I want to write about something outside my usual lane. I spend most of my time on this blog writing about code, but I live in this country too, and I have opinions about how it treats people. This is one of them. The country should abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE. Not reform it, not defund it a little, abolish it. To explain why, I want to walk through where the agency actually came from, because I think most people, myself included until I looked into it, assume ICE is older and more essential than it is.

ICE did not always exist

ICE is not a long-standing pillar of American government. Congress created it on March 1, 2003, as part of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, the same law that created the Department of Homeland Security itself. Before that, immigration enforcement in the United States lived inside the Immigration and Naturalization Service, a single agency under the Department of Justice that had existed since 1933 and handled everything from visas to border patrol to deportations.

After the September 11 attacks, Congress dismantled the INS and split its functions across three new agencies under the newly formed DHS. Citizenship and Immigration Services took over visas and naturalization, the kind of paperwork-heavy, service-oriented work that rarely makes headlines. Customs and Border Protection took over the physical border. And ICE took on interior enforcement, meaning everything that happens after someone is already inside the country: workplace raids, detention, and deportation.

This split was not an accident. Congress made a deliberate choice to fold immigration into the architecture of counterterrorism, combining the investigative arm of the old Customs Service with the interior enforcement arm of the INS into ICE, explicitly under the banner of homeland security rather than the more limited, less securitized framing immigration law had used before. The agency’s founding document treats undocumented immigration primarily as a security risk, not primarily as a civil administrative question, and that framing has shaped everything ICE has done since.

What ICE actually is

ICE has two main branches, and this distinction matters more than most coverage acknowledges. Homeland Security Investigations, HSI, handles cross-border criminal investigations: drug trafficking, human trafficking, child exploitation, and financial crime. This is closer to traditional law enforcement work, and it is not the part of ICE that draws the most controversy.

Enforcement and Removal Operations, ERO, is the other branch, and it is the one people mean when they talk about ICE raids, ICE detention, and ICE deportations. ERO agents locate, arrest, detain, and deport people who are in the country without authorization, a category that in practice sweeps up longtime residents, asylum seekers, and people with pending immigration cases, not just people who recently crossed a border.

Civil immigration violations, the kind ERO enforces, are not crimes. Being in the country without authorization is, in almost all cases, a civil matter, handled in immigration court rather than criminal court. Congress gave ICE police-like powers, including the power to detain people indefinitely in ICE-run or ICE-contracted facilities, to enforce a body of law that is not criminal law. That gap between the civil nature of the violation and the coercive, carceral nature of the enforcement is at the center of most of the arguments against the agency’s existence.

The record since 2003

ICE’s growth has been steady and one-directional, regardless of which party controlled the White House. Detention capacity has expanded under both Republican and Democratic administrations. The agency built out a network of 287(g) agreements, which deputize local police and sheriffs to act as immigration enforcers, extending ICE’s reach into everyday policing far beyond what the agency’s own staffing would allow on its own.

The clearest example of what ICE’s structure enables came in 2018, when the Trump administration’s family separation policy used the existing detention and enforcement apparatus to separate thousands of children from their parents at the border, a policy DHS and ICE leadership implemented and defended before public outcry forced its reversal. That policy was possible because the infrastructure for large-scale, discretionary detention already existed. Nobody needed to build it for the occasion. It only needed someone willing to use it that way.

Detention conditions have been a recurring problem independent of who is in the White House. Government watchdog reports, including from DHS’s own Office of Inspector General, have repeatedly documented overcrowding, inadequate medical care, and deaths in ICE custody at facilities across the country. These are not isolated incidents at a handful of bad facilities. They are a pattern that has persisted across administrations, because the underlying incentive structure, a detention system run partly through private contractors paid per person detained, rewards more detention rather than less.

ICE also operates with less independent oversight than most federal law enforcement agencies. It does not answer to an outside civilian review board. Its internal accountability mechanisms sit inside DHS, the same department that runs the agency. When investigators document misconduct, the consequences land inconsistently and rarely reach the people who set enforcement priorities.

Where the numbers stand now

The scale of this has grown well past what the agency’s founders described in 2003. As of early 2026, ICE holds roughly 68,000 people in detention on an average day, funded by a budget of about 28 billion dollars for the year. ICE has carried out more than 390,000 deportations since January 2025, and 32 people died in ICE custody during 2025 alone, the highest yearly death toll the agency has recorded since it opened in 2003. Groups like the American Friends Service Committee track these numbers because DHS does not make them easy to find on its own.

Public opinion has shifted alongside the numbers. A January 2026 poll found 46 percent of Americans now support abolishing ICE outright, against 41 percent opposed, and roughly three-quarters say they want an immigration system that treats people with dignity, whatever they call the agency that runs it. Congress has taken notice. Representative Shri Thanedar introduced the Abolish ICE Act, H.R. 7123, on January 15, 2026, a bill that would eliminate ICE outright and bar federal funds from going to its functions. It is a long way from becoming law, but it is the clearest sign yet that abolition has moved from a slogan to an actual piece of legislation with a bill number.

None of this happens without people doing unglamorous work: visiting people in detention, tracking deaths in custody, showing up to immigration court. Organizations like Freedom for Immigrants run the visitation networks and organizing resources that keep some public accountability pointed at a system built to avoid it. If any part of this piece makes you want to do something rather than just read about it, that is where I would start.

The case for abolition, not reform

The reform argument says better training, more oversight, or new leadership could fix ICE. I do not think that argument holds up, because the problems are not really about who runs ICE. They are about what Congress built the agency to do. ICE exists to enforce a civil violation through detention and deportation, at scale, with minimal external accountability, and with a founding mandate that frames immigrants as a security threat rather than as people navigating a broken and often arbitrary legal process. Change the leadership and you still have an agency structured to detain people who have not committed a crime, using facilities that a contractor gets paid to fill.

Abolishing ICE does not mean abolishing immigration law or border security. CBP would still exist to secure the border itself, and the visa and naturalization functions that used to sit under the INS would remain, currently handled by USCIS. What disappears is the specific post-9/11 invention: an agency built to treat interior immigration enforcement as a homeland security problem, with detention as its primary tool. Courts and case management could handle civil immigration violations the way they handle most other civil violations, rather than a paramilitary enforcement apparatus with its own detention system.

Before 2003, an agency embedded in the Department of Justice handled this work differently, rather than a security department created in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. That is not a case for restoring the INS exactly as it was. It is a reminder that the current structure is a specific historical choice made under specific political pressure, not the only way this could ever have worked, and not a permanent feature of how the country has to function.

Where that leaves things

ICE is younger than the smartphone. A moment of post-9/11 panic built it, folding a civil administrative function into a security agency, and it has spent twenty years expanding detention capacity and enforcement reach with little independent oversight. The family separation policy of 2018 was not an aberration produced by one administration. It was what the infrastructure was capable of when someone decided to use it that way. I do not think reform can turn an agency with that history and structure into something else. I think the country needs to take it apart, reassign the pieces that do real, accountable work, like the criminal investigations HSI handles, and simply not rebuild the rest. Tell me where you land on this on Bluesky.