Militarized Policing Hiding In Plain Sight?

When Abdul El-Sayed says “ICE is not about immigration,” he is not denying what the agency’s name or statutes say; he is mounting a structural abolitionist critique that ICE’s real function has drifted from immigration administration to domestic paramilitary policing—directly at odds with how the agency and its defenders describe it.

Key Points

El-Sayed has built a consistent, years-long argument that ICE is an unconstitutional, “paramilitary” tool that must be abolished and replaced, not merely reformed.
ICE’s own mission statements, structure, and removal statistics clearly anchor it in immigration and customs enforcement, undercutting any literal claim that it has “nothing” to do with immigration.
The real dispute is less about labels and more about mission: whether ICE’s post‑9/11 design and tactics make it inherently incompatible with constitutional, humane immigration enforcement.
El-Sayed’s rhetoric fits a broader abolitionist tradition: attacking an institution’s stated purpose by arguing that its actual practice serves a different, structurally harmful function.

What El-Sayed Actually Said—and What He Meant

Abdul El-Sayed has not been casual or off‑the‑cuff about ICE. Since at least 2018, he has argued that the agency is “irredeemable,” that retraining and oversight will not fix it, and that it “must be abolished.” In a recent extended interview, he distilled the core of his critique:

“ICE is not about immigration. ICE is not about the southern border. ICE is about normalizing paramilitary force on our streets… That can’t be retrained. It just has to be abolished.”

In campaign statements and town halls, he has repeated that framing almost verbatim, describing ICE as “a paramilitary force that exists specifically to weaponize hatred through the government” and insisting that “abolishing ICE does not mean abandoning immigration enforcement altogether.” He explicitly distinguishes ICE from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which he says is the agency that actually “stops illegal migrants” at the border.

The pattern is consistent: El-Sayed argues that immigration enforcement is necessary, border security is legitimate, and some federal entity will always be needed to administer immigration law—but that ICE, as currently designed, is not that entity. In his view, it is a domestic security force built under the pretext of immigration and deployed in ways that violate the Constitution and basic human rights.

That is why when he says ICE “has nothing to do with immigration,” he is using the language of structural indictment, not claiming that ICE officers never process a visa overstay or carry out a removal order. His own clarifications—“we need to abolish the ICE part and start fresh when it comes to immigration enforcement”—show that he expects immigration enforcement to continue, just not in ICE’s current institutional form.

What ICE Says It Is: Mission, Structure, and Activity

Set against El-Sayed’s rhetoric is ICE’s own account of itself, along with the way Congress and oversight bodies describe the agency. Official statements place immigration at the center of the mission. In a statement to Congress, ICE described itself as “the principal investigative arm” of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with a primary mission to “promote homeland security and public safety through the criminal and civil enforcement of federal laws governing border control, customs, trade, and immigration.”

Structurally, ICE is organized around two main operational components that both touch immigration:

• Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), responsible for locating, detaining, supervising, and removing noncitizens in civil immigration proceedings.

• Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which handles a broader portfolio of cross‑border crime—human smuggling, trafficking, customs violations, and related offenses—but often through immigration-related authorities.

Even critical summaries that raise concerns about ICE’s tactics still describe immigration enforcement—arrests, detention, and deportation of unauthorized immigrants—as the core of what ERO does. USAFacts, using DHS data, estimates that ICE returned around 2.32 million “book‑ins” to their country of citizenship between late 2014 and late 2024, a direct measure of sustained removal activity.

In other words, on the face of its public mandate and outputs, ICE is deeply entangled with immigration enforcement. If the question is whether ICE “has nothing to do with immigration,” the mission statements, organizational charts, and deportation statistics weigh heavily against that literal reading.

The Real Dispute: Mission Drift and “Paramilitary” Policing

Once you move beyond the literal wording, the interesting question is not whether ICE ever enforces immigration laws—it plainly does—but whether the way it was built and has been used makes it something more like a domestic paramilitary force than an administrative immigration agency.

ICE was created in 2003, in the massive reorganization that formed DHS after the September 11 attacks. In that reallocation, immigration functions that once sat inside the old Immigration and Naturalization Service were combined with customs and investigative authorities and placed under a new homeland security rubric. ICE inherited broad powers, including interior immigration enforcement away from the border, detention authority, and armed investigative operations.

Critics point to that post‑9/11 origin story as a design flaw rather than an accident. El-Sayed’s own description—“ICE was rushed into existence with expansive power and minimal oversight in the wake of 9/11”—captures a common line of attack: this is not an agency that drifted into militarized behavior; it was built that way.

Public reporting across the political spectrum has documented aggressive ICE tactics: workplace raids, arrests at courthouses and schools, and heavily armed operations in residential neighborhoods. In the Trump years in particular, ICE became synonymous in public debates with that administration’s deportation strategy, including high‑visibility raids and family separation, which cemented its image as an instrument of harsh immigration politics rather than neutral administration.

El-Sayed leans hard into that perception. He argues that Trump “recognized that ICE and the pretext of immigration was the best way for him to create a paramilitary force of thugs who he could put on your street corner to be accountable only to him.” He ties ICE expansions in places like Minneapolis and Michigan to political goals such as “nationalizing” elections in Detroit, casting interior deployments not as routine enforcement but as intimidation of specific communities.

