Back in November 2024, I wrote in The Justice’s forum on the topic of immigration for its special 2024 presidential election issue. At the time, I laid out the case for Kamala Harris implementing a more compassionate immigration policy than the one she was campaigning on, should she be elected president. I described Donald Trump’s proposed immigration policies as “horrifying” and “fascistic in nature,” concluding that, “immigrants are not pawns to advance political agendas, they’re real people whose lives are affected by policy.” I will be the first to admit, the piece was optimistic, maybe even naively so, but I saw a real opportunity for progress if Harris won.

Instead, here we are, 15 months later, and Trump’s fascistic policies are in full swing, destroying the lives of thousands of real people, immigrants and citizens alike. Since Jan. 20, 2025, Trump has utilized the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency as his personal secret police force to terrorize communities across the United States into submission.

 In flashy, edited videos posted to social media, officers with assault rifles and gas masks flanked by armored trucks smash in the doors of houses to lead out handcuffed men, women and children. These videos aren’t about gang violence, they aren’t about drugs and they certainly aren’t about daycare fraud. When masked agents abducted Tufts University grad student Rümeysa Öztürk off the streets of Somerville last year for the terrible crime of writing in a newspaper just like this one, it wasn’t about any of those things. It was about instilling terror and compliance. That is what a secret police force does. 

It is little exaggeration to say the Twin Cities of Minnesota are currently under occupation by this modern-day Gestapo.  Outnumbering local police, 3,000 ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents have descended on Minneapolis and St. Paul, criss-crossing the metro in search of people to kidnap — read: any person with a skin complexion darker than printer paper. They are trailed by community organizers and legal observers, whistles and phones in hand to alert their neighbors and document ICE’s rampant abuses.

The necessary and courageous nature of the work being done by this diverse group of ordinary people cannot be understated, nor can the threats they face for simply exercising their constitutional rights in Trump’s America. That’s what Renee Good was doing on Jan. 7 as she sat in her car observing ICE actions, waving ICE vehicles past her own. Good was given conflicting commands by ICE, and as agent Jonathan Ross purposefully placed himself in front of her car, she reversed and steered away from him to leave the scene. That was when Ross brutally murdered her, shooting her three times. Walking away from the crime scene, Ross was heard saying that Good was a “fucking bitch.”

As I prepared to submit this piece on Jan. 24, another Minnesotan, Alex Pretti, was murdered by a mob of federal agents who shot him over 10 times. Of the many horrific details shared by these two shootings, one particularly glaring pattern has emerged. Despite swaths of evidence to the contrary, the federal government has fully mobilized to blatantly lie about the facts and circumstances of their murders.  Donald Trump, JD Vance, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, Greg Bovino and countless more have collectively worked to fabricate an alternate universe where Good and Pretti were radical domestic terrorists, intent on inflicting “maximum damage and massacr[ing] law enforcement.”

In the wake of these tragedies and the abhorrent response of the federal government, it is more than clear that, as an institution, ICE has been wholly corrupted by the autocratic power grabs of the Trump administration. So today I’m here to lay out a different policy than the one I did in November 2024: ICE must be abolished. Assuming we still have elections and the Democrats return to power, we must flood their offices with that unanimous and unambiguous message. ICE must be abolished. It cannot simply be reformed or its thugs retrained. 

One recent plan to rein in ICE involved ensuring that all agents wear body cameras. A fair proposal, but wholly inadequate considering we have video taken by Jonathan Ross as he murdered Renee Good, and it has done little to change the narrative approach of Republicans. Mere hours after Alex Pretti’s murder, multiple angles have already emerged showing his body being riddled with bullets. The problem is not a lack of perspectives; it is the agents themselves.

Just take a quick look at the X page of ICE’s overseeing agency, the Department of Homeland Security. One post shows an idyllic beach captioned “America After 100 Million Deportations," a crude dogwhistle for deporting tens of millions of naturalized and natural-born citizens. This sort of veiled, targeted recruitment has enlisted legions of white supremacists and Christian nationalists into the ranks of ICE. Any semblance of background checks or thorough evaluations has fallen by the wayside in a mad rush to massively enlarge the agency with those eager and willing to carry out the orders of Donald Trump.

These far-right ideologues have irreparably compromised ICE’s ability to operate. These forces, with a blank check from the administration for harassment, for bullying and, yes, even for murder, have permanently tarnished ICE’s reputation amongst the citizenry. Abolishing ICE is not about terminating all immigration enforcement. ICE was created in 2003, under a Bush-era expansion of executive power. We existed just fine for 227 years without it! Abolishing ICE is about rebuilding the trust that the federal government has annihilated by waging war on Americans. 

There will surely be many obstacles in the path towards achieving this goal, but it is one we must strive towards with unerring fervor. Harness that anger you feel when you watch our neighbors get kidnapped and gunned down in the streets. Take any action you’re able to. Talk with your friends and family about what ICE is doing, contact your legislators about their stances on ICE, connect with the LUCE Immigrant Justice Network of Massachusetts for reporting ICE sightings, sign up for legal observer training, attend a protest at the Burlington ICE Field Office, in Waltham or anywhere else. Anything and everything helps to advance this cause. In the words of Nemik, the model of an anti-fascist revolutionary from the Star Wars TV show “Andor,” “Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.”