Abolish ICE: It Is a Threat to Americans’ Safety and Freedom
The agent who killed Renee Good should face the same accountability as the migrant who killed Laken Riley
Many government agencies have good intentions but can produce bad outcomes. However, there is one that has bad intentions and produces evil outcomes: Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE. In this Trump administration, as in the previous one, its purpose is to hunt down and eject people whose “crime” is that they can’t obtain a piece of paper from the government authorizing them to live and work in America.
In a free country, it is hard to justify an agency dedicated to stalking and rounding up people. America got along just fine for 227 years till ICE, the monster child of the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism, was spawned 23 years ago. It should never have been created in the first place, but now that Trump has turned it into a rights-trampling, rogue agency that shoots first and asks questions later, as the killing of Renee Good, an American citizen and a mother of three, demonstrates, it deserves to be shut down.
At this stage, the facts of the shooting are well established. Good had just dropped off her toddler at kindergarten, her dog in the rear seat, when she encountered a bevy of masked ICE agents in unmarked SUVs on the street of an otherwise quiet, suburban neighborhood, evidently, in the middle of an “operation.” She was an observer, someone who bears witness to ICE’s actions without impeding them, but masked ICE agents ordered her to get out of her car. Good, however, smiled and said, “It’s fine dude, I’m not mad at you,” to one of them and tried to drive away. But the agent, now identified as Jonathan Ross, shot her three times in the face screaming “fucking bitch.”
Pathological to the Core
Any normal administration would have instantly expressed regret at the incident, offered condolences to the surviving family, distanced itself from the agent, and promised a full investigation. Not this one.
Trump and his vice president immediately circled the wagons around the trigger-happy Ross. The president, as is his wont, took to blatant lying. He accused Good of violently running over Ross who, he maintained, acted in “self defense.” Trump also claimed the officer was recovering in a hospital, and it was “hard to believe” he even survived. “She behaved horribly. And then she ran him over. She didn’t try to run him over. She ran him over,” he blared. Video footage shows Ross sauntering off to his car after killing Good, without any sign of serious injuries.
Picking up on his boss’ cues, Vance blamed Good for her own death. He could believe this was a “tragedy,” he said, but “it was one of her own making” because she was a leftie who was hostile to law enforcement. As The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie notes, “even if she were an Antifa super soldier,” it wouldn’t justify her execution by a government agent.
Meanwhile, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has already accused Good of “domestic terrorism.” Noem has handed over the investigation to the FBI, led by conspiracy theorist and Trump loyalist, Kash Patel, and, shockingly, barred Minnesota authorities from conducting their own probe. She is even refusing to let FBI share information with state law enforcement agencies.
Given that Noem and the other Trump honchos have already pre-judged the case, the outcome of the FBI investigation is a foregone conclusion—never mind that DHS’ own manual states that excessive or deadly force may not be used on someone fleeing. Even if in some alternative universe, federal prosecutors were willing to charge Ross and secure a conviction, Trump’s record—including his mass pardons of Jan. 6 rioters, even those who committed violence—strongly suggests the president would happily oblige Ross with a pardon. Meanwhile, Ross is likely protected from civil liability, thanks to qualified immunity, a doctrine that makes it extraordinarily difficult for victims of police shootings—including Renee Good’s family—to recover damages unless courts find that clearly established constitutional law was violated. This is a very high bar that Good’s family is unlikely to meet without a criminal conviction that Ross acted unlawfully.
Contrast the treatment of Good’s case with that of Laken Riley, the 22-year-old nursing student brutally killed by undocumented immigrant José Antonio Ibarra. He faced the full force of the law and was convicted and sentenced for life without parole. Even that wasn’t enough for Trump. He used that awful episode to demonize all undocumented immigrants at every opportunity during the campaign. Upon assuming office, one of the first things he did was pass the Laken Riley Act that requires ICE to detain and deport anyone without proper documentation if they were so much as charged—not convicted, mind you—with the most minor crimes like shoplifting.
But there is no moral difference between Ross and Ibarra. They both senselessly killed innocent Americans and they should both get the same legal treatment. But that is not enough. MAGA Republicans pushed the Laken Riley Act at Trump’s bidding that is causing untold harm in immigrant communities. Democrats should push the Good Act to abolish ICE, named after Renee Good, to defend these communities and their advocates.
