor’ or ‘transport’ unauthorized immigrants, thus criminalizing many of the everyday social relations between immigrants and citizens or legal
residents. 4. Authorized the state to impound any vehicle driven by or used to transport an irregular migrant. 5. Made it a state crime for irregular migrants to seek employment. 6. Prohibited cities from passing
laws that would limit their police departments from enforcing SB 1070. This provision targeted so-called ‘sanctuary cities’ (e.g. Flagstaff, Tucson) that directed local law enforcers to refrain from inquiring about
immigration status as a routine practice unless it was directly relevant to the immediate situation such as the discovery of a ‘drop house’ filled with presumptively undocumented immigrants or determining if
someone held in jail custody was eligible for counselor services from their native country as provided by international law (Columbia Human Rights Law Review 2011). 7. Intensified measures to exclude illegalized
immigrants from seeking social services, even when they were doing so on behalf of their US citizen children (FAIR 2010b). Just before and immediately after the passage of SB 1070, some illegalized immigrants
and their families left Arizona because of the fear created by SB 1070 (Zeiger 2010). However, rather than leaving the country, some moved to US states perceived as less hostile to Latinos (Faherty 2010, Gomez
2010, Gonzales 2011). A majority of illegalized immigrants in Arizona, however, were unable to leave, and instead receded into the shadows of Arizona's social landscape (Amster 2010, Gonzales 2011). Key reasons
for staying in Arizona were lack of money to move, feeling too old or too established to restart life elsewhere, fear of leaving parents, children or siblings who could not or would not leave the state, and lack of
opportunity elsewhere. Some also stayed in the hope that the law would eventually be overturned and/or the US government would eventually pass a comprehensive immigration reform law that would legalize

their status (Michalowski 2011). Rather than criminalizing specific harmful behaviors, attrition through enforcement
drives undocumented immigrants into social spaces where work, education, social services, legal
protections and many of the public interactions of ordinary daily life are increasingly
unobtainable. The theory is that increased fear of detection coupled with narrow or no access to normal life activities such as work, mobility, recreation, health care, police protection and social
services will lead irregular migrants to self deport, taking their US citizen children with them (Kirkorian 2005). This legislative strategy both rests on and

reproduces a hyper-criminalization of illegalized immigrants that transforms the act of having

entered the country ‘without inspection’ or overstaying a visa into a master status, a quality that renders everything the
person is and does as criminal (Downes 2007).

Prioritize Dehumanization – denying the humanity of a community makes

genocide and war inevitable to cleanse the world of threats.
Johnson 18 - professor of justice, law and criminology at American University
(Robert, Condemned to Die: Life Under Sentence of Death, ebook from University of Michigan, pg.123-125, JMP)

***start of footnote #102*** 102 In making these assertions, I am drawing on a large body of research and theory. For a general review of these materials, see Johnson (1986)
one’s
and Haritos-Fatouros (2003). There are lively debates in the area of institutional violence. Broadly speaking, one school of thought focuses on how

conscience must be neutralized in order to carry out violence against a person who poses no
immediate threat to one’s welfare. Moral disengagement and objectification of others are key considerations. This view, perhaps best exemplified in
the work of Milgram (1963); Bandura, Ross, and Ross (1961); and Haney and Zimbardo (1998), separates objectification from dehumanization. See Bandura (1999) for a
comprehensive review. Other scholars, like Haslam (2006), Bastian and Haslam (2010), and Haslam and Loughnan (2014), think of
objectification as a species of dehumanization, which includes seeing the person as an object, or
animal, or morally degraded creature outside the normal moral discourse or social community.
Rafter (2016: 2215), in her seminal research on genocide, exemplifies the view that one’s conscience
must be neutralized to allow for the atrocities that are part and parcel of genocide : My answer to
the “How could they do it?” question runs as follows: psychological mechanisms involved in moral

disengagement lead to a temporary and selective shutdown in empathy and identification with
others; and that shutdown leads to the objectification that enables individuals to commit
genocide. This is the splitting process. First comes moral disengagement, then neutralization of
empathy, and finally the objectification that makes victims seem like objects, things we can get
rid of rather than individuals like ourselves. Other scholars, like Fiske and Rai (2015) focus on institutional
violence as an example of virtuous violence, which it to say, violence of which one should be
proud, not ashamed. The challenge here is to neutralize repugnance to the often gory physical act of violence; the motivation to engage in violence is a largely
The agents of virtuous
settled matter. In the case of virtuous violence, persons believe they are doing good and feel obligated to carry out acts of violence.
violence are committed followers of beliefs that justify the violence in which they engage. This does not mean that
virtuous violence is easy. It isn’t. Agents who inflict virtuous violence will likely be repelled by the acts of violence themselves, which often involve victims who beg, plead,
collapse, or react with eerie stolidity or unseemly emotion when brutal pain is inflicted upon them. These reactions can be construed to validate the degraded status of the
victims, but reactions to violence among victims are tangibly visible human reactions. It is one thing to embrace and, in one’s work, validate an abstract belief and another to
carry out a concrete act in violation of a flesh-and-blood individual. We are socialized to abhor violence and most of us do. Paradoxically, rising to the occasion to inflict virtuous
people hate
violence can be one measure of commitment of the person carrying out such violence. Fiske and Rai (2015: 515) write: “Now, for the most part,

hurting others. It is extremely distressing to directly kill or injure another person face-to-face,
no matter how socioculturally justified or legally obligatory it is . . . Like many other moral acts, killing or hurting
others can be difficult, requiring training, social support and modeling, effort, practice, and experience before it
becomes second nature. Few people become unambivalently dedicated to moral violence or do it easily, but that is true of many difficult moral practices other
than violence—people often resist or fail to do what is morally required of them, even when they have no doubt about whether they should do it.” There is overlap in these
perspectives. Whether one is a passively or reluctantly obedient participant or an actively engaged
agent of violence, support for one’s violence is helpful. This support may come from peers or authority figures or organizational
structures. Authorizations from organizations to engage in violence, especially when embraced by

one’s peers, give permission and hence a degree of reassurance that one is in the right when one
is called upon to use violence. Training and institutional routines can make violence more palatable, whether one thinks of the violence as virtuous or as
a repugnant but necessary evil. Dehumanization—socialization or training that allows actors to see the target

of violence as an object, animal, or morally degraded creature—can create a motive for violence
(protection from dangerous, animal-like others) or can smooth the way to work in service of what one takes to be

virtuous beliefs (cleansing the world of others who would contaminate it or make others unsafe) .
Persons who are ridding the world of dangerous and unregenerate criminals in service of legal and other institutions they trust presumably need less to mute their conscience
than they would under other circumstances. None of the execution team officers I interviewed expressed guilt, remorse, or regret, at least before, during, or after the executions
they conducted and that I studied firsthand (Johnson, 1998). Socialization and training of persons engaged in institutional violence is meant to indoctrinate them in the value of
what they do. To the degree persons have doubts about the virtue of the enterprise, some degree of neutralization of conscience may be sought by the individual or promoted by
the organization.
 Plan
Plan Text: The United States federal government should abolish the Immigration
and Customs Enforcement agency.
 Solvency

Contention Two - Solvency

Abolishing ICE is necessary to respect the dignity of immigrants as people – ICE

operates secret detention centers which normalizes the dehumanization of
immigrants.
Jack 19 – American Studies major at Macalester College [Suzanna "ICE and the Unquestioned
Human Cost of Efficiency: A Moral Reckoning,"Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities: Vol. 8 : Iss. 1 , Article 7.
Available at: [Link]

Donald Trump has called for a new “deportation force” that would maximize number of
immigrants deported each year. By referring to the idea of a “deportation force”, Trump
contributes to the narrative of efficient practices at the cost of human lives and morality. The
concept of maximizing the number of immigrants deported each year will mean continuing to
cut basic resources necessary for human life from detention centers, and attempts to
continuously carry out deportations as efficiently as possible . As McKibben states, a fast, cheap, and easy economy is in many
5 ways, an American tenant and value. The lives of undocumented folks are negligible in this process and not

valued, allowing for a moral excusing of ICE practices. Unconventional Means of Detainment The other major way
in which ICE contributes to an unethical, “efficient” deportation regime is their means of
detaining people at “black sites” which often include many unregulated detention centers (Romero
2017). Currently, ICE has been accused of having holding facilities at hotels, office buildings, and basements. Oftentimes, the staff who work at these sites give ICE officials
official permission to detain people at these sites or illegally give ICE access to private information (Romero 2017). In 2017, Motel 6, one of the largest motel chains in the
country provided information of “Latino sounding” guests to immigration authorities leading to their arrest and detainment (Romero 2017). ICE invaded the rooms without a
warrant and detained people, often in their motel rooms. (Romero 2017). According to an official response by Motel 6 representatives, the “Practice was “introduced at the local
level” without knowledge from higher up” (Romero 2017). From an economic lens, the concept of efficiency here is functioning perfectly. By establishing small networks within a
larger context (for instance, ICE officers collaborating with local managers of Motel 6 sites) and mutually deciding to detain folks inside, they can bypass forms of regulation on
both the ICE and Motel 6 side. Furthermore, by detaining immigrants in their hotel rooms, the public has no idea that arrests are happening because immigrants are hidden in
One of the major dangers of ICE housing immigrants in unconventional places is that the
plain sight.

public's perception of immigration detention still exists within a strict binary . When 2018
headlines emerged that children were being separated from their parents at the border and were
housed at detention facilities on the border, the response was warranted anger and indignation.
At the same time, despite what was called a new abuse of power by the Trump administration, the existence of these detention facilities been known by the public for years. In
that way, the detention of children still fits into our collective mentality of what was “normal” for the deportation regime, and I argue that it also offset the unconventional ways
in which ICE is detaining immigrants. There is little means for the public to conceptualize people being unlawfully detained in the spaces of everyday life because of how rigidly
we define where detained people exist. Expanding off of the concept of place and why it is vital to understand, author Karen Halttunen writes (There is) “...a strong sense of the
constructedness of place, of place-making as an ongoing and always contested process, and of the creative variety of cultural practices employed for placemaking” ( Halttunen
For ICE, efficiency
2006 ). The rigidity of where the public envisions people being housed under ICE 6 correlates to a set idea of place that can not be questioned.

is seen in leaning into the idea that immigrants are only being held at detention centers on the
border and allows for covert black sites to exist where the public is not watching. Not only is the
practice efficient because more arrests can be made, but additionally ICE can continue without
any level of public accountability in their treatment of detained immigrants. The question must
be asked “what now?” in regards to a deportation regime that continuously builds power in
unethical and unjust ways. My personal conclusion is simple, we must abolish ICE. ICE has only been in existence for 15 years, formed
as a response to the Homeland Security Act of 2002. While the hundreds of thousands of lives who have been impacted by ICE will continue to bear these traumas regardless of
to abolish ICE is to actively seek an opportunity to right a collective wrong in the
their existence or not, the

United States. Simply put, ICE is not needed in our country and only seeks to terrorize immigrant communities
in the name of state control. A common counterpoint to the importance of the existence of ICE is that the presence of undocumented people within them
directly correlates to an increase in crime and illegal activities. However there has not been a single recognized study to date that corroborates the claim that crime corresponds
with undocumented people. Current research has recently concluded that declared Sanctuary cities possess lower crime rates, and that native born citizens of the United States
Abolishing ICE is a matter of humanity, of recognizing that human
constantly commit more crimes (Gonzalez 2017).

worth is not contingent on citizenship and that the only purpose ICE serves is to benefit a
violent, capital economic that prizes efficiency over all else.
Only banning ICE solves – ICE empirically ignores attempts at accountability
Gottlieb 2018 - associate regional director of the American Friends Service
Committee [Amy June 23, "It is time to abolish ICE. It cannot be reformed," The Guardian,
[Link] 5/15/20 TA]

Many people across the country have seen ICE’s destructive practices and have called for
reforms. Both my personal and professional experiences have led me to believe that this is not
sufficient. There is no fix for an agency that was designed to tear apart families and communities
and with very little oversight or accountability. There is no reforming an organization based on
the idea that mass deportations make us safer. ICE itself must be abolished. ICE is a relatively new agency. It was
created in 2003 as part of a government response to 9/11 that included mass surveillance, racial profiling and militarism. Housed within the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ICE was positioned to view immigrants as a security threat, rather than as an integral part of communities.
Now the agency has over 20,000 employees and an annual budget of approximately $6bn. Before 2003, immigration enforcement was the
responsibility of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). After the creation of DHS, INS was divided into three separate agencies – ICE, US
INS and its
Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Although there were significant problems with
immigration enforcement, it did
not have as big a budget or as broad a mandate as ICE and CBP, nor the
same level of brutality and lack of accountability . In Ravi’s case, as in so many others, ICE has done its best to
avoid accountability at all costs. When the agency refused to issue a stay of deportation and we challenged them in court, they said that
the court has no jurisdiction over their decisions. When Ice detained Ravi and members of Congress asked for his release, ICE ignored the request.
When hundreds rally to ask ICE not to deport someone, ICE will often deport that person even more quickly. When immigrants are actively and
publicly challenging ICE practices, they or their family members are targeted for deportation to keep them quiet. Who does this behavior benefit?
Certainly not communities that are torn apart by these actions. Not taxpayers,
who are seeing billions of dollars funneled
toward a rogue law enforcement agency rather than towards things we actually need for safe and secure
communities – schools, housing, jobs, healthcare and infrastructure. And not Congress, whose directives ICE has routinely ignored.

Eliminating immigration detention would allow a due process approach, which is

more effective and humane
Markowitz, 19 – Professor of Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law [Peter L. The
Yale Law Journal 07-11-2019 “Abolish ICE… and Then What?” [Link]

there will be outlier cases where the

D. Pillar Four: Minimizing the Use of Physically Coercive State Power Even with the reforms outlined above,

agency is unsuccessful in bringing individuals into compliance or where an individual fails to

comply with the imposed scalable penalty, and where thereafter, the proportional punishment is
deemed to be deportation. In such cases, the United States has a legal and moral obligation to
64

find mechanisms to ensure people appear in court and comply with deportation orders without
unnecessarily severe deprivations of liberty. The first step in that effort must be to eliminate the
immigration-detention system. Virtually every other federal agency has found a way to enforce
its civil administrative scheme without putting people in cages . There is no reason why
deportation proceedings or even the deportation process itself must begin with handcuffs . For most of
U.S. history, those processes began with notices. The question then becomes, how can we more humanely ensure people’s
65

appearance in immigration court and ultimately, for some, their compliance with deportation
orders? The answer begins with due process. The data demonstrate that the most important thing we can do to improve appearance rates in immigration court is to provide
lawyers. The most recent publicly available data show that virtually every family who was released

from immigration detention and had a lawyer showed up for all of their immigration court
hearings (99%). Those without lawyers were significantly less likely to consistently appear (76%).67 Lawyers help ensure that individuals have accurate
66

information about the time and place of hearings. Lawyers also remove the terror of walking into an unfamiliar

courtroom alone and litigating in one of the most complex arenas of American law, against trained government prosecutors, without any legal training, and often
in an unfamiliar language. In addition, there is a wealth of empirical research about how the perception of

procedural fairness enhances compliance,68 which also helps explain the impact that lawyers have on appearance rates. Moreover, the
feasibility of an assigned-immigration-counsel program has been robustly demonstrated in the
City and State of New York, which have had universal appointed counsel programs dating back
to 2013. To be sure, implementing such a program on a national scale would be costly, but the massive scale-down in punitive
69

enforcement contemplated in pillar one would more than offset any such costs. Providing lawyers is thus the
first step toward ensuring that individuals know and comply with their obligations in immigration court.70 In addition, other countries such as Canada have engaged in
promising experiments with inducements to improve compliance with deportation orders.71 Canada used financial inducements of up to $2,000 to encourage voluntary
compliance with deportation orders. With the United States spending an average of $12,000 per deportation, the cost-saving opportunities of such a program are significant.72
The incentivizing force of money is self-evident but could be particularly powerful in this context, where low-income individuals are often extremely scared about returning to
countries where they may lack any means of economic survival. Other inducements for those who promptly comply with deportation orders—such as reduced wait times for
readmission and continued access to earned domestic benefits like Social Security—could also be powerful tools to promote compliance. 73

ICE cannot be reformed – it is a rogue agency – it perpetuates racist violence,

abuse and neglect.
Markowitz, 19 – Professor of Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law [Peter L. The
Yale Law Journal 07-11-2019 “Abolish ICE… and Then What?” [Link]

I. THE CASE AGAINST ICE

ICE was created in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks  and was fundamentally ill- 14

conceived from its inception. It has since amassed a notorious record of abuse, illegality, waste,
and ineffectiveness. Its predecessor agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), had been housed in the Department of
Justice (DOJ) and had a combined services and enforcement mission. 15 However, in creating ICE, Congress excised the services mission, placing those
functions in another agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). All immigration-related agencies then came under the purview of the
new Department of Homeland Security (DHS). 16 Themessage was clear: immigration policy would be a
component of the nation’s counterterrorism efforts, and ICE would be singularly focused on
punitive enforcement. While ICE’s civil-enforcement efforts, by its own assessment, are
unrelated to DHS’s national security mission, that mission has powerfully influenced ICE’s
17

heavy-handed tactics. ICE’s abusive tactics are well documented . The barbarism of separating
toddlers from their parents, holding them in cages, and forcing them to defend themselves in complex legal proceedings
against trained government lawyers is a daily reality . In addition, there is an established and ongoing pattern
18

of “egregious medical neglect in [immigration] detention facilities across the country.” Not 19

surprisingly, ICE’s mistreatment of detainees has led to a startling pattern of deaths in ICE
custody. In addition, ICE has amassed a well-earned reputation as a dishonest, racist, and
20 21 22

rogue agency that regularly flouts legal limits. 23

Calling for ICE be abolished is more than a policy demand. It demands that we
respect each person regardless of citizenship.
Jack 19 – American Studies major at Macalester College [Suzanna "ICE and the Unquestioned
Human Cost of Efficiency: A Moral Reckoning,"Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities: Vol. 8 : Iss. 1 , Article 7.
Available at: [Link]

Conclusion Atany given time, there are around 30,000 people being held at ICE detention centers
(Cullen 2018). 2017
proved to be the most deadly year in regards to deaths while in custody and
2018 seems to be following the same pattern. Why, as a nation, are we so complicit in a
deportation regime that gains power each year and continues to violate human rights standards
in an efficient and deadly manner? The reason, I believe, comes down to citizenship providing
the frame for which efficiency becomes the highest value. Under ICE, immigrant bodies are
disposable and fall into a category of being treated efficiently in order to maximize arrests and
deportations. Because the principle of efficiency always calls for something to be compromised
in order to maximize results from as little as possible, the lives of undocumented immigrants are
unvalued in the eyes of the state. The political entity of the state only ensures freedom to 7 citizens, so as a result, the
questioning and denial of freedom becomes applied to non citizens because of freedom existing as an “American right”. Are we
boiling down the lived experiences of humans to produce the maximum optimization of efficient practices in everyday life? We rarely
question the way that efficiency is ingrained in our perception of the world and how we allow efficiency to define successes. We
are in a moment where ICE has gained unchecked power and it's up to us to create and carry out
a movement to abolish it. This movement will be ongoing and focus just as much on dismantling
predisposed prejudices based in prioritizing whiteness and citizenship in our definition of
humanity, as it will be the act of abolishing ICE itself.
Labelling ICE immoral is essential to the abolition movement – deportations
violate human rights and distract immigration enforcement from more important
priorities
Godfrey 2018 – politics writer at The Atlantic [Elaine, 07-11-18, The Atlantic, “What abolish ice actually
means”, [Link] ACC 07-13-20, AR]

The advocates and lawmakers calling to abolish ICE have framed the issue as a moral one: The
agency’s widespread use of deportations for undocumented immigrants without criminal
records is inhumane, and detracts from its more important function of investigating drug
smuggling and human-rights abuses. “They’re not doing the job they were hired to do,” said Randy Bryce, the Democratic candidate running for
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s seat in Wisconsin’s 1st district, in an interview with The Atlantic. “It’s more along the lines of a personal deportation force for Donald Trump
right now.” A spokesman for the Michigan gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed, told me that, as governor, El-Sayed would support I C E  being “defunded and dismantled,”
and would not allow state resources to be used in federal immigration enforcement. Sean McElwee, a co-founder of Data for Progress and [Link], has been a leader in the
charge to eliminate I C E   for several years. Abolish I C E  “is fundamentally an anti-deportation movement,” he told me, and after the agency is gone, “the central aim has to be
ensuring that mass deportation is not housed somewhere else in the government.” The question, then, is whether calling to abolish  I C E  means ending all or most internal
immigration enforcement—or simply restructuring or replacing the agency itself. This is the area where Democratic lawmakers’ positions are less clear, and where conservatives
see a political opportunity. Some politicians have stopped short of demanding the complete elimination of the agency. Senator Bernie Sanders, who had been reluctant to
Now, it is time to do what Americans
comment on the growing movement, released a vague statement on the issue on July 3: “

overwhelmingly want: abolish the cruel, dysfunctional immigration system we have today and
pass comprehensive immigration reform,” the statement said. “That will mean restructuring the agencies that enforce our immigration laws,
including I C E .” Senator Kamala Harris of California, in a recent interview on MSNBC, said it would be necessary to “reexamine” the agency and perhaps consider “starting from
scratch.” A spokesman for Harris told me that the senator hopes I C E  funds can be directed more appropriately, and agents can be retrained “against targeting vulnerable
populations such as victims of sexual assault or domestic violence, crime witnesses, pregnant women, and children.” Others, though, have suggested that ICE, as an
agency, should be totally scrapped, which would require identifying and transferring its more
urgent functions—such as combating human-rights abuses and rooting out criminals—to
another agency. Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, one of the most outspoken lawmakers
on the issue, said in an email that she wants “to eliminate the agency as it stands and restructure its functions, starting from scratch.” Jayapal, along with Representative

Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, will soon be introducing legislation to dismantle the agency. “ There will still be enforcement of immigration

laws, but it must be without cruelty and abuse,” she said. Pocan told me the legislation would dissolve ICE within 12 months, and
create a commission to recommend a new immigration enforcement system to Congress. When asked whether broader changes to internal immigration enforcement were
necessary—if authorities should stop pursuing undocumented immigrants altogether—most of the lawmakers I spoke with brought the conversation back to what they viewed as
It’s the indiscriminate, random use of deportations” that has to stop, said Pocan.
ICE’s current flaws. “

“We know there are millions of people here who are technically not here legally, and yet many
have been here for a very long time. I don’t think many people think that’s an effective use of
ICE.” Most American adults, according to polling from Gallup, generally oppose deporting all undocumented immigrants, regardless of criminal background, living in the
United States. But a recent HuffPost/YouGov poll found that public opinion on eliminating ICE altogether is mixed. Roughly 21 percent of respondents said they support
abolishing ICE, while 44 percent said they oppose it and 35 percent were undecided.

You can vote for our demand to Abolish ICE even if you don’t adopt the policy – the
Ideas are more important than the law – they change the tone of public
discussions by advancing the issue
Kuz, 2018 – correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor [Martin July 31, 2018 “Abolish
ICE, Reform it, Or What?” [Link]

In reality, as similar protests percolate across the country, the movement and its intentions remain ambiguous. Even as many
involved in the effort favor dismantling ICE, supporters recognize that, as a more practical
matter, the motto serves as a strategic gambit and a rallying cry to motivate voters. In that
broader view, the campaign can provoke change irrespective of the agency’s survival or demise,
explains Hemanth Gundavaram, co-director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at Northeastern University in
Boston. “A political debate is a negotiation, and in any negotiation, you start from your strongest

position,” he says. “So abolishing ICE has to be on the table in order to come to a middle ground
where reforms can happen.”
Kritikal 1AC
 Criminalization

Contention One - Criminalization

President Trump has rapidly expanded ICE into a mass deportation gestapo - ICE’s
enforcement methods reinforce Criminalization – they entangle immigration with
the Criminal Justice System. Civil and Criminal systems should be separate, but
under Trump, they are not.
Schriro, 2017 - founding director of the Office of Detention Policy and Planning at
the DHS [Dora 04/27/17 The Hill “Don't make immigration custody part of the criminal justice system ‘
[Link] - TA]

Don't make immigration custody part of the criminal justice system Following fast on the heels of announcements to
deport many more immigrants, regardless of their circumstances, and to increase immigration detention capacity to carry out that plan, last week, the New York

Times reported Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would roll back detention
standards and disband its Office of Detention Policy and Planning . These reversals will make it
easier and more lucrative for correctional facilities to qualify and will entice the sheriffs and
private prison companies that operate them to contract with ICE as it expands its capacity at all
cost. Most notably, the Office’s closing signals a growing inclination towards the criminalization of
immigration. The tendency to conflate individuals in ICE custody with those in the criminal
justice system is simply wrong as a matter of law, policy and economics . ICE can hold someone until his or her
removal or release, but ICE cannot punish anyone. Period. Only the criminal justice system can do that. The majority of people held by ICE have no criminal history so there is
no basis in law to punish them, and those who have a record must fulfill any penalties the criminal justice system imposes before ICE takes them into custody. From its inception
in 2009, ODPP brought expertise to ICE in areas other than enforcement; expertise that it lacks and that led to much needed improvements in detention conditions and
the administration should rescind its
bolstered the agency’s accountability and transparency with the American public. Here are a few of the reasons why

decision to close the Office and reverse its use of practices that blur bright-line differences between criminal
and civil law: 1. Punishing ICE detainees is impermissible. A criminal court can sentence a person to prison as punishment. The immigration court cannot. The legal
remedy for a person unlawfully present in the U.S. is either removal or relief. It is not detention. 2. Without the most basic protections provided in the ICE Standards and
ongoing monitoring by the Office to ensure compliance, conditions of detention will quickly deteriorate. For example, translation services, slated for elimination, may appear to
be a nicety but are in fact, a necessity. Last year, ICE held individuals from 178 countries, each with its own language and dialects. To eliminate translation services is to render
most detained persons incapable of interaction with ICE or the immigration court. 3. The people in ICE detention facilities are not the same as pretrial inmates and sentenced
prisoners in jail or prison. Their violations are civil, not criminal, and those with criminal histories typically are not dangerous. In fact, ICE classifies the majority of individuals
in its custody as low risk of escape or assault. They are working parents, school-aged children, productive members of their communities. Assigning them to secure facilities is
Despite the stark differences in case law and clientele, the administration is
excessive and excessively expensive.

doubling down, expanding its use of correctional facilities, correctional staff, and applying
incarceration’s means of control — counts, searches, shakedowns, and the like — towards the
criminalization of what is a civil justice system.