From this vantage point, the issue is not whether ICE processes removals; it is whether the combination of broad authority, interior presence, and political direction has turned immigration enforcement into a vehicle for normalizing militarized state power in everyday civic life. ICE and DHS, by contrast, emphasize life‑saving missions, criminal investigations, and the need to remove dangerous individuals—framing the same operations as legitimate exercises of law‑enforcement authority.

Abolitionist Rhetoric: Why “Not About Immigration” Sounds So Absolute

To make sense of El-Sayed’s “not about immigration” line, it helps to place it in the broader intellectual tradition of abolitionist politics. Contemporary abolitionist movements—from prisons to policing—often start by contesting the public’s basic assumption about what an institution is “for.”

Police abolitionists, for example, argue that “police officers don’t do what you think they do,” that policing as practiced primarily produces racial harm rather than safety or crime prevention. Legal scholars describe one strand of abolition as a call to abolish a mission—say, “Black suppression”—even if some form of public safety provision remains. On this view, abolition is not only about physically disbanding an organization; it is about ending a particular function understood as structurally tied to that organization.

El-Sayed’s critique of ICE follows this pattern almost point for point. He argues that ICE “is not broken” but “working exactly as President Donald Trump wants it to,” that it “cannot be reformed or retrained,” and that its real function is “using the premise of immigration to weaponize an agency of the federal government against our Constitution.” Immigration paperwork and removals, in this telling, are surface features; the underlying mission is intimidation and political control.

Once framed that way, saying ICE “has nothing to do with immigration” becomes a kind of rhetorical short‑hand: it is an assertion that the agency’s structural role in American public life is not the neutral enforcement of immigration rules but the normalization of militarized state violence against targeted communities. You may or may not accept that claim, but it is clearly a claim about institutional function, not a factual denial that ICE works on immigration cases.

Evidence and Limits: What We Know and What We Don’t

Both sides of this argument draw, in this record, primarily on descriptive and rhetorical sources, not forensic audits. El-Sayed’s case rests on speeches, interviews, campaign videos, and media coverage that document his statements and link them to specific enforcement incidents and deaths, such as fatal ICE‑related shootings in Minneapolis. Those are powerful anecdotes but not comprehensive datasets.

ICE’s defenders, meanwhile, point to the agency’s mission statements, organizational descriptions, and headline removal statistics. Those documents clearly show that immigration enforcement is a core mission, but they do not, by themselves, quantify how much of ICE’s total activity is immigration versus other work, or assess the constitutional quality of that enforcement.

What is missing on both sides is precisely the kind of evidence that would settle the structural question: program‑level budget and staffing data, detailed breakdowns of arrests and operations by category, independent case‑file audits, and internal directives showing how agents are instructed to prioritize their work. Without that, the debate lives largely at the level of competing narratives: institutional self-description versus abolitionist reinterpretation.

That gap matters for evaluating El-Sayed’s strongest claims. There is clear evidence that ICE is designed and used as an immigration enforcement agency. There is also ample reporting that some of its tactics look and feel militarized, and that its visibility in the Trump era tied it tightly to partisan immigration politics. What the current record does not provide is a quantitative demonstration that ICE’s primary mission is political theater rather than law enforcement—or, conversely, a rigorous rebuttal showing that its most controversial operations are marginal exceptions rather than systemic practice.

Why the Framing Fight Matters for Voters

For voters evaluating a candidate like El-Sayed, the dispute is ultimately less about parsing one line in a video and more about competing visions of what immigration enforcement should look like in a constitutional democracy. He is offering an abolitionist program: shut down ICE, build a new, more constrained immigration body, and separate immigration administration from militarized interior policing. His opponents, including other Democrats in his race, accept that ICE is flawed but argue for “major reforms and tighter oversight” or “vast” restructuring rather than abolition.

ICE, for its part, insists that its mission encompasses not only removals but also combating human trafficking, child exploitation, and cross‑border crime—functions many voters view as core public safety responsibilities. Those stakes make the rhetorical choice to say ICE “has nothing to do with immigration” both politically explosive and strategically revealing. It signals to abolition‑minded voters that El-Sayed sees the institution itself, not just its leadership, as illegitimate; to skeptics, it reads as dismissive of real immigration law and the people charged with enforcing it.

Both interpretations miss something if taken alone. ICE is, on paper and in practice, an immigration agency. And it is also an agency whose post‑9/11 design, interior footprint, and partisan deployment have made it a focal point for debates about militarization, civil liberties, and the proper limits of state power. To understand what El-Sayed is saying—and to decide whether you agree—you have to hold both truths in view at once.

Where the Debate Goes From Here

The most productive next step in this argument would not be another round of quote‑sharing but more data. A detailed, independent breakdown of ICE’s operations by program, geography, and statute—matched against constitutional litigation, use‑of‑force records, and internal directives—would give substance to or undercut the abolitionist claim that the agency’s real function is “not about immigration.” Likewise, sworn testimony from ICE leadership about day‑to‑day priorities and constraints would clarify how much operational discretion is driven by politics versus law.

Until then, the debate will continue to be fought on the terrain of framing. El-Sayed’s statement that “ICE has nothing to do with immigration” is best read not as a factual description but as an abolitionist thesis about institutional purpose: that the costs of ICE’s existence, in constitutional and human terms, are inseparable from its design, and that the country should start over. ICE’s defenders reply that dismantling the agency risks gutting a key pillar of border and interior enforcement, replacing a flawed instrument with a dangerous vacuum.

Both positions carry risks; both are grounded, at least in part, in the same historical reality of what ICE has become since 2003. The choice for voters is which risk they are willing to run.