Two Democrats, Reps. Eric Swalwell of California and Dan Goldman of New York, are taking a baby step in the direction of accountability for Ross and other rogue ICE agents by proposing a bill called the ICE OUT Act that would effectively end qualified immunity for ICE and make it easier for victims to successfully file civil lawsuits. Democrats are also considering impeaching Secretary Noem and withholding DHS funding, due to expire at the end of the month, until the department puts meaningful restraints on ICE’s conduct.
This is all worth doing but not enough. Even before Trump, this agency was riddled with excesses and abuses. But now that Trump has shown how ICE can be transformed into a paramilitary outfit that can pick up, beat, and kill anyone—immigrant and citizen alike—it needs to be abolished, not reformed.
Incidentally, Good’s death is not the only incidence of ICE’s excesses. According to some counts, federal immigration agents have been involved in at least 16 shooting incidents since Trump’s second term began, resulting in four deaths and at least seven injuries. It has killed other people, too, and more reports are surfacing from Minneapolis of ICE’s violent tactics against protesters and observers. They all tell the same story: ICE agents smashing car windows, hauling them out, throwing them on the pavement, and beating them while laughing in enjoyment.
So far the one line that ICE had observed was not invading private property. ICE’s enforcement action was limited to picking people up from public spaces. Now, apparently, that line has been crossed, too. There is now at least one video of ICE barging into a Minneapolis home without a warrant. (Minnesota, along with Illinois, has sued the Trump administration for its unlawful tactics, including arrests without warrants).
A Disaster, Three Decades in the Making
How have we come to this point?
ICE was formed after 9/11 when panicked lawmakers consolidated 22 federal agencies under the Department of Homeland Security. The Immigration and Naturalization Service and U.S. Customs Service became US Citizenship and Immigration Service, Customs and Border Patrol, and ICE— Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Ensconcing immigration in a national security-focused department shifted the mentality to regard immigrants as potential threats rather than contributors.
The criminalization of immigrants predates 9/11. President Clinton’s 1996 laws—the Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act—vastly expanded what counts as an “aggravated felony” for deportation, applying them retroactively and including minor offenses like drug possession and DUIs. When ICE was created, it already had sweeping powers for mass deportations.
Under Obama, ICE gained the capacity to execute these powers. Immigration hawks grew enforcement budgets by 300% to $18 billion annually. ICE became the largest law enforcement agency, spending more than all other criminal enforcement agencies combined. Congress created a sprawling complex of 200-plus corporate-run detention warehouses with a mandated daily quota of 34,000 detainees, guaranteeing these companies minimum “lockup quota” payments and creating perverse incentives to detain immigrants in abusive conditions. The annual detained population soared to 363,000 in 2010, a 500% increase since 1996.
Obama’s hope was that this would placate the border hawks in the Republican-controlled Congress and open the door to immigration reform that included a path to legalization for the undocumented.
That plan backfired spectacularly because the hawks just kept moving the goal posts for more aggressive enforcement without yielding an inch on regularizing the status of the undocumented or fixing the broken immigration system by creating more workable legal options for immigrants seeking to work or live here.
To the contrary, as Cato’s David J. Bier explained in our Zooming In conversation last week, Trump has mounted an all-out assault on every aspect of the immigration system. Under the guidance of his ghoulish aide and immigration hardliner Stephen Miller, the administration has shut down not just most avenues for legal immigration but is also making it difficult for foreigners to come on tourist visas.
Trump’s immigration enforcement regime was plenty brutal the first time around. Who can forget his heart-wrenching family separation policies that pulled away suckling infants from the breast of migrant moms seeking asylum at the border and putting them in separate detention camps?
But ICE’s cruelty and lawlessness has now traveled from the border to the interior because congressional Republicans, thanks to Trump’s browbeating, tripled ICE’s already inflated budget (it is now at par with Canada’s total defense spending) and also stipulated that this enhanced funding be spent on more mass deportations and removals.
There is a frenzy right now to repurpose government facilities as detention centers and contract with for-profit prison companies to build new ones. Miller has announced a numeric target of 3,000 daily detentions. That can’t be met simply by prioritizing criminal cases. It requires extraordinary steps—such as sweeping neighborhoods, conducting raids in major cities, and targeting broad populations of undocumented people. It also requires excessive force towards immigrant advocates.
This means that ICE needs not just more boots on the ground in a hurry—but ones willing to ruthlessly crush. ICE is not exactly the milk of human kindness but since it works in the interior, it has to show some restraint given that it has to interact with the general public.