ICE relies on the Fear of Immigrants – their rhetoric labels All immigrants as
Criminals. Our deportation culture scapegoats and dehumanizes All immigrants
Loffman 2018 – PBS politics producer [Matt, 07-6-18, PBS, “What’s driving the movement to Abolish ICE?”,
[Link] ACC 07-13-20, AR]
To understand the current fight over ICE, here’s what we know about the agency’s history, its role under Trump and what’s next. How was ICE created? Immigration became a federal responsibility and priority in
the late 1800s and was formalized as a division of the Treasury Department in 1891. In the more than 100 years since, immigration has been shuffled among several federal agencies, including the Commerce,
Labor and Justice Departments, before landing in the newly-created department of Homeland Security in the years after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. “Whatever federal government agency handles immigration is a

great window into how we think about immigration and its role in the United States,” said Erika Lee, the director of the Immigration History
Research Center at University of Minnesota. ICE’s recent home inside DHS signals a decades-
long “shift in America as nation of immigrants and thinking about immigration as a good to
immigration as a national security threat.” The most recent home inside DHS signals a decades-long “shift in America as nation of immigrants and thinking
about immigration as a good to immigration as a national security threat,” she added. While Lee says it may seem like there’s a newfound outsized

fear of immigrants, she sees echoes of the nation’s complicated history and response to outsiders, one that stretches back more than a century to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the
backlash against Irish Catholics in the mid-1800s. The current Immigration and Customs Enforcement was one of three agencies established in 2003 from what used to be the Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS). ICE’s mandate is to enforce approximately 400 federal immigration and labor-related statutes, primarily in the nation’s interior, and work to remove people for immigration violations. One duty
includes monitoring businesses for undocumented workers, but patrolling the border itself is left to Customs and Border Protection, another agency formed in the 2003 shakeup. ICE and immigration under

Trump Since Trump took office, historians like Deborah Kang, a professor at California State University San Marco and author of “The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on
 have seen a wholesale shift in ICE’s priorities. “They’re focused on removing green card holders
the US-Mexico Border,”

— legal permanent residents,” Kang said. The current ICE policy stems from the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, a 1996 law signed by then-
President Bill Clinton. It says immigrants can be deported for committing any crime, including misdemeanors. The country’s network of 200 ICE detention centers began to pop up in the years after Sept. 11, when
there was a surge of funding for immigration enforcement. That funding has more than doubled since 2005, according to the Center for Migration Studies. The average daily population of immigrant detainees has

Amy Gottlieb, an
also surged since the 1996 law was enacted, from around 9,000 a day in 1996 to more than 38,000 a day in 2017, according to CMS. In addition to new enforcement priorities,

immigration lawyer and activist currently working for American Friends Service Committee,
sees a new trend in language, too. “There’s been a lot of rhetoric and a lot of anger and a lot of
suspicion and a lot of scapegoating around immigrants,” Gottlieb said . She points to Trump’s election as something that “really
opened up language that people were sitting on, holding onto, not willing to put out there publicly,”

Gottlieb said. “Trump made it okay to suddenly talk about an invasion and talk about
immigrants as criminals.”

ICE’s Purpose is dehumanization, which is the first step in genocidal cleansing.

Abolition allows us to reform immigration to support humane treatment
Hong 19 - professor of law at Boston College Law School [Kari E., 10 Reasons Why Congress
Should Defund ICE's Deportation Force (March 11, 2019). 43 NYU Review of Law & Social Change Harbinger 2019, Available at
SSRN: [Link]

Ninth, the ERO deportation force’s overly-aggressive deportation strategy dehumanizes

immigrants, which undermines public support for needed immigration reform. As a candidate and president,
Donald Trump has called immigrants, “rapists,” “criminals,” “thieves,” “MS-13” gang members, “murderers,” “terrorists,” and “animals.”86 President Trump’s claims

that immigrants have bad character and have committed criminal acts are more akin to propaganda than
terms within reasonable parameters of a policy debate. 87 It is critical to recognize that President Trump’s repeated defense of—and
call for the expansion of—ICE’s powers is premised on the same falsehoods that immigrants are criminals

and undocumented immigration threatens our nation’s safety. President Trump is defining his presidency with this rhetoric,
but he did not start it. In 1996, Congress enacted the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (“IIRIRA”), which eliminated numerous avenues that
people previously had to legalize their status. This law also codified the wrongful conflation of immigration and crime by using the term “Illegal Immigration” in its title.
IIRIRA’s irrational end to providing legal status to immigrants created the size and permanence of the undocumented population,90 and its false reification of “illegal
immigration” as a matter needing the intervention of criminal law enforcement laid the foundation for ICE to come into being. When ICE was created in 2002, its mandate was
to deport all people who were deportable. If the government suddenly made it very difficult to obtain driver’s licenses and then described anyone who drove without a license as
“illegal drivers,” the public might be more inclined to spend billions of dollars each year to arrest and jail the drivers—which has been our country’s immigration policy for the
past 20 years. The term “illegal” would distract the public from realizing that it is not the drivers who are lacking good character, but it is the government that suddenly and
The ERO deportation force brings into full view the impact of this false
irrationally stopped issuing driver’s licenses.

rhetoric that dehumanizes all immigrants as criminals. Hannah Arendt observed that Nazi
Germany achieved its goals in part because it had convinced the public that if a group of people
were criminal, they deserved whatever punishment the government meted out. She wrote, “[T]he inclusion of
criminals [among the targeted groups of undesirables] is necessary in order to make plausible the propagandist claim of the movement that the institution exists of asocial
elements.”93 Stated another way, if our government is spending billions of dollars each year on a hammer that is the ERO deportation force, few will question why every single
Most Americans support immigration
immigrant is treated as a nail, a criminal and dangerous element for which removal is warranted.

reform. This fact is not surprising when people understand who in fact is immigrating, regardless of whether their entry is by plane or swimming the Rio Grande. In one
of his last formal speeches, President Ronald Reagan eloquently paid tribute to how immigration shapes and renews our country’s values. In his words, We lead the world
because unique among nations, we draw our people, our strength, from every country and every corner of the world. . . .Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of
But
opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge; always leading the world to the next frontier.

ICE’s tactics of force perpetuates myths of dangerousness and obscures the reality that
immigration, and policies that welcome immigrants, are among our nation’s critical
underpinnings. The ERO deportation force’s theatrics of force and the dehumanization of
immigrants give the ERO a false legitimacy. Moreover, the excessive and relentless arrests of
immigrants distract Americans from the truth, which is that it is irrational of our government to
refuse to offer legal status to those who contribute to our country. This distraction further keeps our politicians from
pursuing the needed, common sense immigration reform that will legalize status of the undocumented. The sooner the ERO deportation force

is defunded, the sooner we can achieve real immigration reform . As demonstrated by President Reagan’s words, a president
lionized by the contemporary Republican party, embracing immigrants is not a new or trendy liberal idea. It is an American one, deeply rooted in our past and critical to our
country’s future.
The criminalization of immigration is a strategy of “attrition through
enforcement.” It is nothing less than an intentional policy of Nativism and Ethnic
Cleansing. Dehumanizing and terrorizing communities leaves them vulnerable to
elimination.
Michalowski, 2013 -prof of Criminology, Northern Arizona University [Raymond Journal
of Crime and Justice Volume 36, “Ethnic cleansing American style: SB 1070, nativism and the contradictions of neo-liberal
globalization” [Link]

US history shows that whenever high levels of immigration have collided with economic
recession, the results have been a rise in Nativist sentiments, populist backlash against both
immigrants and the government for letting them in, and major reformulation of immigration controls. This dynamic has occurred four times since the late nineteenth century. These were the Asian
exclusion movement in the 1880s, deportations and the creation of ethnic quotas favoring Northern Europeans in the 1920s, Operation Wetback in the 1950s to deport braceros back to Mexico, and the

current wave of anti-immigration politics targeting Latinos that began in the late 1990s, reached fever pitch after
September 11, 2001, and remains high as at the time of writing in the summer of 2012. The current moment provides an ideal window into the contradictions between capital accumulation and state legitimacy.
Between the early 1970s and 1994 the US federal government followed a relatively ‘open’ immigration policy. Formal immigration policies favored family reunification, while IRCA had significantly increased the
number of legal immigrants who could sponsor residency applications by close relatives outside the country. At the informal level, the US border with Mexico remained relatively porous, with migrant farm labor
easily crossing into the United States for harvest seasons, and others finding their way into the country for more permanent jobs and residences with the help of a coyote at the cost of a few hundred dollars.
Anyone involved with the labor pool, particularly in the Southwest, during the latter decades of the twentieth century knew that the employment of undocumented workers operated according to a wink-and-a-nod
system. Under IRCA, employers were required to obtain documentation of citizenship or legal residency from workers. In response, undocumented workers would buy relatively inexpensive false documents, often
of poor quality. Employers dutifully copied the numbers from these fake papers, and deducted Social Security, Medicare and income taxes that workers would never be able to collect. In 1996, I interviewed a
document dealer operating out of the back of a 1970s era Pontiac station wagon parked in an empty corner lot adjacent to a restaurant on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles. He offered me a Xeroxed Social Security
card for 75 dollars. For an additional 50 dollars I could purchase power company bills, a library card, and rent receipts sent to a common address and matching the name on the Social Security card. For a mere 125
dollars I could have everything I needed to get a job under a new identity. The system worked. Immigrants had jobs. Employers had workers. Capital accumulation grew. As the millennium drew closer, the system
began to unravel. In 1994, after a heated political campaign, California voters passed Prop 187, which would deny unauthorized immigrants a suite of public services, from primary education to health care. After a
four-year battle, the American Civil Liberties Union succeeded in having Prop 187 ruled unconstitutional (ACLU 1999). Nevertheless, politicians took an important lesson about the political benefits of promoting
anti-immigration sentiment. Recognizing the volatility of the immigration issue in California and the Southwest more generally, in 1994 President Bill Clinton implemented Operation Gatekeeper, a strategy to
close off easy transit points from the Tijuana region into the westernmost portions of San Diego county by dramatically increasing the level of border surveillance, interdiction of border-crossers and stepped up
internal enforcement, that is, enforcement beyond the border region (Nevins 2001). At the very moment Clinton moved to harden the Mexico-San Diego border, however, the passage of the North American Free
Trade Agreement sparked a steep devaluation of the Mexican peso and a subsequent sharp rise in Mexicans seeking entry into the United States (Blecker 1999). From 1994 forward the federal government pursued
a strategy of incremental growth in border and interior immigration enforcement in an effort to keep growing anti-immigration sentiment from turning into a hot-button election issue. Many others have detailed
the legal and human consequences of immigration restriction policies, so I will not go into detail here (see for instance: Massy et al. 2003, Michalowski 2008, Nevins 2008, Dunn 2009, Rodriquez 2012). Suffice it

the political Right had molded the populist and Nativist backlash fuelled by
to say that by the turn of the millennium

economic concerns and cultural fears into politically effective demands for hyper-militarization of the US-Mexico border and removal
of illegalized immigrants from US soil. At the level of cultural fear, native-born, non-Hispanic whites of European heritage living in Arizona, California, New Mexico,
Nevada, Texas and Utah found themselves becoming an ethnic minority, while Whites as a whole were on track to loose their role as a majority of the national population (Tavernise 2012) This led, among other
things, to a widely held belief within the anti-immigration community that continued immigration would eventually lead to a Mexican ‘reconquista’ of the territories taken from Mexico after the US-Mexico war. As
more and more Mexicans become US citizens and voters, so the theory goes, they will constitute electoral majorities in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. They will then use their electoral power to take
over State governments. From that position they will then lead their states to secede from the United States and rejoin Mexico (Hansen 2003). As bizarre as this scenario may sound to anyone who understands
national and State politics, many anti-immigration activists in Arizona that I interviewed believe deeply that reconquista is a real threat to the integrity of the United States. At the same time that anti-immigration
activists in the Southwest feared a Mexican reconquista, residents of once nearly all-white midwestern towns found the ethnic composition of their communities changing as Latino immigrants increasingly took

The sense that the ‘face of America’ was

jobs in meatpacking and construction no longer attractive to native-born residents (Kandel and Parado 2004).

changing became an important breeding ground for fear, anxiety, hostility toward immigrants and
increasing vocal calls to ‘close the border’ as exemplified by the extremist views of Congressmen such as Hayworth (2006) of Arizona and Tancredo (2006) of Colorado. These sentiments had already taken hold in

The 9/11 attacks threw a seemingly never-

many parts of the country by the time 11 Al Queda militants destroyed the World Trade Center in New York.

ending supply of gasoline on the fires of anti-immigration sentiment. From that time until now, the claimed ‘terrorist’ threat has
served as an effective moral shield behind which many restrictionists have been able to promote racially motivated anti-immigrant policies directed not at Muslims, but at Latinos (Alden 2009). As a whole,
American workers saw little economic benefit from globalization. From 1980 until 2008, wages of American workers remained stagnant, and then dropped with the onset of the Great Recession. Middle-class life
styles could only be sustained by two incomes, with subsequent loss of at-home caretakers for children and the aged (Drum 2010). Meanwhile, American households began taking on increasing debt in order to
afford the perceived components of a middle-class life for themselves and their children (Livingston 2011). As personal debt grew and economic security shrank, the sense of personal vulnerability increased
(Sheirholz and Mishel 2011). These negative economic forces were not felt equally throughout the society. Instead, the wage gap between those with college educations and those without higher education grew
substantially (Jones and Weinberg 2000). Equally important was the rise of a small sector of super-well-paid workers in finance, high-tech, and corporate management, while well-paying industrial jobs that had
once been the core of a blue-collar, middle class were being destroyed at a fierce rate (Krugman 2011). As those who once had a ‘fear of falling’ actually began to fall, they provided a fertile arena for anti-immigrant
sentiments and calls for restrictionist laws (Ehrenreich 1990). Not all White workers outside the most privileged occupations shared these anti-immigration sentiments. Many continued to believe and behave in
solidarity with workers in general, whatever their ethnicity or citizenship status. A number of unions argued that the solution lay not in immigration restrictions and deportations, but in a new labor law regime
that would enforce fair labor standards for all workers, regardless of citizenship status (Bacon 2008). These proposals fell on deaf political ears. The Conservative turn in US politics had already set an American

Conservative believers held that if the country would only return to

revitalization movement in motion. Like the Ghost Dance,

the ways of the forefathers, in this case an imagined era of nativism, racism, White hegemony
and closely guarded borders, the problems of the present would be resolved . It was in this climate that SB 1070 and the
wider policy of attrition through enforcement seemed poised to spread throughout the country. SB 1070: the basics The Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, commonly known as SB 1070,

a
was passed into law by the Arizona State Legislature and signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer in April, 2010. SB1070 was more than a case of eccentric law-making by right-wing Arizonans. It was part of

national movement to establish ‘attrition through enforcement’ as a centerpiece of US

immigration policy. According to Mark Kirkorian, head of the anti-immigration Center for Integration Studies, and one of the policy's architects, attrition through
enforcement is designed to make ordinary life so unlivable that illegalized immigrants and their
families will ‘self-deport’ (Kirkorian 2005). The central strategy of attrition through enforcement, I contend, is a form of
ethnic cleansing based on using local police to enforce immigration laws, thereby creating
sufficiently widespread fear of detection among illegalized immigrants that they wil l, as is most commonly
claimed, ‘be driven out’ of the state, and hopefully the country. In June 2011, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney endorsed SB 1070, saying he favored enforcement strategies that
would promote ‘self-deportation,’ thereby declaring clearly (if perhaps, unknowingly) his support for ethnic cleansing (Boroff and Planas 2012). In order to compel irregular immigrants to self deport, SB 1070: 1.
Defined the federal civil violation of failing to possess appropriate immigration documents as a criminal act under Arizona state law. 2. Authorized local police to question and arrest without a warrant anyone they
suspected of being an illegal immigrant. 3. Made it a crime to ‘harbor’ or ‘transport’ unauthorized immigrants, thus criminalizing many of the everyday social relations between immigrants and citizens or legal
residents. 4. Authorized the state to impound any vehicle driven by or used to transport an irregular migrant. 5. Made it a state crime for irregular migrants to seek employment. 6. Prohibited cities from passing
laws that would limit their police departments from enforcing SB 1070. This provision targeted so-called ‘sanctuary cities’ (e.g. Flagstaff, Tucson) that directed local law enforcers to refrain from inquiring about
immigration status as a routine practice unless it was directly relevant to the immediate situation such as the discovery of a ‘drop house’ filled with presumptively undocumented immigrants or determining if
someone held in jail custody was eligible for counselor services from their native country as provided by international law (Columbia Human Rights Law Review 2011). 7. Intensified measures to exclude illegalized
immigrants from seeking social services, even when they were doing so on behalf of their US citizen children (FAIR 2010b). Just before and immediately after the passage of SB 1070, some illegalized immigrants
and their families left Arizona because of the fear created by SB 1070 (Zeiger 2010). However, rather than leaving the country, some moved to US states perceived as less hostile to Latinos (Faherty 2010, Gomez
2010, Gonzales 2011). A majority of illegalized immigrants in Arizona, however, were unable to leave, and instead receded into the shadows of Arizona's social landscape (Amster 2010, Gonzales 2011). Key reasons
for staying in Arizona were lack of money to move, feeling too old or too established to restart life elsewhere, fear of leaving parents, children or siblings who could not or would not leave the state, and lack of
opportunity elsewhere. Some also stayed in the hope that the law would eventually be overturned and/or the US government would eventually pass a comprehensive immigration reform law that would legalize

their status (Michalowski 2011). Rather than criminalizing specific harmful behaviors, attrition through enforcement
drives undocumented immigrants into social spaces where work, education, social services, legal
protections and many of the public interactions of ordinary daily life are increasingly
unobtainable. The theory is that increased fear of detection coupled with narrow or no access to normal life activities such as work, mobility, recreation, health care, police protection and social
services will lead irregular migrants to self deport, taking their US citizen children with them (Kirkorian 2005). This legislative strategy both rests on and

reproduces a hyper-criminalization of illegalized immigrants that transforms the act of having

entered the country ‘without inspection’ or overstaying a visa into a master status, a quality that renders everything the
person is and does as criminal (Downes 2007).
 Advocacy
We demand that the United States federal government should abolish ICE.
 Alternative

Contention Two – The Alternative

Calling for ICE be abolished is more than a policy demand. It demands that we
respect each person regardless of citizenship.
Jack 19 – American Studies major at Macalester College [Suzanna "ICE and the Unquestioned
Human Cost of Efficiency: A Moral Reckoning,"Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities: Vol. 8 : Iss. 1 , Article 7.
Available at: [Link]

Conclusion Atany given time, there are around 30,000 people being held at ICE detention centers
(Cullen 2018). 2017
proved to be the most deadly year in regards to deaths while in custody and
2018 seems to be following the same pattern. Why, as a nation, are we so complicit in a
deportation regime that gains power each year and continues to violate human rights standards
in an efficient and deadly manner? The reason, I believe, comes down to citizenship providing
the frame for which efficiency becomes the highest value. Under ICE, immigrant bodies are
disposable and fall into a category of being treated efficiently in order to maximize arrests and
deportations. Because the principle of efficiency always calls for something to be compromised
in order to maximize results from as little as possible, the lives of undocumented immigrants are
unvalued in the eyes of the state. The political entity of the state only ensures freedom to 7 citizens, so as a result, the
questioning and denial of freedom becomes applied to non citizens because of freedom existing as an “American right”. Are we
boiling down the lived experiences of humans to produce the maximum optimization of efficient practices in everyday life? We rarely
question the way that efficiency is ingrained in our perception of the world and how we allow efficiency to define successes. We
are in a moment where ICE has gained unchecked power and it's up to us to create and carry out
a movement to abolish it. This movement will be ongoing and focus just as much on dismantling
predisposed prejudices based in prioritizing whiteness and citizenship in our definition of
humanity, as it will be the act of abolishing ICE itself.

Avoiding the entanglement of politics allows the Abolish ICE movement the
freedom to change minds. The Slogan is more powerful than the Law.
Narea, 2020 – immigration reporter for Vox [Nicole “How “abolish ICE” helped bring abolitionist ideas
into the mainstream” Jul 9, 2020, [Link]
black-lives-matter]

Centrist Democrats’ efforts to distance themselves from the Abolish ICE movement, however, have
had their advantages: The movement was able to evolve outside the realm of electoral politics
and without the baggage of the Democratic brand, McElwee said. “The fact that politicians won’t even
come close to touching it has given a lot of freedom,” he said. “If Biden embraced it, it would become much more polarized and
partisan, whereas, as it is now, it’s sort of a vision for a different society. That allows you to change

people’s hearts and minds.” Advocates of abolition say their goal isn’t just to shift the Overton window — the range of ideas that the
public is willing to consider. They urge people to take them at their word when they say they want to dismantle

the police and ICE. When Detention Watch Network started advocating for abolishing detention in 2012, the idea was not the norm for the criminal justice
reform movement, Shah said. But over time, the advocacy community began to embrace the idea of abolition

rather than reforming a system that they believe harms and punishes immigrants , especially since it was an
idea that originated in the communities most impacted by oppressive law enforcement. “ To actualize our vision, to move us forward, we

have to talk about the world we want to see,” Shah said. “Today we have people talking about the issues in ways that seemed far-
fetched just a few weeks ago. There is a lot of self-education happening, a lot of conversations, and a lot of

action. I don’t think we can discount the role of powerful slogans in that respect.”
Our demand to Abolish ICE helps to shape and guide the broader social discussion about
our assumptions about immigrants and a humane immigration policy – the time is
right, because ICE is so controversial
Ford 18- staff writer at The New Republic.(Matt July 18,2018,The New Republic, “OK, Abolish ICE. What
then?” [Link] ,July 9,2020 AS)

what he would regard as success for the Abolish ICE movement, he situated it within
When I asked McElwee

the context of a broader anti-deportation movement, which advocates decriminalizing

immigration and providing a pathway to citizenship. But he also made clear that he would like to see the Enforcement
and Removal Operations office go defunct. “The job that ERO performs only really makes sense
as a thing that society should be doing if you view the presence of people of color in this country
as a threat,” McElwee said. “I actually think that having a big, broad discussion about what we
want to be as a nation—in terms of what laws we want to enforce and behaviors we make illegal— is actually something that has to be
done and isn’t thought through in a coherent way.” ICE’s ultimate fate would hinge on how much lawmakers want to change. If ERO were shuttered,
Congress could simply leave Homeland Security Investigations and the rest of ICE’s structure intact under a more suitable name. Lawmakers could also make HSI a distinct investigative agency within the
Department of Homeland Security. Congress could also move the office to the Justice Department, either as a standalone agency or to be absorbed by the FBI, or to the Treasury Department, where the U.S.

Customs Service once exercised similar functions. At its broadest level, #AbolishICE isn’t just about changing DHS’ most
controversial agency. It’s about changing the nation’s deadlocked immigration debate. “Everyone’s
entrenched,” Saldana said, referring to Congress. “I don’t blame one side or the other for the lack of comprehensive immigration reform. Both parties are responsible, and

I would hope that at some point the public gets serious enough about it to say, ‘You’re not
working on a major issue in this country and we need someone who will.’” By calling for ICE’s
abolition, activists on the left are hoping to tilt that debate in their favor. “ICE is now contested,”
McElwee said. “Detention beds are contested. ICE’s funding in omnibus bills is no longer a given—a thing that is seen as the thing that’s done automatically. The contesting
of deportation is very valuable. We actually have some space now to question the consensus that
was fundamentally a center-right consensus.” For those hoping to build a new approach to
immigration after Trump, that long-term shift is more important than whatever form ICE takes
next.

