Abolish ICE. Then What?
Darializa Avila Chevalier and Democrats’ incomplete slogan.
Evan Gottesman is the director of communications and special projects at the Renew Democracy Initiative and managing editor of The Next Move.
As Democrats muddle through primary season, the contours of their platform in this year’s midterms—and the 2028 presidential election—are becoming clear. Abolishing ICE, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, is emerging as a baseline position. For many candidates, having a future in the party means declaring that ICE has no future as an institution.
I’m all in for getting rid of ICE. Beyond its routine abuse of immigrants and the high-profile killings of two American citizens in Minneapolis, the institution is simply too rotten to go on. It isn’t weighed down by “a few bad apples” (as the excuse for misbehavior in law enforcement often goes); ICE is recruiting for bad apples, with ads featuring appeals to “protect your culture” and “defend the homeland.” Internal standards have collapsed: The Trump administration shaved 14 weeks off of the 22-week training period for new ICE agents and discarded lessons for officers on the Spanish language and the Immigration and Nationality Act. Meanwhile, ICE’s ranks have more than doubled since January 2025.
The inevitable outcome is that ICE is a politicized militia, its agents overwhelmingly ill-trained, ignorant about the civilians with whom they interact and the law they are supposed to defend, and motivated by all sorts of ugly beliefs. This is by design.
It follows that an anti-ICE policy makes sense. But that position invites a natural follow up, severely underdiscussed in intra-Democratic debates: With ICE gone, what comes next?
After all, the United States will still have borders to maintain and immigration laws to uphold. The question of what comes after ICE carries new urgency as insurgent candidates test the ideological boundaries of the Democratic Party’s big tent. The answer will illustrate whether Democrats are only interested in trendy talking points, or if they really want to govern and build something.
Last night, DSA candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier bested five-term incumbent Adriano Espaillat in the Democratic primary for New York’s thirteenth congressional district. Before yesterday’s election, Espaillat, the first formerly undocumented immigrant elected to Congress, would easily have been called a progressive on immigration. During the first Trump administration—before “abolish ICE” became mainstream—he introduced legislation to dismantle ICE and create a “new immigration enforcement regime.”
Yet it’s the second half of that equation—a new immigration enforcement regime—that feels tricky for the Democrats’ highly visible and increasingly influential left flank. Chevalier, Espaillat’s primary opponent and presumptive successor in the House, doesn’t believe in immigration enforcement as a concept, and she’s said so pretty bluntly.
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Consider Chevalier’s responses in an interview she gave to the New York Editorial Board just last week. Now-nominee, then-candidate Chevalier proclaimed that “all deportation is wrong.” She went further, dismissing the basic idea of national borders as “a very modern construct” that is “deeply dehumanizing.”
Her interviewers, perhaps incredulous at the congressional candidate’s extremism, try to throw her a line. Really, no deportations under any circumstances?
Really, Chevalier affirms.
“I have yet to come up with a reason for why deportation has been used in a way that isn’t rooted in deeply racist ideology,” she says.
There’s no recognition that, judiciously applied, deportation is a necessary instrument in the government’s toolkit. Is ejecting Nazi war criminals or Russian spies from US soil an action “rooted in deeply racist ideology?”
(Chevalier, who believes Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine is a consequence of America “bullying Russia,” might actually say “yes”).
According to Darializa Avila Chevalier’s blinkered worldview, the government should have no control over who passes through its territory, nor any recourse to remove dangerous individuals.
There is no equivalent to this approach anywhere in the developed world. European nations allow for free passage within the Schengen Area, but they retain traditional passport controls to enter the open-border zone. The total neutering of immigration enforcement that Chevalier envisions completely undermines the social contract by which citizens in a democracy entrust their leaders with the responsibility to keep them safe.
It’s both a bad idea and bad politics. In the 2024 presidential campaign, voters in swing states overwhelmingly preferred Donald Trump to Kamala Harris on immigration and the border. Amid daily stories of ICE cruelty and with the faces of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good seared into social media feeds, most Americans now disapprove of Trump’s performance on immigration. Candidates like Chevalier risk undoing that reversal in public opinion. They take Republicans’ most outlandish caricatures of Democratic politics and make them uncomfortably real.
It’s tempting to pass off Chevalier’s talk of unregulated borders and zero deportations as fringe leftist theorycraft, but Chevalier is a future member of Congress backed by a former presidential candidate—Bernie Sanders—and by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a man frequently heralded as the future of the Democratic Party.
When it comes to immigration, Democrats must face two realities: First, that ascendant radicals are bad for the party, and second, that “abolish ICE” is a necessary but incomplete slogan. That missing “then what?” matters.
Democrats can walk and chew gum, leading the conversation about the day after ICE and what a humane, effective enforcement mechanism might look like while also calling for a more generous, streamlined immigration policy. They can and should debate how to ensure that ICE is not replaced by another iteration of the same rogue agency under a different name. They must continue to fight back against the Trump administration’s weaponization of the immigration system, including blatantly unconstitutional attempts to deport pro-Palestinian protesters over protected speech. And they can continue to support a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented, but the purpose should be bringing those people into compliance with our immigration statutes. In the end, answering the lawlessness of Donald Trump and ICE with a different flavor of lawlessness is no answer at all.
Be prepared to hear the name Chevalier a lot. She is god's gift to Fox News, and the media will elevate her voice because it is so extreme. Right-wing media will use Chevalier to convince voters that her stupid statements (and she's just getting started) reflect the average Democrat. Chevalier may become the biggest obstacle to voting MAGA out of office.
ICE is not a politicized militia. It's a federal agency, created in 2002, chartered to enforce immigration law, and - despite all the demonization - that's what it does.
Do I like present immigration policy? I most assuredly do not. It seems to me far too Draconian. The reaction to the open borders in the previous administration is over the top.
But the demonization of the agency is equally screwed up. What you should be doing is insisting on a middle ground policy relative to immigrants, which does not Target indiscriminately, but only the most recent and unrooted arrivals and those with criminal backgrounds. To demonize the entire enforcement agency is just silly.