But one agency that lacks any compunction is the Customs and Border Patrol, which oversees border enforcement. Because it deals primarily with desperate border-crossers and asylum-seekers, who don’t enjoy the full rights of citizenship, cruelty, racism, and impunity for human rights violations are endemic in the agency, the ACLU notes. That’s why when the Trump administration last year replaced nearly half of ICE’s top leaders across the country with current or retired Border Patrol officers, it was a harbinger of terrible things to come.
The new leadership has lived up to its reputation given its Gestapo tactics in Minneapolis and elsewhere. It has recruited CBP personnel into ICE and deployed them without proper interior enforcement training. As Radley Balko, criminal justice writer and author of The Watch, noted to me, “Department of Justice folks regard the FBI as the varsity team, ICE and HIS [Homeland Security Investigation, the investigative arm of ICE] as junior varsity. Border Patrol, however, is a bunch of drunk guys on the company softball team who are out of control and lacking in professionalism.”
It might not be a coincidence that Ross has a Border Patrol background.
In short, over decades of hardline immigration policy—from the Clinton-era IIRIRA law that expanded the ground for deportation and detention to the Trump-era Laken Riley Act that mandates detention for people even accused of minor offenses—combined with Congress’ massive appropriation of enforcement funding and the infiltration of CBP in interior operations, ICE now has the legal authorities, the resources, and the aggressive methods to mass detain and deport immigrants.
Even as ICE now has everything it needs to harass immigrants and the Americans who defend them, there are few meaningful legal restraints on its behavior. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Noem v. Vasquez effectively gave the agency a green light to engage in racial profiling for immigration enforcement—basically an open invitation to harass and terrorize brown skinned folks without fearing legal repercussions—while its expansive view of presidential pardon power gives Trump the ability to hand out get-out-of-jail-free cards to abusive agents.
Not Fit for Reform
So what should be done?
The laws criminalizing immigration—including the Laken Riley Act—need to be jettisoned. We need to return to focusing on removing dangerous criminal aliens without unleashing a reign of terror on other law-abiding immigrants and protecting the rights of Americans to protest and dissent without fear of being executed at point-blank range.
But ICE’s already toxic culture—emanating from a mission inherently hostile to all immigrants—has been toxified even further given that Border Patrol leaders and personnel have burrowed into the agency. Trump has shown how susceptible an agency not fighting targeted crime but treating swaths of the population as suspicious is to authoritarian cooptation.
ICE can’t be reformed. It needs to be dismantled and some of its legitimate functions—for example, keeping track of asylum seekers who are paroled instead of detained and facilitating the removal of those ordered deported (after they have received a proper hearing)—reshuffled to other agencies.
As for nabbing criminal aliens, that should be the job of regular law enforcement, as George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin, a contributor to this site, notes. ICE’s obscene funding levels should be scaled back and the rest handed to state and local enforcement authorities who do actual crime fighting. Local cops are not immune to being abusive and using excessive force by any means. And they, too, enjoy qualified immunity. But they naturally focus on catching the bad guys, natives, or criminals, not conducting sweeps and mass raids, which have no place in a free society.
As Somin points out:
Focusing on undocumented immigrants is a poor use of law enforcement resources because they actually have much lower crime rates than natives. Transferring ICE funds to state and local police would allow a greater focus on violent and property crime, regardless of the perpetrators’ background.
The Trump administration has already made Americans less safe by diverting, according to Bier, 87% of HIS, 69% of ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms), 47% of DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency), 21% of FBI and 17% of U.S. Marshall personnel from crime fighting towards mass deportations.
In other words, the administration is spending more on less crime-prone populations and less on more crime-prone ones. That’s bad enough, but when an agency uses the massive infusion of American taxpayers’ dollars to kill Americans in the name of saving Americans, it has lost all legitimacy.
Abolishing ICE is becoming more popular, with 43% of Americans supporting the idea, an eight-year high, according to one tracking poll. The agency’s approval rating now is at -13, compared to +16 about a year ago.
The country badly needs a Good Act abolishing ICE.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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#abolishice !
The deception that is being spewed in this column about Good's death is abysmal.
How many "observers" park their cars perpendicularly to traffic in the middle of the road? Not to mention that she very clearly was disobeying authorities by attempting to "drive away" (oddly in the direction of the officer in front of her).
Tip for anyone and everyone: when am officer of the law is giving you commands, particularly when you are violating the law, it's generally a good idea to listen to authorities and not escalate matters.
Good escalated things and lost her life for it.