Increasing awareness is essential to preventing abuse – ICE is able to thrive because

we don’t discuss it enough.
McElwee, 2018 – Co-Founder of Data for Progress [Sean, March 9, The Nation “It’s Time to Abolish
ICE A mass-deportation strike force is incompatible with democracy and human rights”
[Link] Acc 7/4/20 TA]

“Idon’t think a lot of people have any kind of direct experience with ICE, so they don’t really
know what they do or what they’re about. If they did, they’d be appalled,” Canon told me. “ICE as it
presently exists is an agency devoted almost solely to cruelly and wantonly breaking up families. The agency talks about, and treats,
human beings like they’re animals. They scoop up people in their apartments or their workplaces and take them miles away from
their spouses and children.” The idea of defunding ICE has gained traction among immigrant-rights groups horrified by the speed at
which, under President Donald Trump, the agency has ramped up an already brutal deportation process. Mary Small, policy director
at Detention Watch Network, said, “Responsible policymakers need to be honest about the fact that the core of the agency is
broken.” Her group led the charge to defund ICE with its #DefundHate campaign last year. Groups like Indivisible Project and the
Center for Popular Democracy have also called for defunding ICE. Brand New Congress, a progressive PAC, has the proposal in its
immigration platform. “ICE is terrorizing American communities right now,” said Angel Padilla, policy director of the Indivisible
Project. “They’re going into schools, entering hospitals, conducting massive raids, and separating children from parents every day.
We are funding those activities, and we need to use all the leverage we have to stop it.” Though ICE abolition is
spreading on the left, it quickly meets extreme skepticism elsewhere. In part, this is because the
mainstream political discourse has a huge blind spot for the agency’s increasingly brutal
policies. While elites have generally become concerned with rising authoritarianism, they have
mainly ignored the purges ICE is conducting in immigrant communities . For example, in their recent
book, How Democracies Die, Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky do not mention ICE at all. Centrist pundits like Jonathan
Chait have dedicated thousands of words to the threat of “PC culture” on college campuses, but haven’t found time to
question whether an opaque and racist deportation force might pose a larger threat to
democracy than campus editorial pages.
Our Discourse empowers political change - Demands to Abolish ICE convince young
voters that Elections Matter
Kuz, 2018 – correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor [Martin July 31, 2018 “Abolish
ICE, Reform it, Or What?” [Link]

“This debate is about more than this singular piece of legislation or just the notion of abolishing
ICE,” says Vedant Patel, a spokesman for Representative Jayapal . “It’s about reforming and changing an agency that has
not been doing its job. It’s about changing our immigration enforcement to something more humane and

fair.” Immigration advocates believe “Abolish ICE” – despite its uncertain direction – stands a better chance of
influencing national politics and policy than the recent “Occupy Wall Street” protests that railed against income inequality.
Their optimism derives, in part, from the campaign taking aim at a clearly defined antagonist in
Trump rather than faceless financial institutions. Tim Warden-Hertz, a directing attorney with the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, a nonprofit legal services group
with offices throughout Washington, casts the nationwide protests as proof of a growing aversion to Trump’s zero-tolerance approach. “ What ‘Abolish ICE’

has done is helped make it clear that elections matter and voting matters,” he says. “There may
not be agreement right now on how to change the system, but the organizing and activism that’s
happening across the country is encouraging.”

Demands to Abolish ICE change the normalization of Deportation Culture by

recognizing our own participation in it.
McElwee, 2018 – Co-Founder of Data for Progress [Sean, March 9, The Nation “It’s Time to Abolish
ICE A mass-deportation strike force is incompatible with democracy and human rights”
[Link] Acc 7/4/20 TA]

The call to abolish ICE is, above all, a demand for the Democratic Party to begin seriously resisting an
unbridled white-supremacist surveillance state that it had a hand in creating. Though the party has moved left on core
issues from reproductive rights to single-payer health care, it’s time for progressives to put forward a demand that deportation

be taken not as the norm but rather as a disturbing indicator of authoritarianism . White
supremacy can no longer be the center of the immigration debate. Democrats have voted to fully
fund ICE with limited fanfare, because in the American immigration discussion, the right-wing
position is the center and the left has no voice. There has been disturbing word fatigue around “mass deportation,” and the threat of
deportation is so often taken lightly that many have lost the ability to conceptualize what it
means. Next to death, being stripped from your home, family, and community is the worst fate
that can be inflicted on a human, as many societies practicing banishment have recognized. It’s time to rein in the greatest threat
we face: an unaccountable strike force executing a campaign of ethnic cleansing .

The context of the demand to abolish ICE matters – it is not Only a literal policy –
it carries a framework of intersectional demands for Justice that can create a
humane immigration system.
Crennen-Dunlap 19 - J.D. candidate at the University of Denver College of Law
[Allison Abolishing the ICEberg (January 3, 2019). Denver Law Review, Vol. 96, No. 148, 2019, Available at
SSRN: [Link]

the abolish ICE movement is not limited to such a narrow approach. Mijente, a group of Latinx
But

and Chicanx activists working for “justice and self-determination for all people,” has created a
policy platform that builds on the call to abolish ICE but offers a more historically grounded
vision of what an alternative to current practices might entail. Among other plans, Mijente
would abolish immigration detention; end all deportation; eliminate state and local support for
ICE; repeal unlawful entry and reentry; and defund Border Patrol as it currently exists, creating instead a border agency that provides emergency rescue services.
Mijente expressly grounds its proposal in an understanding that the U.S. government’s punitive
approach to migration is part and parcel of broader policies that maintain the subordination of
historically subordinated groups. Indeed, Mijente ties the separation of migrant families during the
summer of 2018 to other examples of state violence against subordinated groups, including the
historical separation of black families subjected to slavery; the contemporary separation of black
families via the criminal justice system; the U.S. government’s historical and contemporary
separation of indigenous families88; the internment of Japanese-American families during
World War II; and the forced institutionalization, sterilization, and criminalization of people
with disabilities. Mijente’s vision thus extends far beyond the mere abolition of an agency.
Rather, it calls for a fundamental rethinking of the United States’s current approach to
migration—an approach that relies on a racist criminal justice system to “divid[e] our
communities between those labeled ‘deserving’ of humanitarian reform, and those who will be
left in the system of immigration enforcement, detention, and incarceration. “In short, while a
literal reading of the call to abolish ICE renders that rallying cry meaningless, a proposal
inspired by that rallying cry but grounded in a deeper understanding of the history out of which
ICE was born is a call for profound change. The call to abolish ICE has inspired protestors, vexed mainstream politicians, and raised
questions regarding exactly what that rallying cry might mean. If taken literally, the call to abolish ICE is a meaningless

slogan that would accomplish little or nothing. However, if that call draws on a deeper
understanding of the historical and bureaucratic systems in which ICE is embedded, demanding
ICE’s abolition asks for something more—such a call seeks not merely the end of an agency and
redistribution of its duties, but requires us to reconsider the premises of U.S. immigration
policy. It asks us to reconsider whether the incarceration and banishment of hundreds of
thousands of people annually is morally acceptable, whether the U.S. electorate—largely born
into the privilege of citizenship—should endorse the separation of families born without such
privilege, and whether a nation founded on a proclamation of equality should continue to accept
as inevitable a hierarchy driven by race and birthplace. Whether the electorate will heed that call remains to be seen.

Our demand to Abolish ICE challenges white supremacist authoritarianism.

Ford 18- staff writer at The New Republic.(Matt July 18,2018,The New Republic, “OK, Abolish ICE. What
then?” [Link] ,July 9,2020 AS)

Calls to rethink ICE’s existence first began percolating on social media last year as Trump’s
hardline immigration policies, notably a sharp increase in deportations from the interior U.S.,
began to take shape. By this spring, immigration-rights activists began to lay out the full case
against the agency’s existence. “The call to abolish ICE is, above all, a demand for the
Democratic Party to begin seriously resisting an unbridled white-supremacist surveillance state
that it had a hand in creating,” McElwee explained in The Nation in April. He called on progressives to “demand
that deportation be taken not as the norm but rather as a disturbing indicator of
authoritarianism.”
Case
 Ext Inherency

Trump has dramatically escalated ICE deportations – he has shifted ICE’s focus to
All immigrants
Godfrey, 18 - Political Reporter for the Atlantic [Elaine6-07-18The Atlantic “What ‘Abolish ICE’ Actually
Means” [Link]

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which was set up in 2003 in response to the 9/11 terror attacks, is the largest investigative
arm of the Department of Homeland Security. One of the agency’s most important divisions is Homeland Security Investigations, responsible for
investigating the illegal movement of people and goods within the country, with a hand in everything from cybersecurity to human trafficking. But ICE’s most well-known

division is Enforcement and Removal Operations, which detains and deports undocumented
immigrants. ICE deportations reached a record high under former President Barack Obama—an achievement that earned him the nickname “Deporter in Chief” from immigration groups—
but in his last term, his administration had prioritized the removal of undocumented immigrants who had committed

serious crimes. That changed in February 2017 when Trump signed an executive order
expanding ICE’s focus to include most undocumented immigrants living in the country,
regardless of their criminal records. The agency made 37,734 “noncriminal” arrests in the
government’s 2017 fiscal year, more than twice the number in 2016. Between October and March of this year, ICE said it arrested
roughly 80,000 people, 33 percent of whom were considered noncriminal, compared with 21 percent of the 63,000 people arrested in the same period the year before.
 Ext Harms - Communities
ICE deportations are Designed to terrorize immigrant populations – they use
human rights abuses to deter future migrants
Meng 2019 – senior researcher, human rights watch [Grace, 07-12-19, Human rights watch, “ICE
raids on US immigrant families risk serious abuse”, [Link]
serious-abuses-0, ACC 07-10-20, AR]

President Donald Trump has reportedly ordered US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to carry out raids on undocumented immigrant families in at least 10 major
cities starting [Link] ICE Acting Director Mark Morgan claims the goal is not to instill fear but
to follow “the rule of law,” ICE officials have openly acknowledged they only expect to arrest “10 to 20 percent of their targets in each city,” and instead
make “collateral” arrests of any other deportable immigrants they encounter. Like many of Trump’s immigration policies, the effect of these raids will

be to foster cruelty and terror with the apparent aim to deter others from seeking refuge or a
better life in the US. Should the planned raids move forward – the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit seeking to block them – there are fears a
cascade of human rights abuses will result. We will see more families locked up in detention
centers, suffering trauma, suicidal feelings, dangerously inadequate medical care, and sexual
assault. We will see more family separations, causing increased numbers of families to experience severe and lasting harm. Homeland
Security Acting Secretary Kevin McAleenan reportedly called of these raids  in early June in part because undocumented parents could be separated from US citizen children.
We have already seen that family separations are not temporary – there are families who still have not been identifies as separated, let alone reunified since the American public
first learned family separations were occurring. And even more people are likely to go into hiding, pulling children out of school, not reporting crimes, and not seeking medical
case, even for children. Many of the families targeted for this operation are reported to be asylum seekers who have received final orders of removal but remain in the US.
Arresting and deporting them will only compound any harms incurred while seeking asylum through a process that repeatedly fails to ensure a fair hearing, with court notices
sent to incorrect addresses, lack of legal representation, and the Trump administration’s new barriers to asylum. Because of these abuses, many with final orders of removal may
The Trump administration seems determined to double down on its
be entitled to reopen their asylum cases.

abusive policies, making it imperative that Congress passes legislation to end them . In the meantime, state
governments, law enforcement agencies, and companies should take steps to avoid being complicit in these abuses.

ICE denies the basic humanity of immigrants – it terrorizes their communities and
abuses them in detention.
Hodes, 2019 – Institute for Policy Studies [Rachel, “What ‘Abolish ICE’ Really Means” August 1, 2019
[Link]

As I stepped inside the Cannon House Office Building on a Tuesday in July, I felt like I was taking a step towards a more just world. The night before, when I told my mother I
planned to participate in a “Never Again” protest as part of #JewsAgainstICE, she had one question: “What exactly are their demands?” That question was answered in the
Cannon Building’s rotunda, as we chanted: “Never again means close the camps.” “Never again means abolish ICE.” “Never again is now.” To most of America, “abolish ICE” is a
cry of the far left. Even Americans who dislike Trump’s attacks on undocumented immigrants wouldn’t necessarily tell you that ICE should be abolished; that seems far too
radical. They’re forgetting that ICE is actually pretty new. It was only created in 2003, replacing the Immigration and Naturalization Service (the same agency responsible for the
Since its creation, ICE’s budget has almost doubled , and its activity has expanded to
internment of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s).

This expansion is shocking — and unwarranted. All evidence suggests that

triple the number of agents it employs.

immigrants are far from the national security threat the Trump administration claims they are.
Regardless of status, they’re more law-abiding than native-born citizens. And time and time again, immigration has
been shown to have a net-positive effect on the U.S. economy, from growing tax receipts to increasing wages for native-born residents. In fact, undocumented immigrants
the individuals targeted
typically pay more of their income in taxes than your average millionaire. More noteworthy than the economics, however, is that

by ICE are people — and all people are entitled to basic conditions of safety and for themselves
and their families. When the majority of these immigrants are fleeing violence with roots in U.S.
intervention in Central America, the moral responsibility to offer safe haven becomes even more
pressing. When government agencies neglect this responsibility, we all lose some of our
humanity.

ICE is abusing deportation powers – they have expanded to mass deportations in

schools and hospitals and they lie about protecting safety
Hong 19 - professor of law at Boston College Law School [Kari E., 10 Reasons Why Congress
Should Defund ICE's Deportation Force (March 11, 2019). 43 NYU Review of Law & Social Change Harbinger 2019, Available at
SSRN: [Link]
Fourth, the ERO deportation force has lost all sense of proportionality and is arresting parents,
workers, neighbors, green card holders, and now citizens. Because HSI is targeting transnational criminal enterprises, the ERO
deportation force is left arresting those who are not suspected of any current criminal conduct. Rather, the ERO deportation force is

arresting parents, workers, neighbors, family members of citizens, and even those with green
cards and citizenship. The ERO deportation force has arrested fathers dropping off their citizen
children at school, snatched a mother off a public street leaving her three citizen children alone,
and even detained those married to citizens who showed up at their green card interviews. These are
not aberrations, but are the direct result of the agency’s current mandate. ICE maintains roadside checkpoints during hurricane

evacuations; it roams buses, airports, and public streets across the country asking for papers —a
scene from a World War II movie, not a slice of Americana. The ERO deportation force also is apparently lying to non-

citizens, falsely claiming to be the police force to secure immigration arrests of people who are
not even accused of crimes. Supporters of ICE argue that we need the ERO deportation force to
keep us safe, but the ERO deportation force is not even pretending to go after people who
commit serious crimes. Rather, the agency devotes its excessive government resources to harass
immigrants and citizens alike and surveil those who advocate for social justice. For example, in October 2018,
ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility subpoenaed Daniel Kowalski, a U.S. citizen who is a journalist, immigration attorney, and editor of a website used by practitioners to
stay informed on immigration law.60 Mr. Kowalski had published on his website an ICE internal memorandum that provided guidance to government attorneys regarding the
recent rule changes made by former Attorney General Sessions that make it harder for those fleeing domestic violence and gangs to qualify for asylum. The ICE Special Agent
demanded information from Mr. Kowalski about who had sent the memorandum. The “summons” was issued by ICE (not a judge), lacked the force of law, and violated the First
Amendment and state laws protecting journalists from revealing their sources. It is unclear how and why targeting a citizen for information about a government leaker is in the
mandate of the ERO deportation force. Similarly, in November 2018, it was revealed that the ERO deportation force had embedded informants in a Vermont-based labor
organizing group. Using tactics that law enforcement agencies typically employ to disrupt organized crime, ICE targeted labor organizers who were undocumented for arrest and
deportation. The ERO deportation force is responding to criticisms of irrationality and excess by doubling down and investigating lawful permanent residents and even
naturalized citizens in the hopes of deporting even more people. This list will also shortly include the DREAMers, hundreds of thousands of those who had legal status for
decades under the Temporary Protected Status programs, and veterans who were promised citizenship.

Mass deportations by ICE destroy communities by tearing families apart – a

Massachusetts raid empirically proves
Sauter 2009 - Senior Attorney at National Labor Relations Board [Gregoire F., Case Study:
Aguilar v. Ice; Litigating Workplace Immigration Raids in the Twenty-First Century (April 1, 2009). Bender’s Immigration Bulletin,
Vol. 14, p. 389, April 1, 2009, Available at SSRN: [Link]

In March 2007, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents raided a leather goods factory
in New Bedford, Massachusetts, arresting 361 immigrants charged with working there illegally.
Before the immigrants could speak to lawyers or their families, they were transferred to
detention centers on the Texas-Mexico border, thousands of miles from their homes. The
extraordinary speed and scale of the operation shocked public opinion, and even attorneys who
had experienced prior immigration raids were taken by surprise. Faced with unprecedented legal and logistical challenges,
advocates for the detainees were forced to react rapidly and forge new alliances. In less than 48 hours, a coalition composed of civil rights groups, immigrant rights organizations
and lawyers in legal services and private practice filed the initial complaint in what would become Aguilar v. ICE. This legal alliance faced several extraordinary challenges.
Perhaps the greatest was to litigate a case, the facts of which emerged only incrementally, against a well-informed opponent. While it began as a
relatively “standard” immigration rights case, over the course of the litigation Aguilar v. ICE
morphed into a case of constitutional proportions, with multiple due process, right to counsel
and inhumane treatment issues. The government’s success in limiting the coalition’s access to information, especially during the crucial early stages
of the case, forced the lawyers to work reactively and constantly reconsider their legal strategy, privileging certain claims over others. After initially claiming

right to counsel and due process violations, the attorneys shifted their emphasis to pattern and
practice claims when questions arose about the way the immigrants were treated during their
detention. By contrast, the government maintained the same legal strategy throughout, from the first filing until the final oral argument before the First Circuit.
Although Aguilar v. ICE fell short of fundamentally transforming immigration law, it remains an important case for immigration rights advocates. The case brought widespread
attention to novel immigration enforcement tactics and clarified the boundaries within which the government may enforce immigration laws. Moreover, as the government steps
up its workplace immigration raids, Aguilar v. ICE continues to gain in relevance, providing guidance to activists nationwide on how to respond to such raids and what legal
strategies to pursue.
 Ext Harms - Families
ICE deportations traumatize victims by separating them from communities and
families
Sauter 2009 - Senior Attorney at National Labor Relations Board [Gregoire F., Case Study:
Aguilar v. Ice; Litigating Workplace Immigration Raids in the Twenty-First Century (April 1, 2009). Bender’s Immigration Bulletin,
Vol. 14, p. 389, April 1, 2009, Available at SSRN: [Link]

On one hand, agents

are intentionally restricting, or at least delaying, the lawyers’ attempts to meet
with detainees. On the other, ICE appears to be transferring the detainees out of state: several
people interviewed say they heard from ICE agents or other detainees that they will be sent to unknown destinations, and a growing
number appears to have already left Massachusetts. GBLS has never encountered these procedures in its prior dealings with ICE,
and the notion that detainees are being transferred is especially troubling. First, moving people out of state
separates them from their families and support systems, rendering an already traumatic
experience that much more terrifying. Furthermore, if parents or sole caregivers are mistakenly
included with the transferees, the predicament of those who depend on them is significantly
worsened. Finally, the transfers are taking place without commencing removal proceedings in
Massachusetts. As a result, the detainees will be charged in jurisdictions far removed from the
communities in which they have established roots and relationships. This makes it much harder
for them to prepare their defense in court, and especially to obtain release on bond. If they are to help
the detainees, the advocates realize that they must try to halt these practices. Based on these considerations, the attorneys resolve to
sue ICE to stop out-of-state transfers and compel it to grant prompt access to all arrested MBI workers. 68

ICE raids separate families – arresting innocent workers disrupts families

Godfrey, 18 - Political Reporter for the Atlantic [Elaine6-07-18The Atlantic “What ‘Abolish ICE’ Actually
Means” [Link]

Last month alone, ICE had conducted some of its largest raids. Agents in Salem, Ohio, arrested 146 employees at
a meat-processing plant on June 20. In the same state, two weeks earlier, ICE had detained 114 workers at a nursery, leaving at
least 100 local children without one or both of their parents. Reports of smaller-scale ICE arrests have been met with public outcry: In March, the arrest
of a San Diego mother in front of her children prompted an ACLU class-action lawsuit. On May 9, the arrest of 32 men at a concrete plant in Mount Pleasant, Iowa,

triggered an existential crisis for the small town’s religious community. Families in five towns across northern Kentucky are reportedly still reeling
after an ICE operation swept up 22 men and women a few weeks before Christmas. Much of the energy behind the current “Abolish ICE” movement was generated
by a different kind of family separation, thousands of miles away from Kentucky at the border between the U.S. and Mexico, where 2,300 migrant children have been taken

from their parents after they entered the country illegally. It’s important to note that Customs and Border Protection, not ICE, is the body responsible for
implementing the administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy that has led to this separation. However, ICE is tasked with housing adult detainees

while they go through deportation proceedings, and is expected to help parents locate their children after
they’ve been separated, according to a fact sheet from CBP.

ICE violates basic rights – Trump is escalating family separation and deportation
Gottlieb 2018 - associate regional director of the American Friends Service
Committee [Amy June 23, "It is time to abolish ICE. It cannot be reformed," The Guardian,
[Link] 5/15/20 TA]

Every day I live with the terror that my husband Ravi will be taken away from me and permanently exiled from his home in the United States, where he has lived for almost 25
years. Ravi is facing deportation because of a criminal conviction for wire fraud from almost 20 years ago, back when he had a green card. As a long-time immigration lawyer
and immigrants’ rights advocate, I know our immigration laws are unforgiving. Just about anyone who has a criminal conviction is subject to deportation, without the possibility
of ever returning. Ravi is one of thousands facing deportation for this reason, many of whom have been living in the US with permission for years. Much of what I am living
through, along with these thousands of other families, feels like a battle – we are in a fight for our lives. Under the Trump administration, Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) has dramatically escalated its tactics. There were more than 143,000 immigration arrests in 2017, a 41% increase from the previous year. Rather than using
ICE ignores things like humanitarian need, family and community ties, and
discretion to allow people to remain in the US,
letters of support. Instead people are methodically and heartlessly torn away from their homes, often in
the middle of the night. In the last several weeks, over 2,000 children have been ripped away from their parents and detained across the US under the
Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy, a practice denounced as a human rights violation by the United
Nations. Now the administration is trying to detain families indefinitely. Countless families across the country are living with the trauma of having a loved one snatched away,
with barely time to react.
 Ext Harms – Rogue Agency
ICE is a rogue agency – it enforces Trump’s racist, violent, and militarized
immigration policy
Brodey, 2018 – Washington correspondent for the Minnesota Post [Sam 07/03/2018 How
‘Abolish ICE’ became the left’s new rallying cry [Link]
new-rallying-cry/]

‘Lawless law enforcement’ Critics of ICE say that,under Trump, the agency has essentially become a militarized
deportation task force whose mission has changed to not only enforce existing law, but to serve the administration’s
politically-motivated crackdown on immigration. Hiroshi Motomura, a professor of law at the University of California-Los Angeles, traces the state of ICE
today to the 2003 reorganization that separated immigration benefits-giving from enforcement. “I think it created a culture, ultimately, that emphasized

enforcement exclusively within ICE, because that was their mission,” he said. “Under Trump, it’s
taken another step not toward being enforcement, I’d actually say it’s moved toward lawless law enforcement .” He said that the

administration has sent signals to ICE offices and agents to “go rogue by design.” Indeed, the perceived changes
have sparked dissent even within the ranks of the agency: last week, 19 ICE agents signed a letter to DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen favoring the dissolution of the agency that employs them. They argued the

administration’s aggressive posture on immigration has consumed ICE and made it harder for the agency to pursue its other
objectives. Though the left has criticized ICE for years, its role as the spear-tip of Trump’s immigration initiatives has fueled the push to abolish it. One of the first people to advocate for the idea on a public

“ICE has become a genuine

platform was Sean McElwee, a socialist writer and researcher, who wrote an article in March in the liberal The Nation magazine endorsing the idea.

threat to democracy, and it is destroying thousands of lives,” McElwee wrote. He cited congressional testimony from the then-director of
ICE, Thomas Homan, who stated in no uncertain terms that his goal was to foster fear of his agency in immigrant communities. “The call to abolish ICE is, above all, a demand for the Democratic Party to begin
seriously resisting an unbridled white-supremacist surveillance state that it had a hand in creating,” he said. “Though the party has moved left on core issues from reproductive rights to single-payer health care,
it’s time for progressives to put forward a demand that deportation be taken not as the norm but rather as a disturbing indicator of authoritarianism.” The abolish-ICE slogan, mostly buzzed about in left-wing
political circles to that point, was given a national airing with the unexpected victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year old socialist who defeated powerful U.S. Rep. Joseph Crowley in a Democratic primary
in New York City. Ocasio-Cortez is an advocate for abolishing ICE and is vowing to push for it in Congress next year. In Minnesota, if Omar wins the five-way DFL primary in the 5th District on August 14, she’s

“ICE has only become increasingly

almost guaranteed to be the district’s next representative in Congress, where she’d likely be a leading advocate for getting rid of ICE.

militarized, brutal, and unaccountable,” Omar said in a statement to MinnPost. “Our immigration policy should
be based in compassion and a desire to help the other. ICE is not the solution, we need to
abolish ICE.”

