How a left-wing rallying cry burst into the mainstream as Trump implements his most extreme immigration policy yet
- Calls to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement have picked up momentum on the left in recent weeks.
- The intensity coincides with the Trump administration's implementation of its "zero tolerance" immigration policy.
- Prominent Democratic members of Congress now support eliminating the 15-year-old agency tasked with enforcing immigration law and deporting undocumented immigrants.
- What began as a hashtag might very well force the Democratic party to the left on the central issue of immigration during the upcoming midterms.
Just a month after President Donald Trump's inauguration, a 26-year-old undocumented woman with a brain tumor was taken against her will from a Texas hospital and placed in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center.
Sara Beltran Hernandez, an asylum seeker who said she fled domestic abuse and gang violence in El Salvador, was viewed as the latest victim of the Trump administration's crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
As news of her treatment spread, liberal activist and pollster Sean McElwee tweeted, "abolish ICE abolish ICE abolish ICE abolish ICE abolish ICE."
The message, sent to McElwee's tens of thousands of Twitter followers, resonated.
As ICE arrests spiked over the next few months, McElwee was reminded of an August 2015 essay by the well-known white supremacist Jared Taylor laying out a radical wish list for immigration policy, which included targeting undocumented immigrants without criminal records for deportation.
"The main thing would be to convince illegals that ICE was serious about kicking them out," Taylor wrote.
McElwee drew a direct line between Taylor's ideas and Trump's policy.
"It became immediately clear, about a month or two in, that Stephen Miller and the Trump White House was pretty explicitly following the exact words that this white supremacist had written down," McElwee said, referring to one of the president's top advisers on immigration. "And it became clear what the goal was, which was to use ICE to execute a campaign of ethnic cleansing."
McElwee began regularly retweeting news reports on the agency's alleged abuses with the hashtag #AbolishICE. Left-wing groups, including Indivisible and Justice Democrats, promoted stories of ICE arresting undocumented immigrants in hospitals, workplaces, and as they picked their children up at school.
And in recent weeks, as migrant families were separated on the Southern border under Trump's "zero tolerance" immigration policy, the hashtag has picked up significant momentum. Between January and May, there were an average of 3,600 tweets mentioning the hashtag or phrase "Abolish ICE." So far in June, there have been about 25,000 such tweets, according to McElwee's organization Data for Progress.
On Monday, Rep. Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat, introduced the first ever piece of legislation to eliminate the 15-year-old agency. Over the last week, four Democratic House members and one US senator have endorsed abolishing ICE.
"It's no longer a hashtag, it's a movement," said Antonio Alarcon, a member of Make the Road Action, an immigration advocacy organization, and a DREAMer.
'A terrorist organization' born out of terror
ICE was created in 2003 in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks as part of the new Department of Homeland Security.
Tasked with interior enforcement of immigration laws, the agency has since become the government's deportation force.
Many on the left argue ICE was born out of a moment of fear that resulted in a broad crackdown on civil and human rights, from airports, to Guantánamo Bay, to secret US detention centers around the world - and that it never should have been established in the first place.
Under former President Barack Obama, ICE arrests and deportations spiked, but the agency largely prioritized undocumented immigrants with criminal records, rather than those who had simply entered the country illegally, which is a misdemeanor offense.
Shortly after Trump took office, DHS issued sweeping new guidelines authorizing ICE to expand its raids, deport people with criminal records, and use local law enforcement to implement federal policy.
In 2017, the agency arrested 37,734 undocumented immigrants without criminal records - double the number arrested in 2016, according to The Washington Post.
Critics of the agency argue it's mission is designed to punish and terrorize some of the country's most vulnerable communities. Cynthia Nixon, an activist and former actress running an insurgent challenge against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in this year's Democratic primary, called ICE a "terrorist organization" last week.
