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Abolish ICE
On some deep anthropological level I don't think borders or police or prisons should even be a thing -- there are far better ways to organize a society -- but I'm also an incrementalist; I don't reject things getting a little better. "More humane prisons" is not as good as "no prisons" (in a context where "no prisons" means "people resolve things well together restorative-justice style and confining humans is seen as a grotesque relic of the past like medieval public torture", not "victims are unprotected"). But "more humane prisons" is still good.
However "abolish ICE" does not seem particularly radical to me; it's awfully incremental, in fact. "Abolish ICE" does not mean "do not have a border"; it means return to the status quo ante of 2001, when immigration and customs were handled by different agencies (INS and USCS), so that the people at the border were like "passport please, are you carrying drugs" and not "who can we deport quickly." This is not radical at all. We had a border. The INS was not particularly humane or progressive, it was a pain in the ass. But it was also not the murderous private army of a wannabe tyrant.
Like, abolish it now. Right away. All those people need to be fired, the thing is way too rotten. They can reapply for positions at the new, slow, boring, bureaucratic, non-militarized immigration service if they're interested in standing behind counters and insisting on forms being filled out correctly. They should get those jobs if they're suited to them... but if they were anywhere near this horror, they will have plenty of 'splainin' to do. (Most of them should perhaps rather return to the basement to play Call of Duty onscreen instead of on their neighbors.)
This is, like, so un-radical. It it the most milquetoast of demands. "Abolish ICE" should be at this point a completely normalized, conventional, uninspiring, obvious slogan. We don't have to jump ahead to the kind of Le Guinian utopia of free movement of peoples that I perhaps ultimately favor. We can just go back to infuriatingly long lines and bored bureaucrats and the slow, stupid, conflicted process of the rule of law.
The INS was a boring organization which provided infuriatingly crappy customer services to citizens and immigrants alike. Bring it back. Make immigration boring again. That would be a great first step.
(But also, it's worth noting that the "ICE" in "Abolish ICE" is partly a metonym. CBP, the other Bush-era-created DHS immigration agency, is known for being more lawless and brutal than ICE traditionally was, and part of the current lawless militarization of ICE is really the CBP-ization of ICE. ICE is now treating protesting bake-sale grandmas in their home suburbs and dads picking their kids up from daycare in American cities the way CBP has traditionally treated grandmas and dads trying to shepherd their kids across the desert for a better life; and it may be more shocking -- and more of an existential threat to our deeply imperfect democracy-in-progress -- when it happens in downtown Minneapolis, but surely a moment's reflection should reveal that it's not exactly great when it happens in the desert either. So in fact what we're talking about is a customs, border, and immigration apparatus which is humane, transparent, subject to rules, subject to strict limits on the use of force, closely monitored, and demilitarized -- whether at the border or anywhere else.)
Others:
- here is the brilliant Nate Stevenson on this moment
- here is my Internet Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg's list of possible actions to take right now against ICE et al
- here is a guide distributed by Indivisible on the theory of how nonviolent action can be crafted to make political violence backfire. Minneapolis is providing a profoundly convincing demonstration of how powerful disciplined nonviolent action is, and that it doesn't require your opponent to have a conscience, it just requires them to be dependent on some level of popular support or acquiescence. It seems that, at this moment, people are acutely aware of the kind of images Trump wants to be able to broadcast to his base, and they're exerting profound discipline in not giving him what he wants -- while employing incredible bravery in making it impossible for ICE to operate.