ICE avoids regulation and oversight – it is more efficient to work in secrecy

Jack 19 – American Studies major at Macalester College [Suzanna "ICE and the Unquestioned
Human Cost of Efficiency: A Moral Reckoning,"Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities: Vol. 8 : Iss. 1 , Article 7.
Available at: [Link]

Centralization of the Police The first means to explain this phenomena will be expanding upon the centralization of police argument.
The efficiency of the deportation regime is hinged on the fact that there is no oversight or
regulations being imposed onto ICE for their practices and allow them to operate under a guise
of secrecy. Authors Marisa Franco and Paromita Shah write about ICE practices, “They can do
pretty much everything that all other law enforcement sectors can do in one. Police, arrest, seize
property, judge, and even kill. They often act as judge and jury with few limitations from
immigration court” 4 (Franco and Shah 2015). The freedoms ICE has to function as all parts of a judicial
system speak to a desire by the state to centralize control in order to efficiently detain, charge,
and deport as many people as possible. For these steps to be followed with due process would allow more
opportunities for outside parties to become involved: including judges, lawyers, and concerned friends and relatives. Once other
parties are present in the deportation process, there is more access and in many cases, publicity, to examine the undertakings of the
legal aspects which can lead to criticism against the state. Efficiency and secrecy go hand in hand with each
other, allowing ICE authority to single-handedly administer every step of the legal process
results in not only a more “efficient” deportation timeline but also results in many
undocumented human rights abuses which go unrecognized.
ICE violates the law by using X-rays to determine the age of asylees
Digangi 2018 – assistant professor of anthropology at the State University of New
York [Elizabeth, 07-7-18, Sapiens, “How ICE’s bogus science is violating human rights”,
[Link] ACC 07-13-20, AR]

A teenager’s father is murdered in Somalia, and the boy travels to the United States seeking asylum. Another teen’s father and brother are murdered by extremist groups in Afghanistan, and he too makes his way

Since both are minors, federal law decrees that they must be held separately from
to the U.S. to seek asylum.

adults under the oversight of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). However, in these two
cases, and an unknown number of others, these minors were taken in handcuffs by Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and held in adult detention facilities. The reason? In the
absence of other information that could corroborate the teens’ self-reported ages, analysis of
their dental X-rays revealed that both could be adults. Lawyers for these two teens sued on the
grounds that sole reliance on X-rays for age determination is illegal, and several federal judges
agreed. As a forensic anthropologist, I support these judicial decisions. My work can include estimating the ages of deceased persons using X-rays of bones and teeth, and I’m intimately familiar with the
limitations of how specific these techniques can be. In my field, we generate an age range alongside several caveats; it’s irresponsible for ICE to rely solely on X-rays to provide a definitive answer in determining if
a person is a minor or an adult. WHAT CAN BONES AND TEETH TELL US? Forensic anthropologists study the hard tissues of the human body, which include bones and teeth. I’m typically charged
with estimating biological characteristics of deceased persons, including how old a person was when they died. For children and teenagers, such an analysis can be carried out by examining X-rays. Growth and
development are predictable processes, and milestones occur in a particular order. This is the reason that a tooth such as the first adult molar is also known as the “six-year molar,” because it generally erupts in
everyone around age 6, give or take. The analysis proceeds the same way whether we’re examining the X-rays of a living or deceased person. Essentially, we compare the stage of growth shown in the X-ray
to existing growth charts from children and teenagers of known ages. The crucial point is that it’s not possible to make a definitive, single age determination from X-rays or examination of bones or teeth. A variety
of factors affect how well chronological age corresponds with biological age; that is, the amount of time since birth doesn’t necessarily correlate to the exact same stage of growth in every child or teenager. Lots of
things can influence how well biological and chronological age line up, including nutrition, environmental exposure to disease-causing germs and viruses (and their level of virulence), whether the person has been
vaccinated against preventable diseases, body weight, hormones, and genetics, among many others. While these factors differ between individuals, they also differ broadly between populations of people—for
instance, as a group, Americans likely develop at a different rate than sub-Saharan Africans. Many of the studies relied upon to make age estimations are based on populations not representative of the individuals
to whom they’re being applied. Therefore, a certain amount of error can be expected in the final age estimation. What’s more, this error is immeasurable. Without scientific studies on growth that are specific to
each population, we don’t know if on average, Population A ages six months, one year, or two years faster or slower than Population B. And while many methods are bolstered by a statistical likelihood, this is not
the same thing as being certain. We can never be 100 percent sure. ESTIMATION RANGES VERSUS EXACT AGE Of course, the amount of time since birth is the legally important age. But because a disparity
exists, forensic anthropologists refer to the results of the scientific methods we use as “age estimation.” The estimation will never be a pinpointed exact age, because of the variation that exists between individuals
and between populations of people. Therefore, forensic anthropologists report age estimations as a range. For example, rather than saying someone is 17 years and 8 months old, our estimation may be that she is
between 17 and 20 years old. The recent court cases demonstrate that ICE has broken the law by exclusively relying on X-rays for age [Link], the estimated age range might include ages below
and above 18. Take the development of the wisdom tooth, something we often look at when estimating age of older teenagers and young adults. But the development of this tooth is extremely variable, ranging

X-rays in
from never developing at all to erupting anywhere from the mid-teens to early 20s. In such cases, how would a final decision of adult or minor status be made? Federal law dictates that

cases where adult age is not obvious be used only in concert with other methods, such as
verification of documentation and interviews. This makes sense because X-rays only provide orienting information rather than a definitive answer. The recent
court cases demonstrate that ICE has broken the law by exclusively relying on X-rays for age determination,

ruling that the teens be released back into ORR’s custody as minors. Are these cases isolated or illustrative of a bigger problem? A
2008 report by the Office of Homeland Security found that it was not only unclear how often ICE needed to resort to X-rays to assist with age determination but also unknown how common it was for them to rely
solely on X-ray results. Without accurate numbers, there is no way to know how widespread the practice is or how to improve the process. The stakes are high. Children—especially unaccompanied ones—are
especially vulnerable. For this reason, the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement, which ICE is bound by, stipulates that migrant minors be kept separate from unrelated adults. Given recent news that ORR doesn’t
know the whereabouts of almost 1,500 children it placed, many people have lost confidence in these agencies to do the right or moral thing regarding migrants. If ORR can’t keep track of children under its care,
can ICE be trusted to lawfully treat people whose ages are uncertain? In this situation, the law is consistent with the science. And as a scientist, I am obligated to ensure my interpretations are not used
irresponsibly in a way that could cause harm. Citizens, scientists, and government officials alike should ensure that refugees and migrants are treated fairly, with the dignity and respect they deserve, and in a way

. Making age determinations based on X-rays alone is not in line with

consistent with how we would expect to be treated

that goal and can have serious punitive consequences for young migrants.
 Ext Harms – Ethnic Cleansing

Attrition by enforcement policies are a form of ethnic cleansing – they clearly

target Latinx populations
Michalowski, 2013 -prof of Criminology, Northern Arizona University [Raymond Journal
of Crime and Justice Volume 36, “Ethnic cleansing American style: SB 1070, nativism and the contradictions of neo-liberal
globalization” [Link]

Like many laws with significant racial and ethnic impacts, SB 1070 and its clones are ‘facially neutral.’ Nowhere does SB 1070
Yet, in
refer to driving any particular ethnic group from Arizona. Nor do the official publications of nativist organizations such as FAIR, the IRLI or the Taunton group target specific racial or ethnic groups.

the words of poet and folk singer Leonard Cohen (1988) ‘everybody knows’ that the anti-immigration movement is primarily

about driving out Latinos. In 2005, 6 million of the estimated 10.5 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States came from Mexico and another 1.5 million came from other
countries in Latin America. Thus, at the moment the strategy of attrition through enforcement was being crafted,

Latinos comprised 76% of Kirkorian's target population of ‘illegal immigrants. ’ In Arizona, the picture is even clearer
where over 80% of illegalized immigrants are Latino, with the vast majority coming from across the border in Mexico (Hoefer et al. 2005, Pew Hispanic Center 2010). Regardless of what

immigration restrictionists might say, attrition through enforcement is substantively targeted at

Mexicans and other Latino immigrants. Insofar as it is aimed primarily at an identifiable ethnic
population, attrition through enforcement is ethnic cleansing. SB 1070 was not born in a social or political vacuum. It
emerged from and has helped to normalize a virulent anti-Latino climate . While SB 1070 targets illegalized immigrants, it
affects far more Latinos than those who without citizenship or a green card. Illegalized Latinos in Arizona may feel the greatest threat from SB 1070. However, there are few markers

that distinguish an unauthorized Latino from a US citizen or legal resident of similar ethnic
heritage. As a result, Latino residents, whatever their citizenship status, feel the stigma of Arizona's
anti-immigration climate inscribed on their skin. One Mexican-American I spoke with lives on ranchland in southeastern Arizona that was settled by her
fore-bearers well before Anglos appeared in the territory. She described the contemporary experience of Arizona's Mexican-Americans this way: We used to be a close-knit community. Everybody knew everybody
else. Now everyone keeps to themselves because of these laws. Maybe they aren't afraid of being deported, but they are embarrassed. They don't want to be hassled. They don't want to have to prove they have a

the underlying motivation, I contend, is a desire to

right to be here. While the explicit goal of SB 1070 is to force illegalized immigrants to leave the state,

manage the ethnic composition of Arizona. It seeks to return the state to an imagined past where White Arizonans did not have to compete for jobs or status with
Mexicans or other brown-skinned Latinos. That is, attrition through enforcement is a vehicle for ethnic cleansing. It may be, a
‘lite’ version of ethnic cleansing, perhaps, but ethnic cleansing nonetheless. I want to be very clear that I am not arguing that Arizona's anti-immigration legislation and its imitators in other US States are the moral
equivalents of directly violent forms of ethnic cleansing that have deployed arson, rapes, summary executions, and wholesale slaughter to achieve their goals. That would overstate the case. However,

attrition through enforcement carries clear echoes of attempts by other nations to use laws, not
to punish those guilty of demonstrable harm, but to constrain social boundaries of, and create
fear among, identifiable social groups in order to make ordinary life nearly unlivable. Attrition
through enforcement in Arizona does not seek to reduce people to the state of ‘bare life’ theorized by Agamben (2005). It does, however, seek to reduce them to
a state of what I call, barely life as a way of driving them from the state.
 Ext Harms - Racism
ICE is a tool of White Supremacy – it labels all immigrants as threats and targets
minority communities
McElwee, 18 – president and Co-Founder of Data for Progress [Sean The Nation 09.03.2018
“It’s Time to Abolish ICE” [Link]

ICE was a direct product of the post–September 11 panic culture, and was created in the legislation
Congress passed in the wake of the attacks. From the start, the agency was paired with the brand-new
Department of Homeland Security’s increased surveillance of communities of color and immigrant
communities. By putting ICE under the scope of DHS, the government framed immigration as a national security issue rather than an issue of community development,
diversity or human rights. That’s not to say America’s deportation policies only got bad in 2003, nor that it hasn’t been a bipartisan project. When he was a senior advisor to
then-President Bill Clinton, Rahm Emanuel wrote that Clinton should work to “claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens.” When Republicans gave Clinton the
chance to do this with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, he jumped at it. IIRIRA set up the legal infrastructure for mass deportations
and expanded the number of crimes considered deportable. Clinton’s blessing also harshened the political atmosphere around immigration. As recently as 2006, Democrats still
explicitly used anti-immigrant sentiment as a campaign tactic. During his failed Tennessee Senate run, Harold Ford Jr. ran ads warning that “Every day almost 2,000 people
enter America illegally. Every day hundreds of employers look the other way, handing out jobs that keep illegals coming. And every day the rest of us pay the price.” Even Barack
Obama, while he made pains to distinguish between “good” and “bad” immigrants, presided over aggressive deportation tactics in his first term in order to build support for a
The central assumption of ICE in 2018 is that any undocumented immigrant is
path to citizenship that never came.
inherently a threat. In that way, ICE’s tactics are philosophically aligned with racist thinkers like Richard Spencer and the writers at the white-supremacist journal
VDare. ICE’s modus operandi under Trump bears a striking resemblance to the strategy proposed by white
supremacist Jared Taylor in 2015: The key, however, would be a few well publicized raids on non-criminal illegals. Television images of Mexican
families dropped over the border with no more than they could carry would be very powerful. The vast majority of illegals would quickly decide to get their affairs in order
and choose their own day of departure rather than wait for ICE to choose it for them. The main thing would be to convince illegals that ICE was serious about kicking them
acting director Thomas
out. Ironically, the more ICE was prepared to do, the less it would have to do. This is a near-perfect summary of ICE under
Homan, who has repeatedly made clear that all undocumented residents should be afraid of his agents .
“You should look over your shoulder, and you need to be worried ,” he boasted in his congressional testimony last year. Homan does
not apply any light touch when expressing his authoritarian tendencies. He has threatened to jail and prosecute local officials in so-called “sanctuary cities” that do not fully
comply with ICE mandates. The agency has also clearly been targeting political opponents for deportations and has worked to deport individuals for speaking to media about
ICE. Homan’s authoritarian saber rattling has essentially been ignored in the mainstream political dialogue, but the candidates and activists I spoke with hear it loud and clear.
So do the communities they represent.
 Ext Harms - Democracy
ICE undermines democracy – it creates an unaccountable threat to the liberty of
all people in America
Hong 19 - professor of law at Boston College Law School [Kari E., 10 Reasons Why Congress
Should Defund ICE's Deportation Force (March 11, 2019). 43 NYU Review of Law & Social Change Harbinger 2019, Available at
SSRN: [Link]

Eighth, the ERO deportation force is antithetical to fundamental democratic ideals. We are a
nation of laws, but we do not enforce all of them, especially the minor and outdated ones. The
ERO deportation force’s escalating campaign to arrest and deport millions cannot be justified
simply because people without status—or those who are green card holders and citizens who are
convicted of minor or remote matters—are breaking some sort of law. That logic—we just lock
them up—is antithetical to how we prosecute laws and how our country operates. Unlike
totalitarian regimes or police states, in a democracy, we do not arrest everyone for every single
crime they commit. It is likely that the vast majority of Americans have, at one time or another, exceeded the speed limit,
jaywalked, consumed alcohol before the age of majority, stolen office supplies from an employer, used illegal drugs, or committed
other similarly pedestrian violations. Moreover, pursuing minor and silly crimes comes at a cost. Sixteen states still criminalize
adultery, but not a single prosecutor is lying in wait outside divorce court to lock adulterers up. That is because if our courts and jails
are clogged with adulterers, police and prosecutors will not be able to investigate more serious crimes such as murder, robberies,
and violent assaults. The very premise that we should have a roaming government agency that arrests,
detains, and deports anyone with a minor immigration violation violates our democratic norms
and depletes resources that could be more strategically and effectively targeting actual sources of harm.

ICE reinforces authoritarianism by relying on Fear and Censorship

McElwee, 2018 – Co-Founder of Data for Progress [Sean, March 9, The Nation “It’s Time to Abolish
ICE A mass-deportation strike force is incompatible with democracy and human rights”
[Link] Acc 7/4/20 TA]

acting director Thomas Homan, who has repeatedly made clear that all
This is a near-perfect summary of ICE under

undocumented residents should be afraid of his agents. “You should look over your shoulder,
and you need to be worried,” he boasted in his congressional testimony last year. Homan does not apply any light touch
when expressing his authoritarian tendencies. He has threatened to jail and prosecute local
officials in so-called “sanctuary cities” that do not fully comply with ICE mandates. The agency
has also clearly been targeting political opponents for deportations and has worked to deport
individuals for speaking to media about ICE. Homan’s authoritarian saber rattling has
essentially been ignored in the mainstream political dialogue , but the candidates and activists I spoke with hear it loud and clear. So do the
communities they represent.
 Ext Harms - Constitution
ICE mass deportations violate constitutional rights to due process and effective
counsel
Sauter 2009 - Senior Attorney at National Labor Relations Board [Gregoire F., Case Study:
Aguilar v. Ice; Litigating Workplace Immigration Raids in the Twenty-First Century (April 1, 2009). Bender’s Immigration Bulletin,
Vol. 14, p. 389, April 1, 2009, Available at SSRN: [Link]

II. March 8: Original Complaint and Emergency Hearing The initial complaint is in the form of a dual habeas corpus petition and complaint for injunctive and declaratory relief,
The purpose of the TRO motion is twofold: first, to
80 filed together with a motion for temporary restraining order (“TRO”). 81

maintain the status quo and prevent ICE from transferring the detainees out of state ; second, to buy
crucial time during which the New Bedford attorneys can research and compile information on the case. Barely two days have passed since the raid, and they still know
remarkably little about what took place, or how their clients were treated. This pattern of parallel court filings continues during the entire litigation, with the New Bedford team
filing several successive TRO motions while building its habeas case. The original complaint is quite straightforward, belying the complexity of the issues ahead. First, it alleges
that the petitioners are being arbitrarily held in prolonged and indefinite detention without basis
in law or fact, in violation of the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments .
82 It also claims they are being denied their Fifth Amendment right to prompt and effective access to

counsel, and their statutory right under the Immigration and Nationality Act (“INA”) 83 to
retain the counsel of their choice. 84 The complaint requests that all detainees be released and given reasonable time to retain counsel, and that ICE
be enjoined from further transferring detainees out of Massachusetts. 85 For its part, the TRO motion argues that transferring the detainees will

cause them irreparable damage and undue hardship, as well as deprive them of their rights to
have fair bond hearings, present evidence in their immigration proceedings, and retain counsel
of their choice. 86 It requests that all transferred detainees be returned to Massachusetts, and that an immediate hearing be held to address the motion. With only
two days to research all the legal issues and draft the briefs, the suit is remarkably organized and cohesive.

ICE’s deportations are unconstitutional – they violate the right to counsel and due
process
Sauter 2009 - Senior Attorney at National Labor Relations Board [Gregoire F., Case Study:
Aguilar v. Ice; Litigating Workplace Immigration Raids in the Twenty-First Century (April 1, 2009). Bender’s Immigration Bulletin,
Vol. 14, p. 389, April 1, 2009, Available at SSRN: [Link]

IV. March 13: Amended Complaint Filed just four days after Judge Stearns’s TRO order, the amended complaint is no longer simply a petition for habeas
reprises many of the claims and arguments contained in the initial complaint,
corpus, but also a class action for injunctive and declaratory relief. 124 It

specifically claims of arbitrary, prolonged and indefinite detention without basis in law or fact, and

denial of prompt and effective access to counsel of one’s choice . 125 However, it also reflects discoveries made in the interim,
and presents a more complete and cohesive narrative of the week’s events. Significantly, the New Bedford attorneys recast the procedures

employed by ICE during the raid as a deliberate pattern and practice aimed at impairing the
detainees’ ability to defend themselves. 126 They allege that ICE’s practice during immigration raids is to
seize suspected undocumented immigrants and transfer them to facilities removed from the site
of their arrest, in order to limit their access to counsel. 127 Then, they are again moved, this time
to facilities scattered around the country, and often with limited access to legal services. 128
From these allegations spring two new claims. First, imposing bond hearings in locations far
removed from the petitioners’ homes, with significantly lower chances of receiving favorable
conditions of release, violates their Fifth Amendment due process rights . 129 Second, transferring
the petitioners interferes with their rights to keep their families together and control the care
and custody of their children, thus violating their substantive due process rights under the Fifth
Amendment. 130 For relief, the petitioners request the court to assume jurisdiction over the matter, certify the petitioners as a class, enter a declaratory judgment that
such policies violate the Fifth Amendment and the INA, and enjoin ICE from removing future detainees from Massachusetts for seven days after their arrest. Also on March 13,
the New Bedford attorneys submit a memorandum arguing for the court’s jurisdiction over the case. 132 They address the issue of personal jurisdiction in detail, explaining why
the court’s authority extends to all out-of-state detainees, whether they were transferred before or after the filing of the initial complaint. 133 The memorandum spends
comparatively little time on the issue of subject matter jurisdiction. This is because, in the 2005 case of Hernandez v. Gonzales, the First Circuit held that 8 U.S.C. § 1252(a)(5),
which bars district courts from reviewing orders of removal, does not deprive them of habeas jurisdiction over detention-related claims. 134 Because Hernandez is so
unambiguous in its terms, the New Bedford attorneys feel no need to belabor the issue. 135 In fact, they are so confident that Hernandez is the final word on the matter, that they
only reference the case in a footnote. On March 16, 2007, ICE moves to dismiss the case, citing the same arguments as in its March 8 opposition to the petitioners’ complaint:
lack of personal jurisdiction over the detainees’ custodians, and lack of subject matter jurisdiction over their claims. 137 Since the government argued from the beginning that
the district court cannot hear the case, this motion is not unexpected.
 Ext Solvency - Harassment
Abolishing ICE is key to preventing terroristic harassment by the government -
Demands to Abolish ICE change the normalization of Deportation Culture
McElwee, 18 – president and Co-Founder of Data for Progress [Sean The Nation 09.03.2018
“It’s Time to Abolish ICE” [Link]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is challenging Joe Crowley in New York’s 14th Congressional District, which covers part of the Bronx and Queens, told me she believes that “After
a long and protracted history of sexual assault and uninvestigated deaths in ICE’s detention facilities, as well as the corrosive impact ICE has had on our schools, courts, and
communities, it’s time to reset course.” New York’s 14th district is among the most diverse and immigrant-heavy in the country. Ocasio-Cortez not only supports defunding ICE,
but also wants a full congressional inquiry into ICE enforcement and detention practices. She further argues for a “a truth and reconciliation process for victims of any potential
sexual assault, neglect, and misconduct discovered as a result.” Kaniela Ing, a member of the Hawaii State Legislature currently running for the House in the state’s first district,
has also endorsed defunding ICE, tweeting this week that “When they say defund Planned Parenthood (and destroy millions of lives), we say defund ICE (and save millions of
lives).” Suraj Patel, a child of immigrants, is running a well-funded insurgent campaign against Democratic incumbent Representative Carolyn Maloney in New York’s 12th
. “ICE has crossed a red line under this president by
Congressional District. He would vote to defund ICE if he makes it to Congress

harassing, pursuing, and terrorizing immigrants and activists all over this country with
impunity. These mass deportations are forcing immigrants to live in fear, while making the rest of us less
safe,” he said. “Defunding ICE and returning it to be a passport-patrol and customs-enforcement agency
rather than an above-the-law deportation squad is a critical step to protecting all Americans and our civil
liberties.” Granted, this position might not fly everywhere in the country. But Hillary Clinton won the 12th district with 83 percent of the vote, and candidates like Patel are
trying to shift the Overton window. “We miss an incredible opportunity when we allow districts like ours to be safe havens for the status quo,” Patel said. There is
increasing support for limiting or even ending cooperation with ICE at the state level, too . Abdul El-Sayed,
a gubernatorial candidate in Michigan, told me that he “will not waste a dime of state taxpayer money to
enforce laws that would tear apart families—and tear apart our economy. ” Jessica Ramos, who is running for a New York State
“Instead of making our communities safer, ICE has taught
Senate seat in Queens, has also endorsed defunding ICE.

immigrants to fear and distrust law enforcement,” she said. “It’s absolutely time to defund the
agency and start working on real, common-sense immigration reform.” Ramos’s opponent in the primary, Jose
Peralta, joined the Independent Democratic Caucus in the statehouse last year, which is a group of politicians who were elected as Democrats formed a power-sharing agreement
with Republicans. He claimed this would position him to bring tuition benefits and protections to undocumented immigrants, but those benefits have not materialized, though
he has gotten a nice pay raise thanks to the [Link] call to abolish ICE is, above all, a demand for the Democratic Party to
begin seriously resisting an unbridled white-supremacist surveillance state that it had a hand in creating .
Though the party has moved left on core issues from reproductive rights to single-payer health care, it’s time for progressives to put forward a
demand that deportation be taken not as the norm but rather as a disturbing indicator of
authoritarianism. White supremacy can no longer be the center of the immigration debate. Democrats have voted to fully fund ICE with limited fanfare, because in
the American immigration discussion, the right-wing position is the center and the left has no voice. There has been disturbing word fatigue
around “mass deportation,” and the threat of deportation is so often taken lightly that many have lost the
ability to conceptualize what it means. Next to death, being stripped from your home, family, and
community is the worst fate that can be inflicted on a human, as many societies practicing banishment
have recognized. It’s time to rein in the greatest threat we face: an unaccountable strike force executing a
campaign of ethnic cleansing.
 Ext Solvency - Dehumanization

Abolishing ICE is important to remember and prevent the horrors of

dehumanization as government policy, it allows a more just immigration policy
Hodes, 2019 – Institute for Policy Studies [Rachel, “What ‘Abolish ICE’ Really Means” August 1, 2019
[Link]

I
As I stepped inside the Cannon House Office Building on a Tuesday in July, I felt like I was taking a step towards a more just world. The night before, when I told my mother

planned to participate in a “Never Again” protest as part of #JewsAgainstICE , she had one question: “What
exactly are their demands?” That question was answered in the Cannon Building’s rotunda, as we chanted: “Never again means close the

camps.” “Never again means abolish ICE.” “Never again is now.” To most of America, “abolish ICE” is a cry of the far left.
Even Americans who dislike Trump’s attacks on undocumented immigrants wouldn’t necessarily tell you that ICE should be abolished; that seems far too radical. They’re
forgetting that ICE is actually pretty new. It was only created in 2003, replacing the Immigration and Naturalization Service (the same agency responsible for the internment of
Japanese-Americans in the 1940s). Since its creation, ICE’s budget has almost doubled, and its activity has expanded to triple the number of agents it employs. This expansion is
shocking — and unwarranted. All evidence suggests that immigrants are far from the national security threat the Trump administration claims they are. Regardless of status,
they’re more law-abiding than native-born citizens. And time and time again, immigration has been shown to have a net-positive effect on the U.S. economy, from growing tax
receipts to increasing wages for native-born residents. In fact, undocumented immigrants typically pay more of their income in taxes than your average millionaire. More
noteworthy than the economics, however, is that the individuals targeted by ICE are people — and all people are entitled to basic conditions of safety and for themselves and
their families. When the majority of these immigrants are fleeing violence with roots in U.S. intervention in Central America, the moral responsibility to offer safe haven
What calls to abolish ICE
becomes even more pressing. When government agencies neglect this responsibility, we all lose some of our humanity.

