Purpose of ICE
New York City Democrat Mayor Zohran Mamdani claims that ICE “should be abolished” and does “nothing to serve the interests of public safety.”
IN FACT, ICE protects the lives and livelihoods of Americans by removing aliens who have murdered thousands of people, committed millions of crimes, and financially burden the nation. Here are the specifics:
- Immigration laws contain numerical limits and quality standards to ensure that immigrants assimilate and benefit the people of the U.S. by being law-abiding, self-sufficient, productive members of society who don’t have totalitarian views.
- Politicians, especially Democrats like Biden and Obama, have consistently neglected or broken those safeguards by letting millions of illegal aliens into the U.S. with little or no vetting and giving them incentives to come and stay.
- They have done that by allowing millions of gotaways to penetrate the U.S. border, a figure that grew by 6.1 times under Biden.
- They have done that by letting millions of temporary visitors overstay their visas while making them effectively immune from deportation unless they commit crimes, as Obama and Biden did.
- They have done that by paroling millions of inadmissible immigrants into the U.S. by twisting a provision of federal law that allows for such entries “only” on a “temporary” “case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,” as Biden did en masse.
- They have done that by abusing “Temporary Protected Status” to allow immigrants to stay in the U.S. indefinitely.
- They have done that by trying to place four-to-five million illegal immigrants above the law by shielding them from deportation, giving them work authorizations, forcing states to issue them drivers licenses, and making them eligible for an array of government programs like Social Security and Medicare, as Obama attempted to do.
- They have done that by giving a wide array of other taxpayer-funded benefits to illegal immigrants and fighting Republican attempts to curb these handouts.
- They have done that by flouting the federal law that prohibits foreigners from immigrating to the U.S. if they are “likely at any time to become a public charge,” or burden to taxpayers.
- They have done that by impeding ICE from fulfilling its core duty of removing criminals from the U.S. interior, a figure that fell by 53% under Biden.
- They have done that by creating sanctuary cities, counties, and states that shield arrested illegal immigrants from deportation by refusing to turn them over to federal immigration authorities for deportation, enabling them to commit murders and other crimes in the United States.
- Thus, aliens have committed an average of at least 600 homicides per year in the U.S. for decades, far above the number of their murder victims who make national news like Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, and Rachel Morin.
- Beyond murder, DHS estimated in 2012 that about “900,000 arrests of aliens for crimes occur every year,” and “1.94 million removable criminal aliens are in the United States today.”
- Likewise, DHS reported in 2024 that “662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories” known to ICE were in the United States, including 13,376 aliens convicted of homicide and another 1,896 currently charged with homicide.
