I get why people are hesitant to abolish large parts of the government. I also get why, despite this, more and more people want to abolish the Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement (ICE) agency.

While ICE’s recent psychopathic-clown-show tactics have put it under a particularly bright spotlight, ultimately I think people want to “abolish” it for the same reasons some people wanted to “abolish” various local police organizations in 2020. At some point, it starts to feel like the safeguards on positions of state power are entirely voluntary, and that the people with that state-granted power are the ones who get to decide whether to obey them or not. Those aren’t really safeguards! For all the talk of rounding up people who “broke the law”, regular-ass Dads like me have been watching videos of morons in tactical gear blatantly violating a wide variety of rules, laws, and even Constitutional rights with absolutely no consequences whatsoever, let alone appropriate ones.

For instance, I’m sure I have seen over a hundred videos in the last six months of ICE and CBP employees doing something that made me think “that guy should go to prison for that”, or maybe even “I think you’re supposed to go to prison for that”, and none of those guys are going to go to prison for those things, or even lose their jobs. Personally, I don’t think it’s weird for someone, at a certain point, to just say “the hell with all of this” and demand a fundamental rewrite of this part of the social contract.

Immunity as a Given

Many policy debates are essentially an exercise in trying to make people accept certain “givens”. One given that’s been pushed forever is the idea that law enforcement, for the most part, needs to be in charge of regulating itself. If someone from the government with a gun does something that looks or feels illegal, it should basically be up to a bunch of people who have the same job to decide whether there should be any repercussions, and usually the answer is “no”.

Now, you can make an argument for this. You can say a world where law enforcement is held accountable by some other function, and not allowed to be given vast immunity to a host of otherwise criminal actions, would be a world where laws could not be enforced, and everything would go to shit. You can say that if police, or ICE agents, or whomever is zip-tying you today could not operate with absolute confidence that if they get scared, it’s okay for them to shoot whatever they are scared of, that there would functionally be no policing at all. You can argue that! However, I do not find it especially compelling.

What I think is much, much more likely is that most people have done some math in their head that goes something like this. If a policy makes the police 5% more effective at protecting you from things you don’t like, but 5000% more likely to hurt, rob, or kill innocent people while they do so, that seems like a bad trade. BUT, if you think the 5000% increase in abuse will happen exclusively to people who you are not concerned about, that trade seems fine. I mean, it shouldn’t really seem fine, morally, but I would guess that it probably does, in fact, seem pretty fine to a lot of people. But this is just run of the mill “leopards eating faces” stuff. The point isn’t “no real-world accountability breeds bad outcomes for state power”, even though that’s also true. The point is “if you’ve removed all real-world accountability you can’t fix bad outcomes by adjusting the particulars of accountability”.

In this case, that’s the whole “do we fix ICE or get rid of it?” argument, which is a good argument to have. From my perspective, though, it’s also not a very complicated one. ICE — and unfortunately, most 21st century law enforcement — have insisted on building policy around the idea that law enforcement cannot be held accountable the way regular people are, and in fact need to be fundamentally immune to almost all of the consequences a normal person would face for doing various violent or grossly illegal things to another normal person. That’s non-negotiable, apparently. And now, with that principle in place, let’s make some rules!

See why this is a waste of time? There are already lots of rules! They’re simply being ignored because they can be ignored, and the only answer we can come up with are more rules that will also be ignored, because underneath it all too many of us still think law enforcement should get to decide if it did something bad or not.

In my heart of hearts, I think this is what animates people who want to abolish various law enforcement functions. I don’t actually think — in most cases — it’s some hippy-dippy belief that crime doesn’t exist (although it really would help if the police solved more crimes) or that there is no need for law enforcement of any sort. Instead, it’s a rejection of the idea that these organizations should exist as so many of them do — self-regulated, armed, well-funded, unionized, highly political groups that receive massive judicial and legislative deference in almost every scenario.

I think a world where turning off your legally-required body camera, for instance, and then arresting someone, was potentially a form of criminal negligence is absolutely unthinkable to a lot of people. But I think that position understates the seriousness of the task given to armed agents of the state. I didn’t invent it, but I think the idea of “higher standards + real accountability + much higher salaries” isn’t crazy even though it’s not a panacea and the devil’s in the details. Law enforcement is hard, but so is nuclear physics — and we don’t let nuclear power plants self-regulate or operate with the knowledge that everyone working there will be immune from almost any criminal charge if they decide to kill a bunch of people.

And those are real cops! ICE makes the disconnect here even more obvious. What utility are we even getting out of these goons? I’m not going to stand around and listen to a theoretical argument about utility ICE might have if the people who work for it did their job in a completely different manner than the way — given carte blanche to do whatever they want and total deference from local authorities — they choose to actually do it. I’m going to take it as it is. They don’t follow rules. They lie constantly. They willfully commit sociopathic violence with no consequences. Logically, how would you even fix that? Find some magic politician who will be our benevolent dictator and use his unaccountable army thoughtfully?

We had versions of that for a long time. No, not an actually benevolent ICE (imagine that, lol), but one that put at least some limits on itself because the idea of just telling the public, in every… single… interaction, to eat shit and die seemed… unseemly. But it was only a matter of time before thugs and goons would be drawn to the warm flame of unaccountable, masked violence and bullying, and now ICE simply is what it is — a relationship defined by its lack of boundaries, which means we can’t fix it with boundaries. It just has to go, and then we try again with something completely different.