Advocates argue that the US government should not be in the business of deporting people who have committed a simple misdemeanor offense. If an undocumented immigrant has committed a crime, they say, the criminal justice system is prepared to handle it.
"Deportation is, next to death, the worst thing a government can do to you - and yet we treat it as nothing, we routinize it," McElwee said.
Ratcheting up the pressure on lawmakers
In March, MSNBC host Chris Hayes asked Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris of California whether she thinks ICE should exist.
A former federal prosecutor and state attorney general, Harris seemed almost confused by the question.
"Should ICE exist?" she said. "There needs to be serious, severe, and swift consequences when people commit serious and violent crimes ... and certainly, if they are undocumented they should be deported if they commit those serious and violent offenses ... So, yes, ICE has a purpose, ICE has a role, ICE should exist. But let's not abuse the power."
But just a few months later, Harris - a potential 2020 presidential candidate and vocal defender of so-called Dreamers - has changed her tune.
"I think there's no question that we've got to critically reexamine ICE and its role and the way that it is being administered and the work it is doing," Harris told MSNBC's Kasie Hunt at the site of a detention facility on the Mexico-California border. "And we need to probably think about starting from scratch because there's a lot that is wrong with the way it's conducting itself."
In just the last few days, the hashtag has been transformed into a policy position for a growing number of progressive Democrats. In cities including Portland, Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York, "Occupy ICE" protests have sprung up outside detention facilities.
About two dozen House and Senate candidates have endorsed eliminating the agency, according to McElwee, who launched an organization, in partnership with Make the Road Action, last week to raise money for grassroots organizations fighting deportation and pushing policy reform.
"We should abolish ICE and start over, focusing on our priorities to protect our families and our borders in a humane and thoughtful fashion," Democratic Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon wrote in a Medium post Sunday.
On Tuesday, there was another landmark moment for the movement. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old progressive insurgent whose platform included abolishing ICE, defeated 10-term Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley of New York in a primary battle few were paying attention to.
Just days later, Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York became the first senator to support abolishing ICE.
"I believe that it has become a deportation force, and I think you should separate the criminal justice from the immigration issues, and I think you should reimagine ICE under a new agency with a very different mission and take those two missions out," Gillibrand told CNN host Chris Cuomo.
Many Democrats are wary
The vast majority of elected Democrats either haven't addressed abolishing ICE or are doing their best to skirt it.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, a progressive independent who voted against the formation ICE in 2003, wouldn't endorse eliminating the agency during a Wednesday CNN interview.
"I think this disastrous immigration policy should be abolished," Sanders said. "Whether you abolish ICE or not is not the major issue - the major issue is having an immigration system which is effective."
Cecilia Muñoz, a former director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under Obama, has argued that advocating for the elimination of ICE is a political gift to Republicans.
"If the debate is whether there should be immigration enforcement, then I think we give the other side a really powerful tool to win hearts and minds," Muñoz told Slate in May. "I think that's a mistake. Look, abolishing ICE sounds very close to saying, 'Well maybe we don't need a border. Maybe we don't need immigration enforcement.'"
Indeed, conservatives have jumped on the opportunity to characterize Democratic immigration policy as radical and out of touch with average Americans. Trump recently called the effort an "extremist" call for "anarchy."
Others have echoed the concern that calls to abolish ICE could, as Washington Post reporter Amber Phillips argued, "make it that much more difficult for Democrats to get out from under Trump's false claims that Democrats actually welcome illegal immigration."
While Democratic strategists say they don't yet have the polling data they need to advise politicians and lawmakers on messaging on this particular issue, many say the party needs to move left on immigration more broadly in order to do well with their political base in 2018.
"If Democrats want to tap into the turnout we need in November, we have to talk about what our values are and our values are fundamentally opposed to having the government put kids into cages," said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic consultant and former spokesman for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.
He added: "We know what the growing demographics are in America and if we want to represent those voters, we have to represent their interests and that means a more progressive stand on immigration and on pathways to citizenship."