The fight over Abdul El-Sayed’s claim that “ICE has nothing to do with immigration” is really a fight over what the agency has become since 9/11: a structurally militarized, interior security force layered on top of—rather than synonymous with—immigration enforcement.
Key Points
- Abdul El-Sayed has built his Senate campaign around a clear, repeated demand to abolish ICE, arguing it is a paramilitary tool weaponized against the Constitution rather than an immigration agency.
- ICE’s own mission statements and operational data unmistakably show large-scale immigration enforcement—arrests, detention, and removals—as a core function of the agency.
- The substantive dispute is not whether ICE does immigration work, but whether its post‑9/11 design and tactics have transformed it into something broader: interior state violence and political theater under the pretext of immigration.
- El-Sayed’s “abolish ICE” rhetoric aligns with modern abolitionist strategies seen in policing debates, which target institutional missions and structures rather than the existence of enforcement functions per se.
- Understanding this controversy requires separating three things: ICE’s formal mandate, its operational reality, and the normative judgment that some missions and structures are beyond reform.
Abdul El-Sayed’s Argument: ICE as Paramilitary State Violence
Abdul El-Sayed is not ambiguous about his view of ICE. In speeches, interviews, and campaign materials spanning several years, he describes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as an agency that has “nothing to do with immigration” and “nothing to do with the southern border,” but everything to do with “normalizing paramilitary force on our streets.” He characterizes ICE as having been “weaponized against the Constitution itself under the pretext of immigration” and insists that it “cannot be reformed,” “cannot be retrained,” and “has to be abolished.”
His campaign embeds this position at its core. A dedicated Senate ad brands him “the only Senate candidate for abolishing ICE,” presenting abolition not as a fringe add‑on but as a defining contrast with opponents who have voted to bolster ICE’s budget and authorities. In town halls and rallies, including events with figures like Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez and Bernie Sanders, he repeats the framing: ICE is a “paramilitary force” and “government thugs on the streets,” created to “weaponize hatred through the government.” For El-Sayed, this is not a broken agency needing better oversight; it is, in his words, “working exactly as President Donald Trump wants it to” and therefore must be dismantled.
When pressed on what comes after abolition, El-Sayed explicitly distinguishes ICE from immigration enforcement itself. He argues that “abolishing ICE does not mean abandoning immigration enforcement altogether,” but rather “rejecting a system designed to corrode our constitution and replacing it with one designed to uphold it.” In interviews he supports “a safe and secure southern border,” recognizes a “role for immigration enforcement,” and points out that border security is handled by Customs and Border Protection, not ICE. This is why he can say, in the same breath, that ICE has nothing to do with immigration and that immigration policy should still be enforced—he treats ICE as a particular institutional embodiment of enforcement, not enforcement as such.
What ICE Says It Is: Mission, Structure, and Volume of Immigration Work
Against that critique stands a substantial body of formal description and activity that makes it difficult to sustain a literal claim that ICE has “nothing” to do with immigration. ICE was created in 2003 as part of the Department of Homeland Security reorganization, combining investigative and interior enforcement functions that had previously sat in the old Immigration and Naturalization Service and Customs Service. DHS and ICE describe the agency’s primary mission as promoting homeland security and public safety through “criminal and civil enforcement of federal laws governing border control, customs, trade, and immigration.”
Structurally, ICE is built around two major operational components: Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). ERO is responsible for identifying, arresting, detaining, supervising, and removing noncitizens who fall within civil immigration enforcement priorities—essentially, the interior deportation apparatus. HSI focuses on transnational crime, including human smuggling, visa fraud, and other offenses that sit at the intersection of immigration and broader criminal law. That design embeds immigration enforcement deeply in ICE’s organizational chart.
Operationally, ICE’s own annual reports document large-scale immigration activity. The FY2024 report, for example, details hundreds of thousands of book‑ins, removals, and detainers associated with civil immigration enforcement, alongside criminal investigations. USAFacts, aggregating DHS data, notes that between late 2014 and late 2024 ICE returned roughly 2.3 million book‑ins to their country of citizenship—a direct measure of deportation and removal work. Even critical overviews that emphasize controversy describe ICE as an interior immigration enforcement agency whose remit includes detaining and deporting unauthorized immigrants.
