1. United States
2. Calif.
3. Letter

Since ICE’s establishment in 2003, they’ve prioritized aggressive enforcement and violence rather than due process. Americans are being terrorized. But their patterns of lawless, violent, and arbitrary aggression this past year, culminating in the shameful and avoidable killing of Renee Nicole Good, have proven that ICE is out of control and beyond reform. We must fundamentally change the way we approach immigration: it’s time to abolish ICE. One of President Trump’s first Executive Orders, titled ‘‘Protecting the American People Against Invasion’’, unleashed ICE to carry out mass arrests and deportations of noncriminal immigrants in the United States, with approximately 70 percent of arrests made by immigration agents in 2025 being detainees who had no criminal record. In 2025, 32 inmates died while in ICE custody, the highest number in over 2 decades, linked to the poor conditions faced by inmates that included a lack of medical care and neglect. In 2025, as many as 170 American citizens had been arrested and detained by ICE, a number that has skyrocketed in the first weeks of 2026 due to their escalations in Minnesota. The design of ICE prioritizes aggressive enforcement rather than compliance with due process rights, and its mission of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could be better executed by other Federal agencies. It is clear that ICE is not an organization bound by the rule of law, is past the point of reform, and must be abolished.