Abolishing ICE
Democrat U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed wants to “abolish ICE” and claims it is “clearly not working” because “we have far, far more undocumented people” now than before ICE was formed in the 2000s.
IN FACT, the illegal immigrant population is rapidly falling under President Trump, and prior increases in their numbers were caused by policies that El-Sayed and his fellow Democrats support. Here are the specifics:
- ICE was formed in 2003 in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in which 19 Muslim foreigners who were living in the U.S. slaughtered 2,977 people.
- ICE is a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which is under the authority of the President.
- The primary function of ICE — which is “enforcing immigration laws in the U.S. interior” — was carried out by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) before the formation of ICE.
- 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, and productive members of society who don’t harbor totalitarian views.
- Subverting those safeguards, El-Sayed is a proponent of sanctuary policies that shield illegal immigrants from deportation by refusing to turn them over to ICE after they are arrested or imprisoned for committing crimes — even though non-citizens have murdered an average of at least 600 people per year for decades, and most murderers have prior criminal records.
- El-Sayed is a proponent of giving illegal immigrants a “pathway to citizenship,” a policy tried in 1986 as a compromise between political parties that was supposed to be a “one-time resolution of a longstanding problem” but led to even more illegal immigration.
- Amnesties — which Democrats call “comprehensive immigration reform” — commonly fuel swarms of illegal migration because they send a message to would-be illegal immigrants that they will eventually be legalized if they get into the United States.
- In the wake of the 1986 amnesty, the Clinton administration misused the law to award citizenship to immigrants by processing applications that were “rife with fraud,” failing to conduct “complete criminal history background” checks, flouting the “English-language requirement” of the statute, and giving “superficially trained, inexperienced” INS employees only 5 minutes to vet the applicants during their citizenship interviews.
- Far from being the “Deporter-in-Chief,” President Obama enacted several policies to limit deportations, including an attempt to unilaterally make 4-to-5 million illegal immigrants immune from deportation, give them work authorizations, force states to issue them drivers licenses, and make them eligible for Social Security and Medicare if they had a child who was a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident. This action was struck down (2–1) by a federal appeals court.
- President Biden enacted numerous open border policies that fueled the worst border crisis ever recorded in U.S. history.
- The core duty of ICE — which is removing criminals from the U.S. interior — fell by 53% during Biden’s presidency.
- Biden and Obama made millions of temporary visitors who overstayed their visas effectively immune from deportation unless they committed crimes.
- Biden and Obama also abused “Temporary Protected Status” to allow inadmissible immigrants to stay in the U.S. indefinitely.
- Democrat politicians also consistently opposed and often hindered Republican efforts to deploy border barriers, the most economical and effective means of stopping illegal border crossings.
- Democrats granted a wide range of taxpayer-funded benefits to illegal immigrants, fought Republican attempts to curb these handouts, and undercut the federal law that prohibits foreigners from entering the U.S. if they are “likely at any time to become a public charge,” or burden to taxpayers.
- El-Sayed’s campaign website alleges, “I believe in a safe, secure border,” but it mentions no policies to achieve that end, much like the Biden administration officials who insisted that the “border is secure” while measures of border insecurity like gotaways, encounters, and border crossing deaths climbed by 3–6 times.
- El-Sayed’s campaign website alleges, “I believe” in “immigration enforcement,” but the only policies it mentions are “abolishing ICE” and creating a “clear pathway to citizenship for those who are stuck in limbo in our current system.”
- “The number of deportations within the United States,” as documented by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA, “increased by a factor of five over the course of the first year of the second Trump administration,” and “voluntary departures and returns” rose “by 28 times.”
- Trump also sealed the border, and the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. declined by nearly 1.6 million in 2025, while they increased by about 5.6 million under Biden.
- While ignoring all of the salient facts above, El-Sayed blames illegal immigration on ICE instead of Democrats.