On the face of this record, the straightforward descriptive claim is clear: ICE is an immigration agency in mandate and practice. It may also do customs and national security work. It may, in the eyes of some critics, be overmilitarized or abusive. But as an empirical matter, a very large share of ICE’s resources and legal authority are dedicated to immigration enforcement.
Where the Dispute Really Lives: Mission Drift and the Post‑9/11 Security State
Given those facts, El-Sayed’s “nothing to do with immigration” line is best understood not as a literal description of ICE’s docket, but as a statement about *mission drift* and political function. His criticism focuses on how ICE operates: high‑profile raids in interior cities, the use of aggressive tactics that resemble military operations, and the deployment of immigration enforcement as a public spectacle tied to partisan agendas. In this view, immigration is the pretext; the real project is building a domestic security force with broad powers over targeted communities.
ICE’s origin story reinforces some of this concern. The agency was “rushed into existence with expansive power and minimal oversight in the wake of 9/11,” as El-Sayed puts it, folded into a DHS architecture that blurred lines between immigration administration, counterterrorism, and national security policing. The official mission language reflects that blend: ICE is tasked not only with immigration but with “protecting America from cross-border crime and illegal immigration,” a formulation that collapses migration with criminal threat and grants wide investigative latitude. Critics argue that this fusion makes it easier to justify militarized enforcement, even when cases involve civil status violations rather than violent crime.
Public reporting and commentary, including from outlets that are not aligned with El-Sayed, acknowledge the visible militarization of some ICE operations. Accounts of workplace raids, street arrests, and large-scale detention sweeps describe scenarios that look far less like administrative processing and far more like tactical policing. The BBC, for example, highlights the breadth of ICE’s powers to use force in the context of Trump-era deportation strategies, noting how the agency sits at the forefront of a partisan project to ramp up removals. Those optics—heavily armed agents, mass arrests, and publicity around crackdowns—are precisely what allow El-Sayed and others to frame ICE as a paramilitary presence.
Abolitionist Rhetoric: From Policing to Immigration Enforcement
El-Sayed’s language also belongs to a broader abolitionist tradition that has migrated from criminal justice debates into immigration politics. Modern police abolition movements argue that policing as an institution is structurally harmful and cannot be reformed; they seek to replace police with alternative systems of public safety rather than eliminating safety functions altogether. Scholars describe abolition as focused on ending specific institutional missions—such as racially targeted suppression—while reallocating responsibilities to new structures.
In that context, saying “police don’t do what you think they do” or “police are not about safety” is a rhetorical way of asserting that the institution’s dominant outputs are harm, not protection. El-Sayed’s line that “ICE is not about immigration” functions similarly: he is arguing that what ICE does in practice is not what the public imagines an immigration agency should do. When he calls ICE “irredeemable” and insists it “must be abolished,” he is importing abolitionist logic—an institution’s mission and culture are so entangled with harm that incremental reform cannot fix it.
This helps explain why his rhetoric can sound extreme or implausible if read as literal description, yet coherent when seen as abolitionist critique. He is not denying that ICE processes deportations; he is denying that deportation processing is the morally relevant core of the institution. For him, the core is state violence against marginalized communities under a constitutional pretext, and that core, he argues, cannot be surgically removed from ICE’s structure.
Evidence Gaps: What We Know—and Don’t Know—About ICE’s Activity Mix
Both sides of this debate lean heavily on mission statements and visible practices, but they lack the granular, independent evidence that would decisively resolve how much of ICE’s real-world activity is immigration enforcement versus other functions. ICE’s budget documents and annual reports provide high-level breakdowns of removals, detentions, and investigations, but they do not always disaggregate the data in ways that speak directly to El-Sayed’s claims about paramilitary politics versus administrative enforcement.