actually do is beg the question: Why do we need an immigration system dedicated solely to
terrorizing immigrant communities? Threats of ICE raids prevent undocumented people from
going to work or sending their kids to school. Those in detention are denied access to basic
hygienic products, subjected to severe overcrowding, and experience all manner of abuse.
Several children have died. We spend about $7 billion a year on ICE. What would happen if we instead invested
those funds in resettling asylum-seekers, or hiring more staff to process asylum applications ? What
if families fleeing violence in Honduras or Guatemala had to wait only a few weeks to find out if they could immigrate legally, as opposed to the current average of almost two
years? The U.S. carried out over a quarter million deportations last year. The $7 billion that funded these actions could have been used instead to resettle at least that many
refugees (over 11 times what the U.S. accepted last year). It could also almost triple the funding of the government office that naturalizes around 700,000 new citizens each year.
Which is more radical: Investing in communities that strengthen our country and honoring
basic human decency? Or continuing to fund an agency that’s literally caused the death of
children? As a concerned Jewish American, I believe none of us are safe until we’re all safe. We should be focusing
our resources on welcoming new immigrants and helping them access the rights of citizenship —
not subjecting them to detention and deportation. A better world, for immigrants and for
everyone, is within our reach. ICE just isn’t a part of it.
 Ext Solvency – New Immigration Policy
Discussing an alternative immigration system is a necessary precursor to
abolishing ICE – only the affirmative plan can uphold that vision.
Markowitz, 19 – Professor of Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law [Peter L. The
Yale Law Journal 07-11-2019 “Abolish ICE… and Then What?” [Link]

ICE has failed by every measure. It has brutalized communities, wasted billions of dollars, and failed to increase compliance with
immigration laws. The four pillars set forth above provide a blueprint for how a radically new vision
for immigration enforcement could increase complianc e while simultaneously reducing the human and fiscal
costs of enforcement. This blueprint would allow us to abolish ICE and to create an effective and humane enforcement system
without the need for any dedicated agency of immigration police. In place of ICE, the United States would need to
increase public investment in an immigration agency, like USCIS, that delivers services to
immigrants and that would be responsible for facilitating compliance-assistance programs. Such
an agency, however, should not be housed inside DHS. Instead, the immigration agency should
be housed in a department, like Health and Human Services, that has a mission consistent with appropriate
immigration policy goals: to look after the well-being and economic vitality of immigrants and of the nation as a whole. The
ability to theorize a workable and humane immigration-enforcement system is a necessary but
insufficient precursor to realizing the reforms that our nation’s immigration system desperately
needs. Substantive immigration reform is a separate and perhaps even more critical need,
because it is impossible to construct a just enforcement system if the laws being enforced are
themselves unjust. To date, much effort has gone into theorizing needed substantive reforms. However, comparatively little
work has been done to think through the structures of a just enforcement system. This Essay seeks to help move our national
conversation about immigration enforcement forward by providing a starting point for the immigrant-rights movement and for
policy-makers to use, critique, and improve upon.
 Ext Harms - Discourse
ICE portrays immigrants as threats – they employ the discourse of “illegal aliens”
as propaganda to distract from their attacks on All immigrants and to dehumanize
the community
Hong 19 - professor of law at Boston College Law School [Kari E., 10 Reasons Why Congress
Should Defund ICE's Deportation Force (March 11, 2019). 43 NYU Review of Law & Social Change Harbinger 2019, Available at
SSRN: [Link]

Seventh, the ERO deportation efforts are theatrics of intimidation . When the ERO makes an
arrest, there is a cognizable likelihood that the noncitizen will get legal status. The ERO
deportation force’s theatrical tactics to communicate force—from the state court arrests of crime
victims and witnesses, to the dramatic kidnappings off of public streets, to roadside checkpoints
—suggest an urgency of mission and a dangerousness of those arrested, that in fact does not
exist. The theatrics are completely unnecessary and falsely suggest that ICE is targeting “violent criminals.” This conceals the reality that the
ERO deportation force merely targets parents, children, and people who are integrated into
communities. Of most import, the dramatic arrests hide the reality that many of those arrested people
will, after their arrest, receive legal status and be released to the community. As an example of the ERO
deporation force engaging in theatrics rather than legitimate enforcement activity, ICE makes an effort to arrest people in the

moments before they are able to obtain legal status by targeting people at green card interviews.
Recently, ICE arrested the pregnant wife of a citizen at her green card interview and detained her knowing that she had a high risk pregnancy. ICE also denied her hypertension
medication for two days while she was detained. If ICE had waited for the interview to end, she would have had a
green card and would not have been subject to arrest. The arrest and detention appeared to be just for show. ICE released her within
four days, after the media learned of her senseless arrest.80 It is intellectually dishonest to justify the ERO deportation

force’s mass disruptions to our families and communities because “they” are supposedly
“illegal.” The use of the term “illegal immigrant” is an unconvincing justification for this
wasteful and irrational policy because the term “illegal immigrant” is a fictitious term at best,
and a slur at its worst. It is not a technical term used by any immigration court and has no
meaning in immigration law.81 You do not hear of “immigration violators.” This is because immigration violations are civil matters, which include minor
and unintentional conduct such as volunteering on the wrong visa and overstaying a visa. Immigration violations involve conduct that is not akin to criminal activity and is not a
serious breach of public safety. Because of that, even where immigration violations are proven, the second phase of every immigration hearing, and immigration interview,
begins with the question: What remedies nonetheless are available that will provide the non-citizen with lasting legal status such as a green card or asylum? These remedies are
readily available and freely given, even after immigration violations are proven. When non-citizens are given an attorney, as many as 77% of those arrested by ICE with proven
immigration violations walk out of immigration court with legal status.83 It is unimaginable for someone after being convicted of a crime to be given a good citizenship
“Pre-legal immigrant”—not “illegal
certificate instead of a sentence. But that is what happens in immigration court every single day.

immigrant”—is the more accurate term for those being targeted by the ERO deportation force.
 Ext Discourse – Shape Immigration Policy
Our demand to Abolish ICE helps to shape and guide the broader social discussion
about our assumptions about immigrants and a humane immigration policy – the
time is right, because ICE is so controversial
Ford 18- staff writer at The New Republic.(Matt July 18,2018,The New Republic, “OK, Abolish ICE. What
then?” [Link] ,July 9,2020 AS)

what he would regard as success for the Abolish ICE movement, he situated it within
When I asked McElwee

the context of a broader anti-deportation movement, which advocates decriminalizing

immigration and providing a pathway to citizenship. But he also made clear that he would like to see the Enforcement
and Removal Operations office go defunct. “The job that ERO performs only really makes sense
as a thing that society should be doing if you view the presence of people of color in this country
as a threat,” McElwee said. “I actually think that having a big, broad discussion about what we
want to be as a nation—in terms of what laws we want to enforce and behaviors we make illegal— is actually something that has to be
done and isn’t thought through in a coherent way.” ICE’s ultimate fate would hinge on how much lawmakers want to change. If ERO were shuttered,
Congress could simply leave Homeland Security Investigations and the rest of ICE’s structure intact under a more suitable name. Lawmakers could also make HSI a distinct investigative agency within the
Department of Homeland Security. Congress could also move the office to the Justice Department, either as a standalone agency or to be absorbed by the FBI, or to the Treasury Department, where the U.S.

Customs Service once exercised similar functions. At its broadest level, #AbolishICE isn’t just about changing DHS’ most
controversial agency. It’s about changing the nation’s deadlocked immigration debate. “Everyone’s
entrenched,” Saldana said, referring to Congress. “I don’t blame one side or the other for the lack of comprehensive immigration reform. Both parties are responsible, and

I would hope that at some point the public gets serious enough about it to say, ‘You’re not
working on a major issue in this country and we need someone who will.’” By calling for ICE’s
abolition, activists on the left are hoping to tilt that debate in their favor. “ICE is now contested,”
McElwee said. “Detention beds are contested. ICE’s funding in omnibus bills is no longer a given—a thing that is seen as the thing that’s done automatically. The contesting
of deportation is very valuable. We actually have some space now to question the consensus that
was fundamentally a center-right consensus.” For those hoping to build a new approach to
immigration after Trump, that long-term shift is more important than whatever form ICE takes
next.

The Affirmative is a Starting Point – it shapes the immigration discussion to be

humane and more effective.
Markowitz, 19 – Professor of Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law [Peter L. The
Yale Law Journal 07-11-2019 “Abolish ICE… and Then What?” [Link]

Demonstrating the failure of ICE’s enforcement paradigm, however, merely begs the question whether there is a better way.
Documenting ICE’s irredeemable defects is the beginning, not the end, of the inquiry. The
Abolish ICE movement can only succeed if it can plot a path forward with an affirmative vision
for a more humane enforcement scheme that is both effective and realistic. II. PILLARS OF A HUMANE AND
EFFECTIVE IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT SYSTEM Any successful proposal for a post-ICE immigration-enforcement scheme
must achieve two distinct goals. First, the new system must forswear and commit to cure the inhumanity
and brutality that characterize immigration enforcement under ICE—most notably by
eliminating immigration detention and mass deportation. Second, the new system must be more
effective at promoting compliance with immigration law . Some critics of the Abolish ICE
movement have suggested that the two goals are mutually inconsistent, but they need not be
so.30 Below, I propose four pillars of a new immigration-enforcement paradigm—one that would radically
reshape immigration enforcement and create a humane system that could be both more effective
at encouraging compliance with U.S. immigration laws and dramatically less expensive. The pillars
are foundational elements of such a system that would need to be fleshed out in significant detail in future legislation . I offer
them now in broad strokes to help policy-makers and advocates conceive of, and articulate, the
basic contours of a new immigration-enforcement paradigm. In doing so, I establish a target to
work toward now and to refine into winnable legislation when the political climate allows. 31 The
proposal draws lessons from our own and other nations’ past immigration-enforcement schemes, from mechanisms employed by
other federal agencies, and from the expertise of the Abolish ICE movement leaders interviewed for this Essay.
 Ext Discourse – Public Awareness

The Affirmative call for Abolishing ICE promotes social discussion of why we need
to end the agency
Godfrey, 18 - Political Reporter for the Atlantic [Elaine6-07-18The Atlantic “What ‘Abolish ICE’ Actually
Means” [Link]

The calls to abolish the agency began in earnest in early summer, at the peak of the public outcry
against the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy that resulted in the
separation of families at the United States–Mexico border. Those calls grew louder after the 28-year-
old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ran and won on the issue in her primary victory in New York. “It’s time to abolish ICE, clear the path to
citizenship, and protect the rights of families to remain together,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on her campaign website. Senator Kirsten
Gillibrand of New York—a potential 2020 presidential contender—hopped on the bandwagon shortly after, telling CNN, “I believe
that ICE has become a deportation force … and that’s why I believe you should get rid of it, start over, reimagine it, and build
something that actually works.” Whether Democratic lawmakers are pushing to eliminate the agency completely
or simply restructure it still appears to be up for debate. But the big thing, activists told me, is
that people are talking about it. Saikat Chakrabarti, president of Justice Democrats and an adviser to
Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign, summed up the young movement this way: “Usually in America when there’s some system or something
inflicting great amounts of damage and pain, I think the reasonable thing to do is say, ‘Okay, hold it, let’s stop what we’re doing,’” he
said. “Everyone has a different idea of what happens after [the agency is abolished] but at least
we’ve got everybody on the same page [that] this is wrong.”

Political will is key to abolishing ICE – our demand is part of a growing grassroots
movement
Gottlieb 2018 - associate regional director of the American Friends Service
Committee [Amy June 23, "It is time to abolish ICE. It cannot be reformed," The Guardian,
[Link] 5/15/20 TA]

Suggesting the abolition of a government agency may seem like a radical idea, but it’s actually
not that uncommon. Donald Trump himself proposed eliminating 19 government agencies in his first federal budget blueprint, even though
those agencies actually benefited our communities. Both Democrats and Republicans have proposed eliminating the Commerce Department. And
dozens of federal agencies have been created and dissolved as conditions and politics have changed over time. It’s
not a question of
whether ICE can be abolished, but of how we can generate the political will to make it happen.
Already, many are calling on their members of Congress to speak out publicly about the need to
shut down the agency. Several candidates have even endorsed the idea. But individuals and municipalities are not just waiting for Congress
to act; they are also taking action. Hundreds of counties across the country have passed policies to limit local law enforcement’s collusion with ICE, as
has the state of California. And a national grassroots mobilization has called on Congress to defund the agency because of its anti-immigration agenda.
Some may question who will perform the duties of ICE if it is abolished. But are those duties essential to sustaining strong communities? In my
experience, they often do the opposite. They do
not protect national security, they do not decrease crime and they do
not make us safer. What makes us safer are communities that have access to basic services , including education,
healthcare and jobs, and where loved ones can stay together. Deportation is a form of exile. If Ravi is deported, he will be permanently
refused entry to the US. He will never be able to return to our home, to our community, to his job, to the people who have held us up during this long
struggle. And we are one family among thousands. An agency that enshrines and increases this arbitrary cruelty should not be preserved. Fortunately,
the tide is turning. People across the country are outraged, and are standing up for accountability, for human rights, for family unity. It’s time for
Congress to stand with their constituents and demand an end to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Abolishing an agency that
shatters communities is a first step toward creating a more just world.

The Affirmative call for Abolishing ICE promotes social discussion of why we need
to end the agency
Godfrey 2018 – politics writer at The Atlantic [Elaine, 07-11-18, The Atlantic, “What abolish ice actually
means”, [Link] ACC 07-13-20, AR]
The calls to abolish the agency began in earnest in early summer, at the peak of the public outcry
against the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy that resulted in the
separation of families at the United States–Mexico border. Those calls grew louder after the 28-year-
old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ran and won on the issue in her primary victory in New York. “It’s time to abolish ICE, clear the path to
citizenship, and protect the rights of families to remain together,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on her campaign website. Senator Kirsten
Gillibrand of New York—a potential 2020 presidential contender—hopped on the bandwagon shortly after, telling CNN, “I believe
that ICE has become a deportation force … and that’s why I believe you should get rid of it, start over, reimagine it, and build
something that actually works.” Whether Democratic lawmakers are pushing to eliminate the agency completely
or simply restructure it still appears to be up for debate. But the big thing, activists told me, is
that people are talking about it. Saikat Chakrabarti, president of Justice Democrats and an adviser to
Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign, summed up the young movement this way: “Usually in America when there’s some system or something
inflicting great amounts of damage and pain, I think the reasonable thing to do is say, ‘Okay, hold it, let’s stop what we’re doing,’” he
said. “Everyone has a different idea of what happens after [the agency is abolished] but at least
we’ve got everybody on the same page [that] this is wrong.”

Increasing Discourse about Abolition is necessary to empower political change to

abolish ICE and support Humane immigration
Loffman 2018 – PBS politics producer [Matt, 07-6-18, PBS, “What’s driving the movement to Abolish ICE?”,
[Link] ACC 07-13-20, AR]

Some type of action — whether legislatively or in the courts — could become more likely if
protests grow louder, Kang said. “What we’ve seen in the past is that when people protest and protest
enough, there actually is change,” Kang said. “These protests do have an impact in helping to
raising awareness of problems with our immigration bureaucracy and achieving some degree of
reforms. These reforms are limited, but sometimes reforms can happen.” Still, Kang notes, “just getting rid of ICE isn’t going to solve the problem.” Congress would likely
just shift responsibility for interior immigration enforcement to other agencies inside the Department of Homeland Security, like Customs and Border Protection. Instead,
Lee says 21st century questions about “balancing national security and economic prosperity”
require a comprehensive analysis of immigration in the United States. “The calls for abolishing
ICE is part of a much larger reimagining of our country’s relationship with immigration,” she said, the
latest iteration of an immigration struggle the federal government has wrestled with for more than 100 years.

Empirically, legislation to abolish ICE has increased awareness about inhumane

detention and deportation by focusing on the Abuses.
Ford 18- staff writer at The New Republic.(Matt July 18,2018,The New Republic, “OK, Abolish ICE. What
then?” [Link] ,July 9,2020 AS)

Sean McElwee, a Data for Progress co-founder who popularized the idea of abolishing ICE last year, told me that he considers the bill a “good
first start” toward dismantling the agency. But he acknowledged that there are still open questions about
what exactly should take ICE’s place, if anything. “At this point, there isn’t alignment within the immigrant-rights community and the
groups that have been pushing to abolish ICE as to what a concrete next step would be,” he said. “ What the bill is meant to do, I think it does

quite effectively. The detailed findings that make up the majority of the text are quite powerful.”
McElwee indicated that liberal and left-leaning think tanks have a role to play in fleshing out what should

happen next. “The D.C. policy apparatus isn’t serving what I view its function should be, which
is to take the demands that activists and Democratic voters have, and try to find a way to turn those into
policy proposals,” he told me. McElwee said he expected that there would be “a fully-limbed vision of this” in the coming months, “and then I think we’ll
have an important back-and-forth as to what exactly that will look like.”
 Ext Discourse – Perform Values
The context of the demand to abolish ICE matters – it is not Only a literal policy –
it carries a framework of intersectional demands for Justice that can create a
humane immigration system.
Crennen-Dunlap 19 - J.D. candidate at the University of Denver College of Law
[Allison Abolishing the ICEberg (January 3, 2019). Denver Law Review, Vol. 96, No. 148, 2019, Available at
SSRN: [Link]

Butthe abolish ICE movement is not limited to such a narrow approach. Mijente, a group of Latinx
and Chicanx activists working for “justice and self-determination for all people,” has created a
policy platform that builds on the call to abolish ICE but offers a more historically grounded
vision of what an alternative to current practices might entail. Among other plans, Mijente
would abolish immigration detention; end all deportation; eliminate state and local support for
ICE; repeal unlawful entry and reentry; and defund Border Patrol as it currently exists, creating instead a border agency that provides emergency rescue services.
Mijente expressly grounds its proposal in an understanding that the U.S. government’s punitive
approach to migration is part and parcel of broader policies that maintain the subordination of
historically subordinated groups. Indeed, Mijente ties the separation of migrant families during the
summer of 2018 to other examples of state violence against subordinated groups, including the
historical separation of black families subjected to slavery; the contemporary separation of black
families via the criminal justice system; the U.S. government’s historical and contemporary
separation of indigenous families88; the internment of Japanese-American families during
World War II; and the forced institutionalization, sterilization, and criminalization of people
with disabilities. Mijente’s vision thus extends far beyond the mere abolition of an agency.
Rather, it calls for a fundamental rethinking of the United States’s current approach to
migration—an approach that relies on a racist criminal justice system to “divid[e] our
communities between those labeled ‘deserving’ of humanitarian reform, and those who will be
left in the system of immigration enforcement, detention, and incarceration. “In short, while a
literal reading of the call to abolish ICE renders that rallying cry meaningless, a proposal
inspired by that rallying cry but grounded in a deeper understanding of the history out of which
ICE was born is a call for profound change. The call to abolish ICE has inspired protestors, vexed mainstream politicians, and raised
questions regarding exactly what that rallying cry might mean. If taken literally, the call to abolish ICE is a meaningless

slogan that would accomplish little or nothing. However, if that call draws on a deeper
understanding of the historical and bureaucratic systems in which ICE is embedded, demanding
ICE’s abolition asks for something more—such a call seeks not merely the end of an agency and
redistribution of its duties, but requires us to reconsider the premises of U.S. immigration
policy. It asks us to reconsider whether the incarceration and banishment of hundreds of
thousands of people annually is morally acceptable, whether the U.S. electorate—largely born
into the privilege of citizenship—should endorse the separation of families born without such
privilege, and whether a nation founded on a proclamation of equality should continue to accept
as inevitable a hierarchy driven by race and birthplace. Whether the electorate will heed that call remains to be seen.

Calling for ICE be abolished is more than a policy demand. It demands that we
respect each person regardless of citizenship.
Jack 19 – American Studies major at Macalester College [Suzanna "ICE and the Unquestioned
Human Cost of Efficiency: A Moral Reckoning,"Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities: Vol. 8 : Iss. 1 , Article 7.
Available at: [Link]

Conclusion At
any given time, there are around 30,000 people being held at ICE detention centers
(Cullen 2018). 2017
proved to be the most deadly year in regards to deaths while in custody and
2018 seems to be following the same pattern. Why, as a nation, are we so complicit in a
deportation regime that gains power each year and continues to violate human rights standards
in an efficient and deadly manner? The reason, I believe, comes down to citizenship providing
the frame for which efficiency becomes the highest value. Under ICE, immigrant bodies are
disposable and fall into a category of being treated efficiently in order to maximize arrests and
deportations. Because the principle of efficiency always calls for something to be compromised
in order to maximize results from as little as possible, the lives of undocumented immigrants are
unvalued in the eyes of the state. The political entity of the state only ensures freedom to 7 citizens, so as a result, the
questioning and denial of freedom becomes applied to non citizens because of freedom existing as an “American right”. Are we
boiling down the lived experiences of humans to produce the maximum optimization of efficient practices in everyday life? We rarely
question the way that efficiency is ingrained in our perception of the world and how we allow efficiency to define successes. We
are in a moment where ICE has gained unchecked power and it's up to us to create and carry out
a movement to abolish it. This movement will be ongoing and focus just as much on dismantling
predisposed prejudices based in prioritizing whiteness and citizenship in our definition of
humanity, as it will be the act of abolishing ICE itself.

Our demand to Abolish ICE challenges white supremacist authoritarianism.

Ford 18- staff writer at The New Republic.(Matt July 18,2018,The New Republic, “OK, Abolish ICE. What
then?” [Link] ,July 9,2020 AS)

Calls to rethink ICE’s existence first began percolating on social media last year as Trump’s
hardline immigration policies, notably a sharp increase in deportations from the interior U.S.,
began to take shape. By this spring, immigration-rights activists began to lay out the full case
against the agency’s existence. “The call to abolish ICE is, above all, a demand for the
Democratic Party to begin seriously resisting an unbridled white-supremacist surveillance state
that it had a hand in creating,” McElwee explained in The Nation in April. He called on progressives to “demand
that deportation be taken not as the norm but rather as a disturbing indicator of
authoritarianism.”

Labelling ICE immoral is essential to the abolition movement – deportations

violate human rights and distract immigration enforcement from more important
priorities
Godfrey 2018 – politics writer at The Atlantic [Elaine, 07-11-18, The Atlantic, “What abolish ice actually
means”, [Link] ACC 07-13-20, AR]

The advocates and lawmakers calling to abolish ICE have framed the issue as a moral one: The
agency’s widespread use of deportations for undocumented immigrants without criminal
records is inhumane, and detracts from its more important function of investigating drug
smuggling and human-rights abuses. “They’re not doing the job they were hired to do,” said Randy Bryce, the Democratic candidate running for
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s seat in Wisconsin’s 1st district, in an interview with The Atlantic. “It’s more along the lines of a personal deportation force for Donald Trump
right now.” A spokesman for the Michigan gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed, told me that, as governor, El-Sayed would support I C E  being “defunded and dismantled,”
and would not allow state resources to be used in federal immigration enforcement. Sean McElwee, a co-founder of Data for Progress and [Link], has been a leader in the
charge to eliminate I C E   for several years. Abolish I C E  “is fundamentally an anti-deportation movement,” he told me, and after the agency is gone, “the central aim has to be
ensuring that mass deportation is not housed somewhere else in the government.” The question, then, is whether calling to abolish  I C E  means ending all or most internal
immigration enforcement—or simply restructuring or replacing the agency itself. This is the area where Democratic lawmakers’ positions are less clear, and where conservatives
see a political opportunity. Some politicians have stopped short of demanding the complete elimination of the agency. Senator Bernie Sanders, who had been reluctant to
Now, it is time to do what Americans
comment on the growing movement, released a vague statement on the issue on July 3: “

overwhelmingly want: abolish the cruel, dysfunctional immigration system we have today and
pass comprehensive immigration reform,” the statement said. “That will mean restructuring the agencies that enforce our immigration laws,
including I C E .” Senator Kamala Harris of California, in a recent interview on MSNBC, said it would be necessary to “reexamine” the agency and perhaps consider “starting from
scratch.” A spokesman for Harris told me that the senator hopes I C E  funds can be directed more appropriately, and agents can be retrained “against targeting vulnerable
populations such as victims of sexual assault or domestic violence, crime witnesses, pregnant women, and children.” Others, though, have suggested that ICE, as an
agency, should be totally scrapped, which would require identifying and transferring its more
urgent functions—such as combating human-rights abuses and rooting out criminals—to
another agency. Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, one of the most outspoken lawmakers
on the issue, said in an email that she wants “to eliminate the agency as it stands and restructure its functions, starting from scratch.” Jayapal, along with Representative
 There will still be enforcement of immigration
Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, will soon be introducing legislation to dismantle the agency. “

laws, but it must be without cruelty and abuse,” she said. Pocan told me the legislation would dissolve ICE within 12 months, and
create a commission to recommend a new immigration enforcement system to Congress. When asked whether broader changes to internal immigration enforcement were
necessary—if authorities should stop pursuing undocumented immigrants altogether—most of the lawmakers I spoke with brought the conversation back to what they viewed as
It’s the indiscriminate, random use of deportations” that has to stop, said Pocan.
ICE’s current flaws. “

“We know there are millions of people here who are technically not here legally, and yet many
have been here for a very long time. I don’t think many people think that’s an effective use of
ICE.” Most American adults, according to polling from Gallup, generally oppose deporting all undocumented immigrants, regardless of criminal background, living in the
United States. But a recent HuffPost/YouGov poll found that public opinion on eliminating ICE altogether is mixed. Roughly 21 percent of respondents said they support
abolishing ICE, while 44 percent said they oppose it and 35 percent were undecided.
 Ext Discourse – Policy Not Key
You can vote for our demand to Abolish ICE even if you don’t adopt the policy – the
Ideas are more important than the law – they change the tone of public
discussions by advancing the issue
Kuz, 2018 – correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor [Martin July 31, 2018 “Abolish
ICE, Reform it, Or What?” [Link]

In reality, as similar protests percolate across the country, the movement and its intentions remain ambiguous. Even as many
involved in the effort favor dismantling ICE, supporters recognize that, as a more practical
matter, the motto serves as a strategic gambit and a rallying cry to motivate voters. In that
broader view, the campaign can provoke change irrespective of the agency’s survival or demise,
explains Hemanth Gundavaram, co-director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at Northeastern University in
Boston. “A political debate is a negotiation, and in any negotiation, you start from your strongest

position,” he says. “So abolishing ICE has to be on the table in order to come to a middle ground
where reforms can happen.”

