The several thousand federal agents currently running rampant in the Twin Cities have so far achieved little in the way of legitimate law enforcement objectives, but they have been rather more successful at spreading mayhem and death. Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were both brutally and callously killed this month, Good shot by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Jonathan Ross and Pretti killed by so far unidentified U.S. Border Patrol agents.
Beyond Minnesota, in the five months prior to the killing of Good, federal officers fatally shot at least three other people. Six people have died so far this year while imprisoned by immigration authorities. The death of a Cuban national held at Camp East Montana in Texas was ruled a homicide by the local medical examiner.
These deaths represent by far the worst abuses of the federal immigration authorities and other agencies—like the Bureau of Prisons—“deputized” to carry out the Trump administration’s crackdown on, variously, immigration, political dissent, and urban liberalism in general. But even the many encounters, in Minneapolis and elsewhere, that don’t end in bodybags and vigils show the utter moral depravity of the federal agents involved. Scenes of detained preschoolers and teargassed retirees are causing outrage among all Americans of conscience. The unprofessionalism and cruelty of these goons inspires disgust and moral indignation even among local cops, traditionally a demographic with its own propensity for unprofessionalism and cruelty.
In this environment, it’s little surprise to see the resurgence of “Abolish ICE” as a slogan. In fact, the idea is polling better than ever. Some are even going so far as to call for the dissolution of the Department of Homeland Security, the Frankenstein agency, created in a panic after 9/11, that includes ICE and CBP under its unwieldy umbrella. But while civil libertarians—and, occasionally, regular libertarians—have called for the dismantling of DHS for several years, the prospect remains an unpopular one among actual elected officials, even on the Democratic side.
Instead, Democrats have largely settled on demanding—or, at least, strongly asking for the opportunity to cast symbolic votes on—more and better oversight and training. Prior to the killing of Pretti, Democrats in Congress had largely coalesced around plans to give DHS funding for “de-escalation training” among other proposals, like body cameras, that will be familiar to any veteran of debates about police reform.
The question is, are these Democrats being cowardly—or savvy? Because, after all, while it is certainly emotionally satisfying to just demand the abolition of ICE or CBP or DHS, it may not be politically expedient. And it is an actual fact that ICE and CBP have real problems with insufficient training for the sort of public policing they are now being sent out to do. (Garrett Graff reports that “federal agents and law enforcement joke that the quality of the average ICE officer is so low that they are hired ‘by the pound, from the pound.’”) It might be tempting to just disband ICE and CBP and throw its many employees out on the streets. But—due to their lack of training!—they could get into trouble if just sent out into the world without additional education.
This is why certain Democratic strategists have urged the party to pump the breaks on this “Abolish ICE” rhetoric. Like Blas Nuñez-Neto, a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute, a think tank launched last fall by well-connected moderates, who recently penned a memo arguing that “advocating for abolishing ICE is tantamount to advocating for stopping enforcement of all of our immigration laws in the interior of the United States—a policy position that is both wrong on the merits and at odds with the American public on the issue.”
Instead, according to The American Prospect, “Nuñez-Neto believes Democrats should say they want ICE to be ‘reformed, modernized, and professionalized,’ with better training and more oversight.” As he puts it, pithily: “Let’s not abolish ICE. Let’s abolish the cruelty.” (The Prospect also notes that Nuñez-Neto “for the last seven months has worked for WestExec Advisors, a secretive Washington, D.C., shadow lobbyist that counts as clients major government contractors in the defense and surveillance industry.”)
Here, one might assume I’d take the more radical tack and reject these calls for “training” to fix these fundamentally rotten agencies. But I like to think I’m more reasonable than that. If, in fact, calls to “abolish ICE” turn out to alienate moderate voters Democrats need to retake Congress and eventually the White House, I am certainly amenable to suggestions of different strategies. And “abolishing the cruelty” with more and better training just might be the ticket.
In fact, there is a training regime I could definitely get behind. But it would have to be a bit more extensive than what Democrats have pushed so far. Because when I say “more” training, I mean a lot more. “Abolishing the cruelty” of an agency that operates with this level of callous disregard for life, that kidnaps children as a matter of routine policy and whose agents seem to take pleasure in killing with assumed impunity? That’s going to take one hell of a retraining regime.
But it just might be possible.
I propose a sort of long-term residential program for everyone who remains with ICE and CBP after this week, along with more or less everyone hired since the start of the second Trump administration. This would have to be a mandatory program, reflecting the seriousness with which we ought to take proper law enforcement training in this country.
Obviously, ICE agents will not be able to continue working while they are undergoing this rigorous new training program. And in order for retraining to be effective, it will take a long time—perhaps even years. Because we can’t accept one-size-fits-all solutions, we should expect this mandatory residential retraining program to be somewhat open-ended. I would recommend we place these agents on an indefinite leave of absence from their jobs while they are retraining, and have their essential duties taken over by other agencies, preferably outside the Department of Homeland Security (which will have a lot of its agents undergoing this long-term residential training).
This will not be a cheap program, admittedly. Fortunately the immigration enforcement agencies are currently funded at extremely high levels, and Democrats have already shown a reluctance to clawing back that money, out of fear of being labeled soft on crime. But what could be more pro-law enforcement than additional training? And as the Trump administration has decisively shown, using appropriated money for its official purpose is more of a “suggestion” than a requirement of our constitutional system, so a future administration can repurpose that funding for this new mandatory long-term residential training program.
It also might be good for morale—and healing the country?—if certain high-ranking Trump administration officials also joined the program. After all, if any of them ever wish to serve in the government again, we will all have to make sure they are very well-trained, so that they know better than to do all this kind of stuff again.
Of course, we needn’t invent this program from scratch. In policy areas ranging from transportation to healthcare, the United States far too often ignores best practices from other nations. Here, we have no shortage of examples to borrow from abroad, but we might look specifically at the example of our allies—and participants in Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace”—in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, which had a similar retraining program after 1975 for (in the words of their government) around 40,000 “army officers, and civilian officials of an equivalent rank, and persons with comparatively high responsibility in reactionary parties and organization”
This was, the government attempted to explain, a more humane policy than many other possibilities. “The Vietnamese Government wishes to patiently reeducate those who had committed serious crimes against the people and the countries. It is confident that national feelings and the national cause will succeed in awakening them and helping them soon realize the fact that their own happiness should go hand in hand with national independence. It is hoped that they will endeavor to reeducate themselves so as to be able to go back as normal citizens to the midst of the national community.” And that seems like precisely what we should expect of a future ICE “training program.”
Admittedly, some of the retraining in Vietnam lasted considerably longer than originally intended. But by 1989, a mere 128 people were still undergoing their mandatory training, and officials believed they were all prepared to “graduate,” as it were. None, admittedly, would reassume their former positions of authority or influence. We must, unfortunately, assume that some current ICE and CBP agents will be similarly resistant to training and unable to return to their current employment. However, many of those troublesome cases in Vietnam were eventually settled overseas, and I’m sure a similar arrangement could be worked out with these recalcitrant agents. It can be hard to resettle in a new country after political changes back home, but I’m sure they can expect the same treatment abroad that the United States has traditionally shown to its own populations of refugees and asylum-seekers.
As tempting as it is to reach for easy slogans and extreme solutions in a time like this, we must be mindful of political realities. “Abolish ICE” is simply too radical a proposal. My “mandatory long-term residential retraining program,” on the other hand, is the sensible, moderate-friendly solution to the crisis with ICE and CBP. And if that description of the program is too much of a mouthful, we might call it something like a “camp” for ICE and CBP agents. After all, who doesn’t fondly remember camp?
