1. United States
2. Ariz.
3. Letter

ICE is a relatively new bureaucratic creation and it can be replaced, just as it was a congressional creation from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) that provided these programs with chaos from 1933-2003. ICE has continued to act violently and lawlessly against individuals in American cities, regardless of their legal status, in their desperation to meet Stephen Miller’s unreasonable deportation quotas. Courts have ruled that ICE has lied about individuals it has jailed more than 4,400 times and despite judicial admonitions, they persist in misrepresenting constitutionally protected behaviors as crimes, peaceful protests as assaults, and legal resident immigrants as criminal aliens. Moreover, by housing ICE and CBP inside the Department of Homeland Security, these organizations have been able to siphon resources away from investigation and prosecution of truly dangerous crimes like human trafficking, drug trafficking, sexual exploitation, and cybercrime to arrest hardworking immigrants who are keeping their appointments with immigration courts, paying their taxes, and contributing to our communities. These arrests make all of us less safe while giving traffickers, dealers, and cyber criminals unfettered opportunities to exploit Americans and international travelers alike. I urge you to • negotiate a settlement on the 10 needed reforms to ICE, including no private property searches without judicial warrants, no agents operating anonymously or without body cameras active, no raids on sensitive locations, no racial profiling or use of force beyond those accepted in U.S. police forces around the country, and revised detention standards • introduce legislation to dissolve ICE and reorganize immigration services under new agencies, renewing our country’s commitment to Immigration and Naturalization, with clearly defined duties that no longer pull border patrol thousands of miles from our borders and any customs agents no longer operating as masked paramilitary • introduce legislation to move immigration services out of the Department of Homeland Security; these are Labor, Treasury, and tangentially Justice issues but the sprawling nature of DHS has led to mission confusion We did immigration enforcement before ICE; we will do it (hopefully much better) after it is replaced.