Avoiding the entanglement of politics allows the Abolish ICE movement the
freedom to change minds. The Slogan is more powerful than the Law.
Narea, 2020 – immigration reporter for Vox [Nicole “How “abolish ICE” helped bring abolitionist ideas
into the mainstream” Jul 9, 2020, [Link]
black-lives-matter]

Centrist Democrats’ efforts to distance themselves from the Abolish ICE movement, however, have
had their advantages: The movement was able to evolve outside the realm of electoral politics
and without the baggage of the Democratic brand, McElwee said. “The fact that politicians won’t even
come close to touching it has given a lot of freedom,” he said. “If Biden embraced it, it would become much more polarized and
partisan, whereas, as it is now, it’s sort of a vision for a different society. That allows you to change

people’s hearts and minds.” Advocates of abolition say their goal isn’t just to shift the Overton window — the range of ideas that the
public is willing to consider. They urge people to take them at their word when they say they want to dismantle

the police and ICE. When Detention Watch Network started advocating for abolishing detention in 2012, the idea was not the norm for the criminal justice
reform movement, Shah said. But over time, the advocacy community began to embrace the idea of abolition

rather than reforming a system that they believe harms and punishes immigrants , especially since it was an
idea that originated in the communities most impacted by oppressive law enforcement. “ To actualize our vision, to move us forward, we

have to talk about the world we want to see,” Shah said. “Today we have people talking about the issues in ways that seemed far-
fetched just a few weeks ago. There is a lot of self-education happening, a lot of conversations, and a lot of

action. I don’t think we can discount the role of powerful slogans in that respect.”
 AT Empty Slogan
“Abolishing ICE” isn’t hollow rhetoric – it is a serious demand to transform our
immigration policy, eliminating policing and deportation.
Markowitz, 19 – Professor of Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law [Peter L. The
Yale Law Journal 07-11-2019 “Abolish ICE… and Then What?” [Link]

In recent years, activists and then politicians began calling for the abolition of the United States’s interior immigration-enforcement
agency: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Many people have misinterpreted the call to
“Abolish ICE” as merely a spontaneous rhetorical device used to express outrage at the current
Administration’s brutal immigration policies. In fact, abolishing ICE is the natural extension of
years of thoughtful organizing by a loose coalition of grassroots immigrant-rights groups. These
organizations are serious, not only about their literal goal to eliminate the agency, but also about
not replacing it with another dedicated agency of immigration police. Accordingly, the proposal
to eliminate ICE necessarily raises the question of how, in a post-ICE world, the United States
would enforce its immigration laws. Missing from the public discourse, however, is an affirmative vision for the
mechanics of a just and humane immigration-enforcement system that could follow the abolition of ICE. Drawing on lessons from
our own and other nations’ past immigration-enforcement schemes, enforcement mechanisms employed by other federal agencies,
and interviews with leaders of the “Abolish ICE” movement, I seek to begin to fill this void. This Essay suggests a
paradigm shift in immigration enforcement toward the creation of an enforcement scheme that
does not rely on detention, mass deportation, or any dedicated agency of immigration police but
is nevertheless realistic and effective at increasing compliance with immigration law. The new
immigration enforcement principles set forth herein are intended as a starting point for the
immigrant-rights movement and for policymakers to use, critique, and improve upon.
 AT It will Just shift to Another Agency
The plan will not shift deportations to another agency – Abolition questions the
existence of deportations, and the policy to replace it would protect human rights.
Godfrey, 18 - Political Reporter for the Atlantic [Elaine6-07-18The Atlantic “What ‘Abolish ICE’ Actually
Means” [Link]

McElwee, a co-founder of Data for Progress and [Link], has been a leader in the charge to
Sean

eliminate ICE for several years. Abolish ICE “is fundamentally an anti-deportation movement,”
he told me, and after the agency is gone, “the central aim has to be ensuring that mass
deportation is not housed somewhere else in the government .” The question, then, is whether calling to abolish ICE means ending all or
most internal immigration enforcement—or simply restructuring or replacing the agency itself. This is the area where Democratic lawmakers’ positions are less clear, and where conservatives see a political
opportunity. Some politicians have stopped short of demanding the complete elimination of the agency. Senator Bernie Sanders, who had been reluctant to comment on the growing movement, released a vague
statement on the issue on July 3: “Now, it is time to do what Americans overwhelmingly want: abolish the cruel, dysfunctional immigration system we have today and pass comprehensive immigration reform,” the
statement said. “That will mean restructuring the agencies that enforce our immigration laws, including ICE.” Senator Kamala Harris of California, in a recent interview on MSNBC, said it would be necessary to
“reexamine” the agency and perhaps consider “starting from scratch.” A spokesman for Harris told me that the senator hopes ICE funds can be directed more appropriately, and agents can be retrained “against

Others, though, have suggested that

targeting vulnerable populations such as victims of sexual assault or domestic violence, crime witnesses, pregnant women, and children.”

ICE, as an agency, should be totally scrapped, which would require identifying and transferring
its more urgent functions—such as combating human-rights abuses and rooting out criminals—
to another agency. Democratic Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, one of the most outspoken lawmakers
on the issue, said in an email that she wants “to eliminate the agency as it stands and restructure its functions,

starting from scratch.” Jayapal, along with Representative Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, will soon be introducing legislation to dismantle the agency. “There will still be enforcement of
immigration laws, but it must be without cruelty and abuse,” she said. Pocan told me the legislation would dissolve ICE within 12

months, and create a commission to recommend a new immigration enforcement system to

Congress.

Even if it is shifted, the new agency will be more humane than ICE
Ford 18- staff writer at The New Republic.(Matt July 18,2018,The New Republic, “OK, Abolish ICE. What
then?” [Link] ,July 9,2020 AS)

“Any essential functions carried out by ICE that do not violate fundamental due process and human
rights can be executed with greater transparency, public accountability, and adherence to
domestic and international law by other federal agencies,” the bill surmises. If signed into law, the bill would set a one-year
window before ICE is shut down, while also establishing a commission to undertake a 90-day review that would identify ICE’s essential responsibilities and the agencies that
could take over those roles. A second act of Congress would then be needed to establish where its former powers should go. Commission members would also be charged with
“This legislation would
accounting for any constitutional infringements and abuses of power committed by ICE agents and officials during its existence.

establish a commission to look at transitioning essential ICE functions to a new agency that
would have accountability, transparency and oversight built in from its inception,” Washington
Representative Pramila Jayapal, another Democrat who introduced the bill, said in a statement. “It’s time to change the
system to one that is accountable, efficient, humane, and transparent.”
 AT No Solvency – ICE Will Just be Replaced
We don’t need to replace ICE – it was only created as a result of post 9/11 panic
McElwee, 2018 – Co-Founder of Data for Progress [Sean, March 9, The Nation “It’s Time to Abolish
ICE A mass-deportation strike force is incompatible with democracy and human rights”
[Link] Acc 7/4/20 TA]

Others tend to dismiss ICE abolition as more of a troll than a serious policy demand. Josh Barro,
a senior editor at Business Insider, argued that progressives have not paired the proposal with “a
plan to do the function without the hated agency.” But the goal of abolishing the agency is to
abolish the function. ICE has become a genuine threat to democracy, and it is destroying
thousands of lives. Moreover, abolishing it would only take us back to 2003, when the agency was first formed. ICE was a
direct product of the post–September 11 panic culture, and was created in the legislation
Congress passed in the wake of the attacks. From the start, the agency was paired with the brand-new Department of Homeland Security’s increased surveillance
of communities of color and immigrant communities. By putting ICE under the scope of DHS, the government framed immigration as a national security issue rather than an issue of community development,
diversity or human rights.

Even if it is replaced, the new agency will be more humane than ICE
Ford 18- staff writer at The New Republic.(Matt July 18,2018,The New Republic, “OK, Abolish ICE. What
then?” [Link] ,July 9,2020 AS)

“Any essential functions carried out by ICE that do not violate fundamental due process and human
rights can be executed with greater transparency, public accountability, and adherence to
domestic and international law by other federal agencies,” the bill surmises. If signed into law, the bill would set a one-year
window before ICE is shut down, while also establishing a commission to undertake a 90-day review that would identify ICE’s essential responsibilities and the agencies that
could take over those roles. A second act of Congress would then be needed to establish where its former powers should go. Commission members would also be charged with
“This legislation would
accounting for any constitutional infringements and abuses of power committed by ICE agents and officials during its existence.

establish a commission to look at transitioning essential ICE functions to a new agency that
would have accountability, transparency and oversight built in from its inception,” Washington
Representative Pramila Jayapal, another Democrat who introduced the bill, said in a statement. “It’s time to change the
system to one that is accountable, efficient, humane, and transparent.”
 AT You don’t have an Alternative
We don’t have to defend a replacement – many agencies have been defunded
without replacements
Hong 19 - professor of law at Boston College Law School [Kari E., 10 Reasons Why Congress
Should Defund ICE's Deportation Force (March 11, 2019). 43 NYU Review of Law & Social Change Harbinger 2019, Available at
SSRN: [Link]

Calls to abolish ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency tasked with
deportations, are growing. ICE consists of two agencies – Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which investigates
transnational criminal matters, and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), which deports non-citizens. The calls to abolish
ICE focus on the latter, the ERO deportation force. Defenders proffer that the idea is silly, that abolition could harm public
safety, or that
advocates of abolition must first explain what, if anything, would replace the agency.
Those reasons are not persuasive. The first ignores that federal agencies are not eternal and have been created and
eliminated as our country’s priorities change. The second reason is refuted by numerous studies establishing that immigrants are
less—not more—likely to be involved in criminal activity than citizens. And of great import, the third reason has not
stopped Congress from similarly defunding the federal enforcement of marijuana laws in states
that have legalized medical marijuana. This example shows that Congress does not need “an
actual proposal for what should replace [enforcement], or even if it should be replaced at all”
before defunding enforcement that is no longer a policy priority.

Our affirmative offers an alternative vision of immigration policy without ICE –

without this, public and political support will wane
Markowitz, 19 – Professor of Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law [Peter L. The
Yale Law Journal 07-11-2019 “Abolish ICE… and Then What?” [Link]

INTRODUCTION The movement to abolish the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency
(ICE) burst into the national consciousness in the summer of 2018. 1 The idea was the natural
extension of years of thoughtful organizing by a loose coalition of grassroots immigrant-rights
groups.2 They had become convinced that efforts to reform ICE were futile and that a more
radical approach was needed. The Trump Administration’s policy of separating and detaining parents and children and
the upset victory of U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who had built her campaign in large part around a call to abolish
ICE, created a tipping point for the movement. Prominent national politicians quickly lined up behind the idea. But that
3 4

initial rush of support has waned in the past year, as many have struggled to explain how we
would enforce immigration laws without ICE. ICE’s brutality, lawlessness, and ineffectiveness have been well
documented in academic literature and, more powerfully, by immigrant-community leaders, who have proposed
specific and thoughtful changes to our immigration-enforcement paradigm. 5 These changes,
however, focus almost exclusively on a negative vision of what we need to eliminate in our
current enforcement scheme: detention, deportations, 6 and the entanglement of our criminal-
justice and immigration systems, among other flaws.7 Lacking in the public discourse is a clear
affirmative vision for a practical immigration-enforcement system 8 that is not dependent on
mass detention and deportation.9 This Essay seeks to offer such a vision for a new immigration-
enforcement paradigm10 that is humane and effective but that does not rely on the existence of
ICE, or any immigration police agency. The proposal builds on the work of others who have examined immigration-
11
enforcement strategies within the context of the current agency system, as well as upon the literature discussing administrative
12
enforcement in other contexts. In addition, a critical and primary source for this Essay is a series of interviews conducted with
13
immigrant-community leaders who generously shared their time and insight. This Essay proceeds in two Parts. Part I lays out the
case for the abolition of ICE. Part II proposes four key pillars of a humane and effective immigration-enforcement system that could
follow ICE’s dissolution.
A Post-ICE immigration system would emphasize cooperative enforcement which
would be more effective than current punishments
Markowitz, 19 – Professor of Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law [Peter L. The
Yale Law Journal 07-11-2019 “Abolish ICE… and Then What?” [Link]

B. Pillar Two: Mandatory Preferences for Compliance Assistance There are large categories of undocumented immigrants who are both potentially subject to deportation and
also eligible to obtain lawful status. For example, someone who came to the United States lawfully, overstayed their visa, but married a citizen may either be deported or allowed
Immigration authorities have a choice between two enforcement pathways:
to obtain legal permanent residence.

punish the noncompliance through deportation, or allow the individual to come into compliance
by applying for permanent residence. Administrative-law scholars have widely praised the trend
toward “cooperative enforcement” where administrative agencies outside the immigration
context increasingly favor efforts to help entities come into compliance over punitive measures . 51

When the regulated parties are corporations rather than immigrants, the government seems comfortable with this approach. It is the approach now favored by federal agencies
like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Securities and Exchange
Commission.52 Indeed, it is the approach that the IRS has favored in modern times, which has helped it successfully transition away from heavy-handed punitive enforcement. 53
But when it comes to immigration, the government has done the opposite . Instead of diverting 54

people out of the punitive-enforcement stream—ICE’s deportation machine—into compliance-

assistance mechanisms—USCIS application processes—it does the reverse . When an eligible-but-
deportable individual applies for an immigration benefit, however, USCIS frequently declines to
grant their application and diverts them into the deportation system . There are large categories of undocumented 55

individuals eligible to obtain lawful status right now. 56 There are other significant categories of people being pushed through the deportation pipeline who will, in time, become
eligible for lawful status.57 In addition, there are many more people eligible to obtain or maintain status through mechanisms that are currently only available defensively in
deportation proceedings, such as cancelation or withholding of removal. 58 Prosecutorial discretion is the mechanism that has generally been used to determine which
.
enforcement pathway to pursue, and it has failed to deliver a reliable preference for compliance assistance Accordingly, the second pillar of a humane and effective
immigration-enforcement scheme is to enact mandatory rules that give people the right to affirmatively pursue pathways to lawful status before they can be subject to any
punitive enforcement action. This mandatory preference could be implemented through regulation59 and, like the first pillar, would not require any congressional action.60 In
addition, Congress should consider making compliance mechanisms that are presently only available defensively, instead available on an affirmative basis. Most dramatically,
implementing this pillar could address the majority of noncompliance if Congress created new affirmative pathways to citizenship for undocumented individuals, as it has done
With a significantly reduced investment in punitive enforcement, the United States could
in the past.61

increase compliance by redirecting resources to USCIS (or some successor agency responsible
for delivering immigration benefits) to speed up processing times, expand legal assistance, and
reduce application fees for immigration benefits.

Empirically – No Replacement Necessary – we can do the plan while coming up

with what comes next.
Hong 19 - professor of law at Boston College Law School [Kari E., 10 Reasons Why Congress
Should Defund ICE's Deportation Force (March 11, 2019). 43 NYU Review of Law & Social Change Harbinger 2019, Available at
SSRN: [Link]

Tenth, there is existing precedent to defund misguided prosecutions to stop government waste
without an identified replacement. In 2018, former Attorney General Sessions directed all
federal prosecutors to arrest marijuana users, including those who live in states where buying and selling marijuana
is legal.96 But there has been no national crackdown on pot—not because Congress repealed
federal law—but rather, in a remarkable and quiet bipartisan effort, Congress took away all
funding for any federal prosecutor to follow Attorney Sessions’ directive .97 Congress did not repeal the
law criminalizing marijuana use, nor did it create a separate agency to enforce only necessary laws. Congress instead realized that
the power of the purse is its most impactful power. In the immigration context, until it can reform the laws, Congress
can disband an excessive, irrational, and wasteful agency that hurts more Americans than it
protects.
 AT Deportations Necessary
Deportations are not necessary – they are too absolute. New, scalable sanctions
are a better alternative
Markowitz, 19 – Professor of Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law [Peter L. The
Yale Law Journal 07-11-2019 “Abolish ICE… and Then What?” [Link]

Even if the United States dramatically reduces the scale of

C. Pillar Three: A System of Proportional Consequences

punitive enforcement and relies principally on compliance assistance, there will still be
situations where individuals cannot be brought into compliance and where enforcement is
warranted. Accordingly, there must be some consequences that can be triggered by noncompliance .
The current regime relies only on a single penalty—deportation—which is grossly
disproportionate to the overwhelming majority of immigration offenses . A binary choice between
no penalty and the harshest possible penalty is not how other effective enforcement systems
work. Imagine the injustice that would follow if we had a criminal-justice system where the only two choices were no penalty or the death penalty. Accordingly,
implementing a new system of scalable penalties is the third pillar of a humane and effective
immigration-enforcement scheme. To create such a system, the United States should implement
a set of scalable penalties. Fines are the most obvious option and are widely used across the administrative state. As recently as 2000, fines were also a
62

critical part of the immigration-enforcement system. Certain individuals who entered unlawfully were permitted to obtain lawful permanent residency if they paid a $1,000
penalty.63 Any such fines would need to be of sufficient magnitude to be significant to the regulated population but also within their ability to pay. Other scalable penalties could
include, for example, delayed access to immigration or other public benefits, lengthened pathways to citizenship, or mandated community-service obligations . As with the
former $1,000 penalties noted above, any such scalable penalties would then unlock a previously unavailable pathway to status. Any such new penalties and the ability to access
lawful immigration status thereafter would require an act of Congress. As with other administrative schemes, the penalties could be offered as a negotiated resolution of
noncompliance by USCIS, or the successor services agency, and if no agreement could be reached, such penalties and any defenses thereto could be litigated through the
ICE currently acts as the prosecutor in immigration court. However, as with most
immigration courts.

other federal administrative schemes, we would not need a separate agency to play such a role,
as USCIS could serve that function itself.
 AT Sanctuary Cities Solve
Sanctuary cities won’t solve – many states don’t offer sanctuary.
Narea, 2020 – immigration reporter for Vox [Nicole “How “abolish ICE” helped bring abolitionist ideas
into the mainstream” Jul 9, 2020, [Link]
black-lives-matter]

For many unauthorized immigrants, coming into contact with police for an offense as minor as a
traffic violation could result in their deportation. Advocates have therefore understood the importance of police reform at the local level.
This cooperation between the two agencies is why some states and cities have adopted
“sanctuary” policies barring local law enforcement from complying with detention requests or
sharing information. The Supreme Court recently left in place a California law that prevented most state and local law enforcement officials from providing
information about detainees’ release dates or home addresses to ICE unless it’s already public information. That law also barred immigrants who have not been convicted of a
But those sanctuary policies can’t entirely
crime from being transferred to immigration custody absent a court order, with some exceptions.

shield immigrants from ICE’s reaches, and other states have taken the opposite tack,
encouraging cooperation between police and ICE, such as Arizona’s SB 1070. That controversial law was largely struck down by the
Supreme Court in 2012, but one provision that still stands requires immigration status checks during law enforcement stops, arrests, and detention.
Off Case
 AT Topicality - Criminal
Immigration enforcement has become entangled in criminal justice – decades of
policies have criminalized immigration
Crennen-Dunlap 19 - J.D. candidate at the University of Denver College of Law
[Allison Abolishing the ICEberg (January 3, 2019). Denver Law Review, Vol. 96, No. 148, 2019, Available at
SSRN: [Link]

Rather, ICE was born after a punitive bent in criminal justice and immigration policy had
already created the conditions for mass detention and deportation.3 7 After the civil rights
movement rendered explicit racism taboo, politicians took a newly severe approach to both
criminal justice and immigration policy that maintained racial subordination through facially
neutral laws enforced to racially disproportionate effects. Lawmakers declared “war” on crime and drugs,39 passed harsh new
laws with mandatory minimum sentences, reduced judicial discretion in sentencing, and increasingly tied immigration decisions to criminal activity. President Reagan

adopted new policies to deter migration via detention , while many inaccurately condemned new waves of Haitian and Cuban
migrants as criminal. Immigration officials increased collaboration with criminal law enforcement

officials and adopted more of their trappings,45 while prosecutors drastically increased prosecution of migration related offenses. The
1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act set the stage for the militarization of the México-U.S.
border; the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 created a new category of migrants deportable for
conviction of an “aggravated felony”; and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 and the Illegal
Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 vastly expanded the number of
criminal offenses that can result in deportation , reduced migrants’ ability to seek relief from removal, limited judicial review, and made
detention mandatory for many migrants. Enforcement of this punitive system, including policing, arrest,

prosecution, conviction, sentencing, and (for migrants) deportation, was (and remains)
disproportionately directed at communities of color.

ICE entangles immigration in criminal justice – the literature shows that they are
intertwined – activists do not distinguish them
Narea, 2020 – immigration reporter for Vox [Nicole “How “abolish ICE” helped bring abolitionist ideas
into the mainstream” Jul 9, 2020, [Link]
black-lives-matter]

Both “abolish the police” and “abolish ICE” have reframed the
ICE abolition is picking up momentum into the mainstream

conversation around criminal justice reform. Before thousands of people took to the streets
demanding the abolition of police, “abolish ICE” was the rallying cry of activists protesting the
Trump administration’s immigration policies. Democrats on the debate stage were asked about the movement to abolish the agency, also
known as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Two candidates made dismantling the agency part of their platform, and those who did not still embraced calls for more
aggressive reform. And the movement pushed ideas about abolition further into the mainstream, changing the conversation around criminal justice reform. Activists
for police abolition see the two movements as intertwined and say it isn’t a coincidence that both have risen to prominence in
recent years. “The activist communities that are involved in engaging people with the idea that we

should defund the police or abolish the police or abolish ICE have a lot of cross-fertilization,”
said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at the University of Denver. “These are
activists who often are people of color in communities where law enforcement agents of various types have a deleterious effect on them and the people around them. For

lots of people who have been doing this work for many years, they view the police and ICE as
working hand in hand.” Movements to abolish ICE and the police have amassed significant support. By August 2018, about a quarter of Democrats
supported calls to dismantle the agency and more than half had come to view the agency negatively. Similarly, polls conducted in the wake of recent protests have shown an
almost 15 percent increase in support for cuts to law enforcement funding. It would be wrong to stay that the movements’ messaging has had no impact, García Hernández said.
“The notion of abolishing ICE has become one worthy of consideration by a much broader segment of society,” he said. “There has been an enormous shift.” Advocates
see abolishing police and abolishing ICE as part of the same movement Many of the
organizations and movements calling for the abolition of ICE are the same ones that have been
working to abolish the police; they see both moves as part of their objective of dismantling
repressive law enforcement. By these activists’ definition, ICE, which has more than 20,000 agents nationwide,
operates as a police force that targets and criminalizes non-white communities. “I don’t
differentiate between abolishing the police and abolishing ICE,” said Monica Mohapatra, one of
the authors of “#8toAbolition,” a platform for police abolition. She listed ICE, along with sheriffs, highway patrol, campus police, school safety guards,
corrections officers, and military officers as among the forms of law enforcement that her group views as toxic.

The lived experience of activists and immigrants Emphatically denies the clear
separation between Immigration and Criminal Justice
Narea, 2020 – immigration reporter for Vox [Nicole “How “abolish ICE” helped bring abolitionist ideas
into the mainstream” Jul 9, 2020, [Link]
black-lives-matter]

Advocates see abolishing police and abolishing ICE as part of the same movement Many of the
organizations and movements calling for the abolition of ICE are the same ones that have been
working to abolish the police; they see both moves as part of their objective of dismantling
repressive law enforcement. By these activists’ definition, ICE, which has more than 20,000 agents nationwide, operates as a police force that targets and
criminalizes non-white communities. “I don’t differentiate between abolishing the police and abolishing ICE,”

said Monica Mohapatra, one of the authors of “#8toAbolition,” a platform for police abolition. She listed ICE, along with
sheriffs, highway patrol, campus police, school safety guards, corrections officers, and military officers as among the forms of law enforcement that her group views as toxic.
The calls to abolish the police are informed by the work of migrant rights organizers who have
opposed detention and family separations and sought to frame calls to “secure the border” as a product of American imperialism, she said.
Police have long worked in cooperation with ICE to arrest immigrants, leading to their detention and possible deportation. During recent Black Lives

Matter protests in Phoenix and New York City, ICE agents worked alongside police to take protesters into
custody, even though that’s prohibited under the agency’s guidelines.