The sources documenting his position—campaign videos, interviews, and partisan coverage—offer vivid anecdotes and normative arguments but not internal ICE directives, training materials, or case-file audits that would show, for example, how enforcement priorities are set or how often operations are coordinated with political messaging. Conversely, the DHS and ICE materials that emphasize immigration enforcement are self-descriptions; they do not grapple with whether tactics, resource allocation, or command structures systematically skew toward deterrence by spectacle rather than due process.
For a reader trying to adjudicate his central claim, the practical takeaway is sobering: we can say with confidence that ICE is formally and operationally an immigration agency, and we can say with equal confidence that parts of its work look and feel like militarized interior policing. What we cannot do, on the current public record, is produce a definitive, audited map of ICE’s activity that quantifies the share of its mission devoted to immigration administration versus broader security theater.
Policy Substance Behind the Slogan: What “Abolish ICE” Would Mean
If ICE does substantial immigration work, what would it mean, concretely, to “abolish” it? El-Sayed’s own descriptions are more specific than the slogan suggests. He calls for dismantling ICE as an agency and replacing it with a new immigration enforcement body designed around constitutional protections, high training standards, and due process, with a clear separation from partisan directives. He emphasizes that border enforcement would continue under CBP, and that interior immigration functions would not disappear but be re-housed in institutions he considers compatible with democracy.
This is consistent with abolitionist frameworks that focus on missions and structures rather than raw function counts. In policing debates, one version of abolition calls for abolishing the mission of racialized suppression and empowering alternative actors—social workers, community organizations—to handle many situations currently routed to police. Transposed into immigration, abolition of ICE would mean abolishing a specific fusion of interior enforcement with militarized tactics and partisan spectacle, while allowing for other agencies or new entities to manage visa overstays, asylum processing, and removal proceedings under different norms.
Of course, whether such a replacement could avoid reproducing ICE’s harms is an open question, and one his critics highlight. Without detailed institutional design, abolition risks becoming a slogan attached to a vacuum. That is why opponents seize on his most absolutist phrasing, recasting it as a bid to “neuter our immigration laws” rather than a strategy for changing how those laws are enforced. The absence of a fully specified alternative gives his detractors room to paint abolition as abandonment.
The Hodgetwins. Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed made these remarks during a progressive campaign event in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Speaking alongside Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez he stated:
"ICE has nothing to do with immigration. ICE…
— charlene ✝️✝️✝️ (@grad3361) July 22, 2026
Why This Debate Matters Beyond One Senate Race
The argument El-Sayed is making about ICE sits at the intersection of immigration, constitutional law, and the architecture of the post‑9/11 security state. On one level, it is a campaign wedge: he distinguishes himself from rivals by pledging to abolish an agency they have repeatedly funded. On another level, it is a test of how far abolitionist ideas have traveled from academic and activist circles into mainstream electoral politics.
For voters, the key is to disentangle the descriptive from the normative. Descriptively, ICE is an immigration enforcement agency. It arrests, detains, and removes noncitizens at scale. Normatively, El-Sayed argues that the way it has been built and used makes it unconstitutional and irredeemable. Both claims can be true: an agency can be substantively about immigration in terms of caseload and yet, in a critic’s eyes, not “about immigration” in terms of its governing purpose.
Whether one accepts his conclusion depends less on the words “nothing to do with immigration” and more on how one assesses the trade‑offs embedded in ICE’s design. If you see militarized interior enforcement as a necessary response to illegal immigration and cross-border crime, then abolition looks reckless. If you see it as a predictable outgrowth of a security state that overidentifies migration with threat, then abolition looks like a rational, if radical, reset. The evidence available today supports a clear factual baseline and competing value judgments. What it does not yet offer is the kind of deep, independent audit that might move this controversy from rhetoric into settled consensus.
Sources:
twitchy.com, youtube.com, breitbart.com, metrotimes.com, thepostmillennial.com, forumtogether.org, ice.gov, usafacts.org, dhs.gov, charlesinternationallaw.com, legalwin.org, medium.com, bbc.com, cambridge.org, ebsco.com, abolitionistlawcenter.org
