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The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has become notorious for its cruelty, abuses of civil liberties and racial profiling. As a result, the agency and the Trump administration’s deportation policies generally have become increasingly unpopular.
Yet most Democrats have hesitated to call for its abolition, likely because of fear of seeming to be “soft on crime.”
But there is a way out of this dilemma: Abolish ICE and give the money to state and local cops.
ICE’s abuses are legion. Its agents routinely detain people with little or no due process, even seizing American citizens and legal permanent residents, as well as illegal migrants. ICE agents allegedly assaulted a U.S. citizen and Army veteran named George Retes with tear gas, smashed his car window, then detained him for three days in solitary confinement without letting him contact his family or an attorney.
The ubiquitous use of masks by ICE agents and their refusal to identify themselves and their agency protects them from accountability, ensuring that those targeted often have no way of knowing whether they are being seized by ICE agents, regular law enforcement or common criminals. There is no good evidence to support claims that mask-wearing and secrecy are needed to protect officer safety.
The alarming extent of racial and ethnic profiling by ICE is shown by the fact that the agency’s arrests in Los Angeles County declined by 66 percent after a federal court order barring the use of these and similar tactics. Conservatives and others who rightly seek a color-blind government must not turn a blind eye to racial discrimination by government agents who have the authority to arrest and detain people.
In the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling against racial preferences in university admissions, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.” That must include ICE.
Conditions in ICE detention facilities are often abysmal, featuring overcrowding, inadequate food and denial of needed medical treatment. These conditions are unfit even for the worst imprisoned criminals — and most ICE detainees are far from that. Despite administration claims that ICE is protecting the public against dangerous criminals, 65 percent of people detained as of June had no criminal record, and some 90 percent had no convictions for violent or property crime. Overall, undocumented immigrants have much lower crime rates than native-born Americans.
ICE’s detentions and deportations also inflict grave harm on immigrants and their communities. They break up families and return people to horrific oppression and poverty in countries such as Cuba and Venezuela. Many of those detained and deported did not even enter the U.S. illegally, but rather were deprived of legal status by cruel government decisions, such as President Trump’s revocation of “parole” for Cubans, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans who fled horrific socialist dictatorships, and Afghans who escaped Taliban oppression.
Deportations also damage the economy. Undocumented immigrants are vital contributors to many sectors. For example, social science evidence indicates deportations exacerbate housing shortages because migrants disproportionately work in construction.
Many of these abuses predate the second Trump administration. But its policies have made things worse, for example by seeking to massively ramp up deportations, thereby exacerbating civil liberties abuses and targeting more non-criminals.
Growing public awareness of ICE abuses has made the agency very unpopular. Recent survey data indicates that large majorities disapprove of it, and a large minority — almost 40 percent in a recent tracking poll — already wants to abolish it.
Yet most Democrats have hesitated to call for the agency’s abolition, probably for fear of seeming to be soft on crime. Immigrant crime was an effective issue for Trump in 2024. But opponents can avoid such accusations by combining abolition of ICE with reallocation of its funds to ordinary police, which would undercut accusations of being pro-criminal or anti-law enforcement. This could greatly expand support for abolition.
In my 2022 book “Free to Move,” I proposed dismantling ICE and giving the money to ordinary police, perhaps in the form of federal grants to state and local law enforcement. Recipient agencies should be required to use the funds to target violent and property crime, and abjure ICE-style abuses.
Putting more ordinary police on the streets is an effective way to reduce crime rates, according to a long line of studies. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill has massively increased ICE funding, tripling it to $28 billion per year. That is enough to pay the salaries of over 360,000 police officers, at the median annual pay of $77,270 per year. The actual number of new cops would be lower, but even 100,000 or 150,000 new police officers could still make a big difference, increasing the total number of state and local law enforcement officers by about 8 to 12 percent.
Focusing on undocumented immigrants is a poor use of law enforcement resources because they actually have much lower crime rates than natives. Transferring ICE funds to state and local police would allow a greater focus on violent and property crime, regardless of the perpetrators’ background.
We need not necessarily transfer all ICE spending to state and local law enforcement. Some might be better used in other ways. But transferring a large part can simultaneously reduce crime and reduce possible political risks of advocating ICE’s abolition.
Abolishing ICE would not end all deportations. State and local authorities could still, in many cases, turn illegal migrants over to the federal government for removal. Other, much smaller federal agencies could still help, and they could also still restrict migration at the border. U.S. marshals already handle extradition of dangerous criminals. But abolishing ICE would make deportation much more dependent on state and local cooperation and would empower jurisdictions to make their own choices.
Leaving immigration restrictions more to the states would bring us closer to the Constitution’s original meaning. The Constitution does not explicitly grant immigration authority to the federal government, and Founding Fathers such as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson rightly argued that it did not have any general power to bar migrants. For the first century of American history, that authority was largely left to the states.
We may not be able to fully restore the original meaning of the Constitution on this score. But abolishing ICE and shifting more law enforcement resources to state and local governments would bring us closer to it. It would also simultaneously curtail ICE abuses and reduce crime.
Ilya Somin is Professor of Law at George Mason University, the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, and author of “Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.”
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