ICE is entangled in the criminal justice system by coordinating with local police
Narea, 2020 – immigration reporter for Vox [Nicole “How “abolish ICE” helped bring abolitionist ideas
into the mainstream” Jul 9, 2020, [Link]
black-lives-matter]

Police have long worked in cooperation with ICE to arrest immigrants, leading to their detention
and possible deportation. During recent Black Lives Matter protests in Phoenix and New York City, ICE agents worked alongside police to take protesters
into custody, even though that’s prohibited under the agency’s guidelines. ICE can send a written request to a local jail or other

law enforcement entity asking officers to continue to detain immigrants for an additional 48
hours beyond when they would otherwise be released so that the agency can take them into custody and begin deportation
proceedings. ICE doesn’t need court approval to issue these requests — it can do so even if an immigrant isn’t facing any pending charges and without probable cause that they
ICE has access to a number of federal databases that help it identify immigrants
have committed any violation.

to deport, including Department of Motor Vehicles databases and the National Crime Information Center database. But
police can also informally share information with ICE to notify them of someone in their custody
who they suspect may have committed an immigration violation.
 AT Economy DA
Turn - ICE raids hurt the economy – they deport necessary workers and are
extremely expensive
Gundavaram, 2019 – professor of Immigration law and Immigration law at
Northeastern University [Hemanth, 08-09-2019, Politico, “The ICE raids aren’t just wrong – they’re expensive",
[Link] , ACC 7/9/20, AR]

This week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided seven Mississippi food
processing plants and arrested 680 workers for immigration violations . The moral cost of these raids to
our shared humanity is apparent in stories like that of a tearful 13-year-old boy waving goodbye to his mother or an 11-year old
girl pleading for her father’s release. But some people might feel differently, believing such scenes are just the cost of enforcing our
immigration laws. If that’s you, I urge you to weigh another cost instead: the sheer financial expense of such
cruelty. First, there’s lost income. ICE was created in 2003 to “protect national security and public safety after 9/11,”
but this week’s raids were not about security or safety or terrorism. They targeted immigrants while
they worked to support their families and our economy. Many of the arrested individuals now
leave behind jobs that won’t be filled and children and spouses who now live without a family member and their
associated income. Their communities and local businesses will suffer down the line . And state and local
governments will lose the associated tax revenues; undocumented workers pay an estimated $12 billion a year in taxes. Then there
are the costs of enforcement and detention . ICE Acting Director Matt Albence admitted that the raids required a
yearlong investigation and 600 agents to execute. The 680 arrested individuals now languish in detention facilities. According to
ICE, the average daily cost of detaining one person is $134. Some estimates place the cost at closer to $200 per day. Given this
administration’s immigration policies, from family separation to zero tolerance to mass raids, the number of immigrants in
detention is rapidly expanding, not retracting. For every person who leaves detention, another replaces them, if not two. Even
using ICE’s conservative figure of $134, the cost of keeping one immigrant in detention is almost
$50,000 per year. The detention expense alone for the group detained on Wednesday is
approximately $100,000 a day, $3 million per month, and $36 million a year. Given that more
raids are coming, these costs are only going to go up.

Turn – ICE kills the economy – deportations cost Americans jobs as industries
collapse, and immigration helps the US economy – studies prove.
Hong 19 - professor of law at Boston College Law School [Kari E., 10 Reasons Why Congress
Should Defund ICE's Deportation Force (March 11, 2019). 43 NYU Review of Law & Social Change Harbinger 2019, Available at
SSRN: [Link]

Fifth, Americans are losing—not gaining—jobs from this overly aggressive deportation strategy.
ICE’s deportation efforts are hurting American workers. One Bush-era ICE raid in Postville,
Iowa resulted in an entire factory shutting down and the decimation of the town due to loss of
renters, homeowners, and customers who had previously supported the local economy. More
recently, mom and pop businesses cannot open during tourist season,66 racetracks cannot find workers,67 and deportations
threaten the dairy industry, which is largely supported by immigrant labor. Deportations are not protecting jobs
for
American workers. To the contrary, deportations of workers result in the loss of U.S. jobs and
economic well-being. Indeed, our economic prosperity requires that we welcome more
immigrants, not fewer. As Shikha Dalmia has argued, “[T]he idea that America is experiencing
mass immigration is a myth. The reality is that we desperately need to pick up the pace of
immigration to maintain our work force and economic health.”
Turn - ICE destroys the economy – it drains government resources and
undermines jobs and businesses.
Hong 19 - professor of law at Boston College Law School [Kari E., 10 Reasons Why Congress
Should Defund ICE's Deportation Force (March 11, 2019). 43 NYU Review of Law & Social Change Harbinger 2019, Available at
SSRN: [Link]

ICE is a federal agency that has existed for only 18 years. Its financial waste, unjustifiable purpose, and detrimental impact are now in full
Conclusion

view. As a practical matter, ICE’s dedicated deportation force, the ERO, is a very expensive waste of tax-
payer dollars. The U.S. government spends more than $18 billion each year to apprehend and
detain immigrants, which is more costly than the billions spent apprehending people who
commit actual crimes. The arrest and detention of immigrants is a costly, wasteful, and cruel
charade. As an economic matter, our country is hurt when we deport immigrants. The ERO
deportation force’s aggressive deportation efforts are resulting in Americans losing their jobs,
businesses, and income. Moreover, ICE’s mandate is at odds with our country’s short- and long-
term needs. Economists agree that immigration is needed to sustain both economic prosperity
for all, and social security for all retirees. 100 Numerous sectors such as hospitals, food production, small businesses, and tourism are fueled by
immigrant workers (and immigrant business owners).101 As a good governance matter, the mandate of the ERO deportation force— to opt for deportation over legalization—
lacks common sense and decency. And its fatal flaw is that the agency does not aspire to have either. Jim Kyu Park, who is a DACA recipient, Harvard graduate, and Rhodes
Scholar could be arrested, detained, and deported when he returns to the United States after studying at Oxford.102 Any federal agency that would arrest and deport a Rhodes
Scholar with the billions of dollars it claims is needed to protect the public against the MS-13 street gang is an agency that lacks the judgment needed to operate. As a moral
matter, President Trump’s demonization of immigrants exposes the fallacy behind ICE’s mandate. Our country is finally abandoning the misguided Tough on Crime policies of
the 1990s, opting instead for criminal justice reform that saves money, protects the public, and rehabilitates those convicted of crimes. 103 The fallacy of Tough on Immigration
policy finally is in plain view too. Scholars and politicians are giving voice to the morality in welcoming immigrants and condemning the immorality of deportation.104 At the
heart of this needed change— or more accurately, this needed return to prior norms—is the recognition that for most American citizens, our birthright as Americans was paid for
by an immigrant ancestor. Now is the time to question—and call for the end of—a project that threatens the core of our country, national identity, and future promise. Our
country needs immigrants, immigrants contribute to America, and we are all better off together. Congress must provide a path to legalization, a compassionate and fair route
Congress
that existed until 1996 when Congress enacted the IIRIRA, which eliminated numerous avenues that people had to legalize their status.105 Until this happens,

must defund the ERO deportation force, and its wasteful, cruel, and senseless immigration
enforcement practices. Just as Congress quietly ended former Attorney General Sessions’ planned and misguided crackdown on marijuana, it must follow suit
and end the senseless arrests and abuses by the ERO deportation force.

Turn – Undocumented immigrants help the US economy – they pay more taxes
without using public benefits and they increase growth
Markowitz, 19 – Professor of Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law [Peter L. The
Yale Law Journal 07-11-2019 “Abolish ICE… and Then What?” [Link]

In the immigration arena, the societal costs of the current high levels of punitive enforcement are profound. The
destruction
of family units, deaths, mistreatment, and the traumatization of entire communities are well
documented. Further, the fiscal costs are extraordinary.42 On the other side of the equation, the harms
associated with noncompliance are hotly contested. Immigration restrictionists point principally
to three categories of alleged harm: criminality of undocumented immigrants, the cost of
providing public benefits and services to undocumented immigrants, and the harms that may
flow from labor competition with undocumented workers.43 However, the social-science data
establish that these alleged harms are either nonexistent or minor. Study after study has
concluded that undocumented immigrants pose no heightened risk of criminality .44 Undocumented
immigrants are also ineligible for virtually all federal benefits programs. 45 Indeed, many undocumented workers pay
taxes and pay into Social Security and other benefits systems—notwithstanding their ineligibility
to receive such benefits—leading some to argue that they are a net benefit to the public coffer .46
Evidence on whether undocumented workers create increased labor competition in low-wage fields is more contested, 47 but the
overwhelming weight of the evidence demonstrates that undocumented workers are a critical
net benefit to the U.S. economy.48 Indeed, much of the literature demonstrates that the greatest harms of
immigration noncompliance are suffered by the undocumented population itself .49 Moreover, even
if we were to assume some significant level of harm from noncompliance, high levels of
enforcement are only justified if they actually reduce noncompliance. The weight of the
evidence, however, suggests that ICE’s heavy-handed tactics are of limited value in reducing
noncompliance.50
 AT Court Clog DA
Turn - ICE Raids increase court backlog because of the large number of people
arrested
Gundavaram, 2019 – professor of Immigration law and Immigration law at
Northeastern University [Hemanth, 08-09-2019, Politico, “The ICE raids aren’t just wrong – they’re expensive”,
[Link] , ACC 7/9/20, AR]

Raids add to the immigration court backlog. According to Syracuse University, the
There is yet another cost:

number of cases pending in immigration courts is close to 1 million and ballooning by the day.
Under the Trump administration, this number has nearly doubled in just 2½ years, and the average wait for an
immigration hearing is now more than two years. Detention centers holding people awaiting their time in immigration

court have exceeded their capacity, which necessitates the use of private prisons, whose owners
made record campaign donations in the past election cycle. Last year alone, taxpayers paid almost $1 billion to the private prison complex for immigration detention.
Meanwhile, private prisons have minimal oversight and harsh conditions that resemble slave labor. The result is an increasing number of immigrants caught up in the
detention system, a larger immigration court backlog , a financial incentive to keep immigrants in detention longer, and correspondingly higher cost
to taxpayers. The truth is that no government has unlimited resources. When choosing how to spend public funds, we need to weigh costs and benefits. This administration has
decided to spend countless time and money arresting nonviolent workers who take care of their families and their communities while spending little or nothing on combating
domestic terrorism and white nationalism. CNN reported this week that the Department of Homeland Security sought to increase its focus on domestic terrorism but was
rebuffed by the White House. Meanwhile, two gunmen killed 31 people in Dayton and El Paso last weekend — yet another cost of this administration’s immigration policies. ICE
officials are boasting that the workplace raids in Mississippi were the largest in over a decade. That is nothing to brag about. Beyond the countless families and lives torn apart in
these operations and mass arrests, the time and financial resources necessary to execute them are wasteful and unnecessary. These raids are merely a show to fire up an anti-
immigrant base — and a costly show at that.
 AT Crime DA
Turn - Immigration’s entanglement in the criminal justice system undermine law
enforcement – communities and domestic violence victims won’t trust the police.
Jack 19 – American Studies major at Macalester College [Suzanna "ICE and the Unquestioned
Human Cost of Efficiency: A Moral Reckoning,"Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities: Vol. 8 : Iss. 1 , Article 7.
Available at: [Link]

Currently, ICE officers are allowed to identify as police officers, adding to the unethically
efficient practices they undertake. ICE and police forces are in theory, distinctly different: They
operate under different departments, the scope of their work is vastly varied, and to date there continues to
be legal confusion surrounding if and how local police forces and ICE should interact and work
together. However, one major difference is that police are responsible for mitigating crimes that occur within their local
jurisdiction and ICE is not (Green 2016). Allowing ICE to identify as police officers has been flagged as a
major potential problem for undocumented folks who may need to access police assistance (for
instance, as victims of domestic violence), but will now be frightened that if they do, ICE could arrest and
detain them. Community activists have voiced that allowing ICE to identify as police officers
could also prove dangerous for eroding community relationship building attempts by local
police in communities with large undocumented populations , with a goal of attempting to increase trust
between the two. However, it is important to firmly recognize that, even with the absence of ICE, local police forces have historically
and are currently deeply complicit in the deportation regime themselves by utilizing measures of police brutality, unlawful
detainments, and tactics of intimidation and coercion while policing. The current day allowing of ICE combining
with local police forces is dangerous because these human rights abuses will probably increase
and be carried out more covertly.

No Internal link – ICE doesn’t prevent crime – no evidence supports the neg claim
Jack 19 – American Studies major at Macalester College [Suzanna "ICE and the Unquestioned
Human Cost of Efficiency: A Moral Reckoning,"Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities: Vol. 8 : Iss. 1 , Article 7.
Available at: [Link]

A common counterpoint to the importance of the existence of ICE is that the presence of
undocumented people within them directly correlates to an increase in crime and illegal
activities. However there has not been a single recognized study to date that corroborates the
claim that crime corresponds with undocumented people. Current research has recently
concluded that declared Sanctuary cities possess lower crime rates, and that native born citizens
of the United States constantly commit more crimes (Gonzalez 2017). Abolishing ICE is a matter of humanity, of
recognizing that human worth is not contingent on citizenship and that the only purpose ICE serves is to benefity a violent, capital
economic that prizes efficiency over all else.

ICE doesn’t stop crime – immigrants are less likely to be “violent criminals.”
Hong 19 - professor of law at Boston College Law School [Kari E., 10 Reasons Why Congress
Should Defund ICE's Deportation Force (March 11, 2019). 43 NYU Review of Law & Social Change Harbinger 2019, Available at
SSRN: [Link]

Calls to abolish ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency tasked with
deportations, are growing. ICE consists of two agencies – Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which investigates
transnational criminal matters, and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), which deports non-citizens. The calls to abolish
ICE focus on the latter, the ERO deportation force. Defenders proffer that the idea is silly, that abolition could harm
public safety, or that advocates of abolition must first explain what, if anything, would replace the agency. Those reasons
are not persuasive. The first ignores that federal agencies are not eternal and have been created and eliminated as our
country’s priorities change. The second reason is refuted by numerous studies establishing that
immigrants are less—not more—likely to be involved in criminal activity than citizens. And of great
import, the third reason has not stopped Congress from similarly defunding the federal enforcement of marijuana laws in states that
have legalized medical marijuana. This example shows that Congress does not need “an actual proposal for what should replace
[enforcement], or even if it should be replaced at all” before defunding enforcement that is no longer a policy priority.

ICE doesn’t reduce crime – they do not focus on immigrants who are violent
criminals.
Hong 19 - professor of law at Boston College Law School [Kari E., 10 Reasons Why Congress
Should Defund ICE's Deportation Force (March 11, 2019). 43 NYU Review of Law & Social Change Harbinger 2019, Available at
SSRN: [Link]

Here are 10 reasons why Congress should defund the unnecessary, detrimental, and escalating deportations that the ERO
deportation force is undertaking. First, the ERO deportation force does not arrest “violent criminals,”
and therefore is not contributing to America’s safety. A common concern is that if the ERO
deportation force is defunded, “violent criminals” will run amok. For example, President Donald Trump
claimed at a rally, “Democrats want to abolish ICE. They want to turn America into one giant sanctuary city for violent criminals.”10
Transnational criminal enterprises that traffic in drugs, guns, and human beings exist, and it is well within the police powers of the
state—and federal government—to intervene and apprehend individuals engaged in those crimes. But HSI is the agency
responsible for investigating and prosecuting criminal enterprises, not the ERO deportation
force. By contrast, the ERO deportation force apprehends people without any criminal
convictions, or people who have been convicted for a crime that was minor or committed years
ago, or who have demonstrated rehabilitation. During the first two months of Trump’s administration, one third of
non-citizens arrested by the ERO deportation force had no criminal conviction.11 But just as important, having a prior criminal
conviction does not mean that a person is a present danger to society. By ICE’s own statistics, 1% or fewer of those
swept up in ERO deportation force arrests had prior convictions for the serious crimes of
“[s]exual assault, kidnapping and homicide.” Rather, the vast majority of those arrested and deported by the ERO
were convicted of more minor offenses relating to “driving under the influence, drugs, other traffic offenses and immigration
violations.” In the case of a present threat to public safety—for example, an active shooter or serial sexual predator—the local police
department and, in some cases, the FBI would be responsible for responding to the situation, investigating the crime, and arresting
the person suspected of committing the crime. The person arrested for the crime would then be held in custody or released on bail
by the state or federal criminal court, depending on where the charges are filed. The ERO is not involved in any way in
the investigation of the crime or the detention of those accused of crimes pending criminal
prosecution. The people whom the ERO targets are not the “dangerous” criminals that
proponents of ICE would have the public believe. Examples of the so-called “dangerous” people swept up by the
ERO deportation force include a doctor and green card holder who had two misdemeanors that were twenty-six years old, a business
owner who volunteered to sift through the rubble of 9/11 who had an old drug offense, 15 and countless combat veterans who were
convicted of drug crimes or offenses that criminal courts often did not punish with much or even any prison time. Supporters of
ICE argue that we need the ERO deportation force to keep us safe. But the ERO deportation
force does not go after people who commit serious crimes, nor does it target people who pose a
present danger to our communities. Defunding the ERO will have no negative impact on our
safety.
 AT Gangs DA
Turn – ICE Increase gangs like MS-13 by deporting member to nations that cannot
handle them.
Hong 19 - professor of law at Boston College Law School [Kari E., 10 Reasons Why Congress
Should Defund ICE's Deportation Force (March 11, 2019). 43 NYU Review of Law & Social Change Harbinger 2019, Available at
SSRN: [Link]

Second, the
MS-13 gang is not an immigration problem, and it is not an actual nationwide threat.
President Trump repeatedly contends that ICE, and the ERO deportation force, is needed to
protect Americans from the MS-13 criminal gang. This is false . To understand the significance of the MS-13
gang—a transnational criminal gang operating primarily in Central America and Los Angeles18—it is important to understand the
gang’s origins and contemporary functions. Ironically, unintended consequences from U.S. actions created
the perfect storm for the MS-13 gang to become as powerful as it is. Stated another way, “MS-13
was a gang fueled by deportation, not immigration.”19 First, the Reagan administration’s foreign policy in the
1980s destabilized the Salvadoran government by supporting a right-wing military dictatorship to prevent the Marxist opposition
from gaining power. Second, in the 1990s, the Clinton administration’s fast-track deportation program
targeted members of the MS-13 gang, deporting 31,000 members of the gang to Central America
and 12,000 members to El Salvador alone. While the United States has a functioning criminal
justice system that can arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate members of gangs who commit crimes,
22 El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala are plagued by corruption and lack the resources and
ability to apprehend sophisticated criminal enterprises. According to WOLA, a research
organization focusing on human rights in the Americas, “Gang members deported from Los
Angeles took advantage of these conditions and leveraged their professional and unified
structure to ramp up recruitment, consolidate small local youth gangs into more violent and
more organized groups, and expand into the street gangs that control neighborhoods
throughout Central America today.”23 One-sixth of the El Salvadoran population is believed to be involved in a
criminal gang, resulting in El Salvador having the highest homicide rate in the world and with the MS-13 operating with impunity.24

No Impact – MS-13 is a Tiny gang in the US, and ICE deals with a Tiny percentage
of them.
Hong 19 - professor of law at Boston College Law School [Kari E., 10 Reasons Why Congress
Should Defund ICE's Deportation Force (March 11, 2019). 43 NYU Review of Law & Social Change Harbinger 2019, Available at
SSRN: [Link]

As much as the MS-13 gang is a serious threat to those living in Central America,25 the gang is
not a meaningful threat to those in the United States. In the United States, the MS-13 gang
numbers 10,000 members, which is “less than 1 percent of the approximately 1.4 million gang
members [in the United States] according to F.B.I. estimates.”26 The gang is not a national scourge, but is concentrated
in Los Angeles, Long Island, and outside Washington D.C.27 In addition, the vast majority of the MS-13 gang’s
members in the United States are U.S. citizens.28 About 70% of the gang members who ICE
arrested in two major raids in 2016 and 2017 were in fact U.S. citizens.29 These raids, when
undertaken by ICE, were wasted efforts because the ERO deportation force has no authority to
lawfully arrest or detain U.S. citizens.30 Rather, it is local police forces and the FBI who are responsible for
investigating and arresting citizens who are affiliated with gangs for their crimes.31 For fiscal year 2018, ICE’s total budget was 8.6
billion dollars.32 If ICE’s role were to apprehend MS-13 gang members, as President Trump repeatedly claims, tax payer dollars
would be better spent elsewhere. From 2012 to 2017, ICE deported only 38 MS-13 gang members who
had been arrested for murder (compared to 169 citizen MS-13 members who were arrested for murder in that time).33
That means ICE deports on average fewer than eight non-citizens who are members of the MS-
13 gang each year for committing murder. Keep in mind that the ERO deportation force is
further limited to arresting and deporting MS-13 gang members—and all people for that matter
—only for immigration violations. Arrests for the underlying crimes of murder, drug dealing, assault, and conspiracy are
made by HSI, the FBI, or the local police.34 But
rather than simply being irrelevant to the apprehension of
transactional criminal enterprises, the ERO deportation force often is thwarting the
investigation and prosecution of gang members. In some cases, the ERO deportation force
arrests and deports government informants who have provided law enforcement with
information on members of MS-13. In my work as a solo practitioner, I have represented two clients from Mexico and
El Salvador asserting asylum claims based on their fear of gang retribution against them. Both have volunteered to be U.S.
government informants. One client provided information that assisted in the arrest and conviction of over 200 members of the MS-
13 gang, and the other provided information for the arrest and conviction of over 100 people involved in drug trafficking. The ERO
deportation force had arrested both clients for immigration violations and attempted to deport them. Due to the intervention of the
Ninth Circuit, one received legal status, and the other has a hearing scheduled for later this year. Lastly, Trump’s endless
drumbeat of the dangers of MS-13 gangs to justify ICE’s existence undermines public safety by
diverting our attention away from harms for which potential government solutions are neither
pursued nor realized. As Professor Patricia Williams noted, racism does not simply entail erroneously
misidentifying one group of people as dangerous, but it also renders true sources of likely harm
invisible.35 To illustrate her point, Williams highlighted the irrationality of presuming Black teenagers on public streets to be
violent threats when statistics bear out that most white people are likely to be victims of crimes perpetuated not just by other white
people, but by white family members or close friends. “[T]he general white population seems, in the process of devaluating its image
of black people, to have blinded itself to the horrors inflicted by white people.”36 Likewise, the outsized attention President Trump
and the ERO deportation force place on the MS-13 gang in particular and immigrants in general elide the real dangers Americans
face: gun violence kills 100 Americans each day, 37 a rate 25 times higher than other Western countries, which have stricter gun
control laws. Domestic violence results in three American women being killed each day by former or current partners.39 Attention
and policies spent on funding “solutions” to the false threats of dangerous immigrants is pursued at the cost of inattention and
inaction on real sources of violent—and preventable—threats that Americans face. 40

Plan won’t help gangs – negative claims are just Trump scapegoating
Godfrey, 18 - Political Reporter for the Atlantic [Elaine6-07-18The Atlantic “What ‘Abolish ICE’ Actually
Means” [Link]

“Just when you thought the Democrats couldn’t move farther to the left, leading members of the Democratic Party—including candidates for higher office—are actually openly
advocating the abolition of ICE, an agency that protects the American people and our communities every single day,”
Vice President Mike Pence said during a visit to the ICE headquarters in Washington, D.C., last week.” The official White House Twitter account came after Harris for
“supporting the animals of MS-13” after she suggested reexamining ICE. And at a recent campaign rally in Great Falls, Montana, Trump told rally-goers that “a vote

for the Democrats in November is a vote to let MS-13 run wild in our community … We will not stand for these vile
Democrat smears against our law enforcement.” The Democrats and activists I spoke with said that’s clearly not their

mission. “That’s one of the big lies,” Pocan told me, pointing out that for one, it’s CBP, not ICE,
that patrols the border. “The president does all this because he’s desperate to drive up [approval]
numbers to somehow prove a need for a wall.”
 AT Immigration DA
ICE doesn’t solve undocumented immigration – it wastes billions of dollars while
immigration increases
Markowitz, 19 – Professor of Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law [Peter L. The
Yale Law Journal 07-11-2019 “Abolish ICE… and Then What?” [Link]

The one area where ICE has demonstrated startling success has been in garnering resources for itself. Its funding has risen from
$3.3 billion in 2003, the year after its creation, to $7.5 billion in 2018—an increase of approximately 130%.24 The United States
now spends more on immigration enforcement than on all other federal criminal law enforcement
combined.25 And what has been gained from this enormous spending increase? Certainly, the number of deportations has
skyrocketed.26 But if the goal is to increase compliance with the law, the surge in funding has failed
miserably. In 2000, just before the creation of ICE, the country’s undocumented population stood at 7
million.27 DHS’s most recent estimate of the undocumented population is 12 million. 28 Thus, while ICE’s
resources have more than doubled, the undocumented population has grown by over 70%. Waste and
mismanagement are part of the problem,29 but at base, these numbers demonstrate that ICE’s ever-increasing
investment in detention and deportation has simply failed to increase compliance with U.S. immigration
law.

ICE deportation policies do Not improve immigration enforcement – no

substantive data proves that they work.
Markowitz, 19 – Professor of Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law [Peter L. The
Yale Law Journal 07-11-2019 “Abolish ICE… and Then What?” [Link]

DHS was founded with the mission of achieving a “100% removal rate.”
A. Pillar One: Optimal Enforcement Scaling 32

Accordingly, ICE’s goal from the outset was, and remains, to deport every person potentially
subject to deportation. This approach, which has driven the extraordinary increase in ICE’s
33

funding, is both wildly impractical and dramatically out of step with historical norms. During the
34

twentieth century, when the United States also had significant levels of noncompliance with immigration laws, the nation deported under 25,000 people per year on average. 35
Thus far in the twenty-first century, the United States has deported over 300,000 people per
year on average—a startling 1,200% increase. Accordingly, the first inquiry is to determine
36

whether the current extraordinary levels of punitive enforcement are justified. Any well-
conceived enforcement scheme must identify its optimal scale by balancing the societal costs of
punitive enforcement against the marginal compliance such enforcement can achieve and the
societal benefits associated with that additional compliance. For example, extremely high levels of enforcement are justified by
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission because even low levels of noncompliance risk grave societal harm. In other areas, such as the regulation of marijuana, sex work, or quality-
of-life crimes, there is a growing consensus that the cost and collateral harms of high levels of enforcement, the low deterrent value of heavy-handed enforcement, and the
relatively minor societal injuries associated with noncompliance, militate in favor of low enforcement levels. In the administrative arena, the approach of the Internal Revenue
Service (IRS) stands out as an example of an intentional low-level punitive enforcement strategy. Initially, the IRS was required to audit all tax returns.37 Over time, this
enforcement approach came to be seen as overzealous.38 In response, Congress implemented reforms that caused punitive enforcement activity to decline significantly.39 The
IRS now employs a notably low level of punitive enforcement, annually auditing under one percent of returns and prosecuting only a couple hundred people for failure to file. 40
This shift away from punitive enforcement and toward compliance assistance has not undermined the IRS’s enforcement of tax laws. Indeed, the United States now enjoys one of
the world’s highest tax-compliance rates.41 In the immigration arena, the societal costs of the current high levels of punitive enforcement are profound. The destruction of family
units, deaths, mistreatment, and the traumatization of entire communities are well documented. Further, the fiscal costs are extraordinary.42 On the other side of the equation,
the harms associated with noncompliance are hotly contested. Immigration restrictionists point principally to three categories of alleged harm: criminality of undocumented
immigrants, the cost of providing public benefits and services to undocumented immigrants, and the harms that may flow from labor competition with undocumented
workers.43 However, the social-science data establish that these alleged harms are either nonexistent or minor. Study after study has concluded that undocumented immigrants
pose no heightened risk of criminality.44 Undocumented immigrants are also ineligible for virtually all federal benefits programs.45 Indeed, many undocumented workers pay
taxes and pay into Social Security and other benefits systems—notwithstanding their ineligibility to receive such benefits—leading some to argue that they are a net benefit to the
public coffer.46 Evidence on whether undocumented workers create increased labor competition in low-wage fields is more contested,47 but the overwhelming weight of the
evidence demonstrates that undocumented workers are a critical net benefit to the U.S. economy.48 Indeed, much of the literature demonstrates that the greatest harms of
even if we were to assume some significant level
immigration noncompliance are suffered by the undocumented population itself.49 Moreover,
of harm from noncompliance, high levels of enforcement are only justified if they actually reduce
noncompliance. The weight of the evidence, however, suggests that ICE’s heavy-handed tactics are of
limited value in reducing noncompliance. 50
Indiscriminate deportations are immoral – they violate human rights and distract
immigration enforcement from more important priorities
Godfrey, 18 - Political Reporter for the Atlantic [Elaine6-07-18The Atlantic “What ‘Abolish ICE’ Actually
Means” [Link]

The advocates and lawmakers calling to abolish ICE have framed the issue as a moral one: The
agency’s widespread use of deportations for undocumented immigrants without criminal
records is inhumane, and detracts from its more important function of investigating drug
smuggling and human-rights abuses. “They’re not doing the job they were hired to do,” said
Randy Bryce, the Democratic candidate running for Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s seat in Wisconsin’s 1st district, in an interview with The
Atlantic. “It’s more along the lines of a personal deportation force for Donald Trump right now.” A spokesman for the Michigan gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed, told me that, as governor, El-Sayed would
support ICE being “defunded and dismantled,” and would not allow state resources to be used in federal immigration enforcement. Sean McElwee, a co-founder of Data for Progress and [Link], has been a
leader in the charge to eliminate ICE for several years. Abolish ICE “is fundamentally an anti-deportation movement,” he told me, and after the agency is gone, “the central aim has to be ensuring that mass
deportation is not housed somewhere else in the government.” The question, then, is whether calling to abolish ICE means ending all or most internal immigration enforcement—or simply restructuring or
replacing the agency itself. This is the area where Democratic lawmakers’ positions are less clear, and where conservatives see a political opportunity. Some politicians have stopped short of demanding the
complete elimination of the agency. Senator Bernie Sanders, who had been reluctant to comment on the growing movement, released a vague statement on the issue on July 3: “Now, it is time to do what
Americans overwhelmingly want: abolish the cruel, dysfunctional immigration system we have today and pass comprehensive immigration reform,” the statement said. “That will mean restructuring the agencies
that enforce our immigration laws, including ICE.” Senator Kamala Harris of California, in a recent interview on MSNBC, said it would be necessary to “reexamine” the agency and perhaps consider “starting from
scratch.” A spokesman for Harris told me that the senator hopes ICE funds can be directed more appropriately, and agents can be retrained “against targeting vulnerable populations such as victims of sexual

assault or domestic violence, crime witnesses, pregnant women, and children.” Others, though, have suggested that ICE, as an agency, should be totally
scrapped, which would require identifying and transferring its more urgent functions—such as
combating human-rights abuses and rooting out criminals—to another agency . Democratic
Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, one of the most outspoken lawmakers on the issue, said in an email that she wants “to eliminate the
agency as it stands and restructure its functions, starting from scratch.” Jayapal, along with Representative Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, will soon be introducing legislation to dismantle the agency. “ There

will still be enforcement of immigration laws, but it must be without cruelty and abuse,” she
said. Pocan told me the legislation would dissolve ICE within 12 months, and create a commission to recommend a new immigration enforcement system to Congress. When asked whether broader changes to
internal immigration enforcement were necessary—if authorities should stop pursuing undocumented immigrants altogether—most of the lawmakers I spoke with brought the conversation back to what they

It’s the indiscriminate, random use of deportations” that has to stop, said Pocan.
viewed as ICE’s current flaws. “

“We know there are millions of people here who are technically not here legally, and yet many
have been here for a very long time. I don’t think many people think that’s an effective use of
ICE.” Most American adults, according to polling from Gallup, generally oppose deporting all undocumented immigrants, regardless of criminal background, living in the United States. But a recent
HuffPost/YouGov poll found that public opinion on eliminating ICE altogether is mixed. Roughly 21 percent of respondents said they support abolishing ICE, while 44 percent said they oppose it and 35 percent
were undecided.

Abolishing ICE would not eliminate borders – it would allow us to replace a bad
immigration system with a good one
Brodey, 2018 – Washington correspondent for the Minnesota Post [Sam 07/03/2018 How
‘Abolish ICE’ became the left’s new rallying cry [Link]
new-rallying-cry/]

Though a growing cohort of Democrats may want to abolish ICE, that doesn’t mean they’re on the same page about something equally important: what, if anything, would
Gillibrand argue that federal immigration enforcement needs to be
replace it. Supportive politicians like

restructured, not eliminated: “You should get rid of it, start over, reimagine it and build
something that actually works,” she said. Two Democratic members of the U.S. House, Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin and Rep. Pramila
Jayapal of Washington, have introduced legislation to abolish ICE and create a special commission that would “implement a humane immigration

enforcement system that upholds the dignity of all individuals, while transferring necessary functions to other agencies.” “I

think what many people want to do is return to an integrated agency that combines service with
enforcement,” UCLA’s Motomura says. “To understand that slogan or that rallying cry as a call
to abolish borders, or to abolish enforcement, misstates what it’s about. I think it’s a rallying cry
against a certain attitude toward enforcement, a rallying cry against a certain attitude toward
immigrants.”
 AT HSI DA
Abolishing ICE won’t hurt HSI – they will be moved to another agency
Ford 18- staff writer at The New Republic.(Matt July 18,2018,The New Republic, “OK, Abolish ICE. What
then?” [Link] ,July 9,2020 AS)

Congress could simply leave Homeland

ICE’s ultimate fate would hinge on how much lawmakers want to change. If ERO were shuttered,

Security Investigations and the rest of ICE’s structure intact under a more suitable name.
Lawmakers could also make HSI a distinct investigative agency within the Department of
Homeland Security. Congress could also move the office to the Justice Department, either as a
standalone agency or to be absorbed by the FBI, or to the Treasury Department, where the U.S.
Customs Service once exercised similar functions.

Turn – ICE is killing HSI – the bad reputation from ERO is undermining HSI
effectiveness
Ford 18- staff writer at The New Republic.(Matt July 18,2018,The New Republic, “OK, Abolish ICE. What
then?” [Link] ,July 9,2020 AS)

Trump’s push to maximize immigration enforcement and deportations has resurfaced some
tensions between the agency’s two largest offices. In a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen last month, a group of
Homeland Security Investigations special agents asked for their office to be separated from
Enforcement and Removal Operations, citing cultural differences in the mission and the
workforce between the two principal offices. The agents also made clear, albeit politely, that
ERO’s operations were undermining their ability to perform their own functions: Furthermore,
the perception of HSI’s investigative independence is unnecessarily impacted by the political
nature of ERO’s civil immigration enforcement. Many jurisdictions continue to refuse to work
with HSI because of a perceived linkage to the politics of civil immigration . Other jurisdictions agree to partner with HSI as
long as the “ICE” name is excluded from any public facing information. HSI is constantly expending resources to explain the

organizational differences to state and local partners, as well as to Congressional staff, and even within our own department—DHS.

Turn – ICE is killing HSI – the focus on deportations will drain resources, deny
witnesses, and sour relations for HSI
Hong 19 - professor of law at Boston College Law School [Kari E., 10 Reasons Why Congress
Should Defund ICE's Deportation Force (March 11, 2019). 43 NYU Review of Law & Social Change Harbinger 2019, Available at
SSRN: [Link]

Third, the ERO’s deportations are actively interfering with prosecuting criminal enterprises. The
ERO deportation efforts are not only a waste of resources, but they are also interfering with
prosecution of criminal enterprises. In June 2018, nineteen HSI agents asked for HSI to be
completely separated from the ERO deportation force because, among other reasons, an
association with the ERO causes local police not to cooperate with HSI . The ERO deportation
force has further soured relationships with local police departments by asking local jails to hold
and turn over U.S. citizens for deportation, without regard to evidence of citizenship. The lies
are costly to tax payers, as the ERO deportation force does not indemnify local police
departments that are found liable for monetary damages from individuals whom the police
wrongfully arrested or detained based on ICE’s assurances. Moreover, the ERO deportation force is
raiding HSI’s funding that is used to investigate and apprehend those involved in actual ongoing
crimes. Whereas the ERO deportation force is targeting people who were convicted of crimes
decades ago, HSI arrests those who it suspects pose an existing threat to the public. The ERO
deportation force is taking away resources from the HSI. According to the HSI, “the ebbs and
flows of ERO detention priorities have directly impacted HSI operations and infrastructure,
including the reprogramming of HSI funds to ERO (specifically $5M in FY11, $10M in FY13, and $34.5M in
FY16).”Restated, ERO is taking away funding from the agency that focuses on active transnational
criminal matters—including human trafficking—to instead target, arrest, and deport people
without criminal records and who are not a threat to public safety. The ERO deportation force is
also lurking at state courthouses,45 arresting witnesses to crimes and victims of human
trafficking. As unbelievable as it sounds, the ERO deportation force is deporting crime victims,
including those who have agreed to cooperate with prosecutors and who are willing to serve as
witnesses at trial. Under Trump, ICE arrests at courthouses, which include victims and witnesses
to crimes, has risen 1,700%.47 The Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court repeatedly has asked ICE to stop this
policy, an extraordinary request that the ERO deportation force ignores.48 In June 2018, former Attorney General Sessions
attempted to unilaterally change asylum law so that those who assist U.S. law enforcement in apprehending and arresting members
of gangs will no longer be able to ask for asylum.49 Although a district court has blocked this policy change, it reveals that this
administration is so blinded by its anti-immigration agenda that it is pursuing goals that undermine legitimate law enforcement
efforts. The ERO deportation force is taking the funding that HSI would otherwise use to combat
gang violence and is tainting the entire ICE agency with a reputation for overzealousness,
dishonesty, and racism, thus interfering with ICE’s ability to cooperate with police. The ERO
deportation force has been deporting crime victims and witnesses, as well as those who risked
their lives helping the United States apprehend criminal gangs, thus preventing state
prosecutors from convicting those charged with crimes. Not only is the ERO deportation force
unnecessary to keep us safe, but there are reasons to believe that our communities would
actually be safer if it were defunded.
 AT BLM DA
Turn – Abolish ICE helps BLM activists – the two movements help each other
Narea, 2020 – immigration reporter for Vox [Nicole “How “abolish ICE” helped bring abolitionist ideas
into the mainstream” Jul 9, 2020, [Link]
black-lives-matter]

“Immigrant rights activists have been very clear about engaging local elected officials for many
years on policing reforms,” García Hernández said. “[Being stopped] in the street because of a traffic violation or because of some
suspicion of criminal activity becomes the key moment that then sets the tone for whether or not this individual ends up in ICE’s hands and potentially getting deported.” The

movements to abolish the police and abolish ICE often work in tandem. Some activists work on
both causes, and others see their work as ideologically sympathetic. ICE and the police are “built
on the same foundation of racism and white supremacy,” said Silky Shah, executive director of
Detention Watch Network, which was one of the first organizations to call for abolishing immigration detention. “For police, it was to
patrol and ‘catch’ enslaved people and protect white property and corporations. For ICE as an
agency, it was an isolationist and Islamophobic response to the September 11th attacks,” she
said. “The call to abolish ICE is a call to shift away from a system that targets, abuses, and exiles
immigrants to one that values migration and human life.”
 AT Reform CP
ICE cannot be reformed – they have resisted or lied to avoid all oversight – only
abolition solves
Hong 19 - professor of law at Boston College Law School [Kari E., 10 Reasons Why Congress
Should Defund ICE's Deportation Force (March 11, 2019). 43 NYU Review of Law & Social Change Harbinger 2019, Available at
SSRN: [Link]

Sixth, the ERO deportation force has a toxic culture that resists reform, and thus must be
brought to an end. Since its inception in 2002, ICE has been repeatedly caught making
mistakes, lying to the public, acting outside its legal authority, acting overzealously, causing
preventable deaths, targeting law-abiding community members, and making decisions tainted
by racism. The Obama administration was unable to rein in and reform the internal culture of
ICE that aggressively—and at times unlawfully— abused discretion, norms, and immigrants
themselves. As a result, it stands to reason that the problems with ICE and the ERO deportation
force will not end when the Trump Administration is over. Regardless of who has held the
presidency, ICE officials have publicly engaged in political activity advocating more aggressive
enforcement actions against non-citizens. In 2012, ICE officers sued President Obama, asserting in part
that the DACA program and the Obama administration’s policy to exercise discretion in deportation were illegal (neither claim was vindicated).72 In the 2016 presidential
election, the union representing ICE officers endorsed Donald Trump. Going one step further, some ICE agents created a website to communicate directly to the American
people. The content chosen included nativist propaganda from [Link] and articles critical of President Trump’s failure to end all “illegal immigration.”75 It would be
unimaginable for a group of career officers at the State Department to tell the American people who they should vote for and against while selectively highlighting and omitting
ICE has lied to the public
facts to further an internal political agenda; yet, this is exactly what ICE agents did in support of Donald Trump. In addition,

and even federal judges about its true mandate and actual accomplishments. In March 2018, an
ICE spokesperson resigned after refusing to follow his superiors’ instructions to falsely report
that the agency had arrested 800 “dangerous people” when it had done no such thing .76 ICE responded
by sending agents to interrupt his television interview, an act the former official described as an “intimidation technique.”77 Additionally, in November 2018, a federal judge
released 120 Iraqi nationals and indicated that he would sanction ICE attorneys who gave the court “demonstrably false” information about the conditions they would face if
The intimidation tactics and lies speak to an agency infected with a culture that eschews
deported.78

good governance. The military, by contrast, subjects its officers and members to court-martials if they obey an unlawful order . The military has a
code of honor and discipline to incentivize courage and integrity. ICE seems to revel in the
contrary. Congress cannot reform what is rotten, but Congress can end the rot by defunding it.

Reforming ICE is irrelevant – it has No positive aspects to preserve

Loffman 2018 – PBS politics producer [Matt, 07-6-18, PBS, “What’s driving the movement to Abolish ICE?”,
[Link] ACC 07-13-20, AR]
Gottlieb has experienced shifting ICE priorities regarding legal permanent residents firsthand. Her husband, Ravi Ragbir, has lived legally in the United States legally for more
than two decades. “I can’t name a single thing that ICE has done to protect public safety in our community. Not a single thing.” – Amy Gottlieb, immigration lawyer and activist
Following a wire fraud conviction in 2006, Ragbir served two and a half years in ICE detention facilities. In the years since, he continued to appear at regular check-in meetings
with immigration agents. Despite his criminal conviction and the 1996 law that could have been used to deport him to Trinidad and Tobago, Ragbir never faced a serious
deportation threat because of the Obama administration policy of prosecutorial discretion. That all changed during his most recent appointment in January. “They arrested him
in front of my eyes. They handcuffed him and they flew him that very day to Miami trying to deport him,” Gottlieb said. “To me that was an incident of state-sponsored violence.
I will not ever forget that moment.” Ragbir was held in custody for 11 days before a court ordered his release. Gottlieb says in the nearly six months since Ragbir’s detention she
ICE enforcement in recent months that Kang says has
and her husband live “one day at a time.” It’s experiences like Ragbir’s and increased

“created the kind of opposition you’re seeing to ICE right now.” Gottlieb and Ragbir are two of the many
activists who are calling on the government to abolish ICE. “I can’t name a single thing that ICE
has done to protect public safety in our community. Not a single thing,” Gottlieb said . “You can’t
fix an agency that is so broken and has so much power. ”
 AT Capitalism K
ICE entrenches the expansion of neoliberal state control – it privatizes
immigration and reduces immigrants to units of Efficiency, reinforcing the
capitalist abuse of human rights.
Jack 19 – American Studies major at Macalester College [Suzanna "ICE and the Unquestioned
Human Cost of Efficiency: A Moral Reckoning,"Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities: Vol. 8 : Iss. 1 , Article 7.
Available at: [Link]

In July of 2017, headlines emerged that the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (also known as ICE) was housing detained immigrants and undocumented
There was confusion surrounding why these immigrants were
people at a local San Diego hotel, right next to paying civilians.

being housed in a standard hotel instead of a detainment center and ICE responded by saying
that “unconventional” means of detainment were standard for holding short term immigrants
who were awaiting trial (Romero 2017). However, this poses the question; how, as a nation, were we not
outraged by ICE systematically embedding their practices into the built and lived landscape of
the United States? The answer, I believe, is efficiency and state control. Through looking at ICE through a lens of the
principles of economic efficiency, ICE’s actions can be categorized as a function of increasing productivity by

any means necessary, even when these practices violate human rights. What is productive about
violating human rights? State control possessing unprecedented and unchecked power over the
people in their country. In this paper, I will be arguing that ICE practices are based on a model that values
efficiency and maximizing state control. Through their practices of centralizing police forces,
detaining undocumented folks outside of detention centers, and stripping due process away
from non-citizens, the concept of efficiency in the deportation regime becomes a means to
support state control. Positionality I am writing this paper to theorize why current practices in immigration exist, and
as a call to abolish ICE and dismantle the “efficient” capitalist process that has resulted in mass
human rights violations in the name of maximizing state control. I cannot reasonably do this without recognizing my
positionality in relation to this topic, and the ways in which I benefit every single day in a country that prioritizes my safety and wellbeing over many others. I am a white, upper-
middle class citizen of the United States who has always had access to easily travel both within and outside the borders of our nation. My body is not criminalized or targeted by
the state and my existence is one that is not only conceptualized as “the norm” in the United States, but celebrated because of oppressive institutions that prioritize whiteness
and financial stability. These privileges allow me to write this paper and do this research without fear of retaliation from my educational institution or the state. I hope to use my
voice to draw focus to and elevate others who do not have these comforts and safety but who are tirelessly engaging in work to make our country a safer and more just place for
all. Efficiency is of the essence of the good citizen in today’s world. The word efficiency evokes a variety of connotations, but we see it in everyday life, in movements both big and
small. Here at Macalester College in particular, efficiency is a communal value that is felt from the earliest days of applying to college (“If you apply ED you’ll be done with the
process by December!”) to navigating the most efficient route to finish requirements and majors while at school. It could be argued that the reason why Macalester College is a
successful institution is because it is an efficient one. The students here are efficient in our constant juggling of commitments, learning how to prioritize and move forward to
achieve the maximum outcome allowed post graduating, whether this means gaining meaningful employment or becoming a “friend of Macalester” and donating. Whether this
is seen in academics, internships, or extracurricular activities, the Macalester student is an efficient machine. Through this positive association with efficiency as a concept, we
often forget where the actual meaning of the word comes from, and the simple definition of efficiency as a concept. This section will work to define efficiency through an
economic lens and from a state control perspective. This first definition will conceptualize efficiency from an economic lens. Economic efficiency is about productivity through
putting in fewer inputs and getting out more outputs. Basically, the concept is to maximize an outcome by utilizing as little energy or resources as possible (High Rock Education
This focus on minimizing resources can lead to human rights violations and environmental
2018).

degradation in the name of achieving profit and state control. When the state is controlling
forces such as the police force, healthcare, and legal processes, they can utilize them in an “efficient” way. An “efficient”
controlling ensure a maximum outcome that benefits the state and aligns with a capitalist
mentality that perpetuates a free market profit maximization. To contextualize the concept of efficiency more broadly, I will
be using the work of Bill McKibben, an environmentalist. He has studied the detrimental impact of global warming on communities around the world, with particular regards to
how the large market mentality of efficiency has had a huge impact on climate change. His work also focuses on the economic reasoning behind global warming and how the
current framework of consistently productive markets continue to be the largest driving force in the continuation of global warming. In his book “Deep Economy” he advocates
for smaller, more locally sustainable markets as a means to remedy and help reverse the impact global warming has had on both the earth and humans’ daily life. Because this
paper will be connecting the concept of efficiency to the current-day deportation regime, McKibben’s scholarship is important for understanding why efficiency issued as a
means for excusing violence and also why our nation is so attached to its meaning. In doing so, we will examine how the concept of morality is tied to efficiency, especially in
regards to growth. McKibben’s moral growth argument is as follows: “the quality of democracy and character of American society is contingent on a society that has a vigorously
growing economy” (McKibben 2008). Economic growth in this case is coded as a social and personal value, one that defines the “character” of an American society. What is
interesting about this argument is how growth is not viewed as a negative; in fact it is very much the opposite. As a result, the “moral growth” argument allows for mass
. For
production and consumption of goods without analyzing the impact. Endless growth allows Americans to not look at fundamental flaws rooted in structures

example, until 2017, there was congressional directive that required ICE to hold at least 34,000
people in detention centers per day (Gottschalk 2016). The “bed mandate” practice is also common in United States prisons, requiring that prisons
ensure that a certain number of beds are occupied each day. These lockup quotas ensure that prisons are regularly and

reliably turning a profit (Kirkham 2013). The practice of United State prisons prioritizing growth leads to human rights implications, and
profit interest over human lives. Another tenant of McKibben’s argument is how our current day economy is “fast, cheap, and easy” (Mckibben 2008). Because the United States
economy is based on rapid growth without consequence, often sacrifices are made on a human level to compensate. McKibben asks why our nation never questions the impact of
how a fast, cheap, and easy economy impacts the ways that people experience lived institutions. We can use mass incarceration as an example of this, especially in regard to
prison labor. Prisoners often work for wages totaling less than one dollar an hour in manufacturing jobs that produce a variety of products for corporations (Evans2001). Author
Linda Evans writes, “For private business, prison labor is like a pot of gold. No strikes. No union organizing. No unemployment insurance or workers’ compensation to pay”
(Evans2001). While prison labor is efficient and cheap, there are two major implications. Oftentimes local economies bear the brunt of corporations choosing to employ
prisoners because of how little the corporations would have to pay them. In addition, incarcerated folks are forced to work for negligable wages in a system where they have no
autonomy or safety. This choice to utilize prison labor is absolutely efficient for the companies that employed the prisoners, but as the definition states, one side always loses in
The human and moral cost of efficiency is overshadowed by the collectively held
order for efficiency to work.

value of growth at all costs. Growth and its negative effects can be related back to ICE by
examining the privatization of the deportation process, a relatively recent phenomenon.

Capitalist profit motives drive immigration detention – private companies make

money by efficiently abusing immigrants
Jack 19 – American Studies major at Macalester College [Suzanna "ICE and the Unquestioned
Human Cost of Efficiency: A Moral Reckoning,"Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities: Vol. 8 : Iss. 1 , Article 7.
Available at: [Link]

Overview of the Privatization of the Deportation Process The deportation process has become increasingly
privatized in the past 15 years. Privatization began in earnest in 2003 under the Bush
administration, when private American corporations were encouraged by the United States to
move their infrastructure to help strengthen border protection . As Andrea Silva writes in her paper
“Neoliberalism confronts Latinos: Paradigmatic shifts in immigration practices”, “(these corporations) now operate,
build and maintain our immigrant enforcement system (Silva 2016). Some of these corporations included
Geocorp, ICA, and KBR. Between 2008 and 2013, $106 billion was spent on border surveillance by contracted companies and
workers. The state works in capitalist interest by creating a market for their services, and the
deportation industry is an enormous business. For deportation centers, it cost $200/day to
house immigrants, and in comparison, for regular prisons it is $54/day. It is in capitalist
interests to house and detain immigrants, and with the removal of troops from overseas, the
border is replacing those areas and being turned into an increasingly militarized zone. This is no
coincidence, as the border is now considered a low intensity conflict by homeland security.
Sanctuary cities, and especially the detaining process complicates what is called the neoliberal pole of efficiency by disrupting the
communication between ICE officers vs local police forces and courthouses. Silva later writes, “ The neoliberal principle of
efficiency has only increased the obscurity of immigration practices and the vulnerability of
undocumented immigrants at the hands of the federal government”. (Silva 2016). As the
privatization of the deportation process expanded, so did an interent in “efficient” models . One
efficient model that has been enacted has been the centralization of ICE and police forces in the United States.