Paramilitary Claim Explodes ICE Debate

Border inspection station with heavy vehicle traffic — Photo: Arthur Greenberg / Shutterstock

When Abdul El-Sayed says “ICE has nothing to do with immigration,” he is not denying what the agency’s charter claims; he is asserting that its real-world role has drifted from administrative immigration enforcement toward domestic paramilitary policing—and that this mission drift is so fundamental the agency should be abolished and replaced.

Key Points

El-Sayed’s abolition call rests on a structural claim: ICE functions as a domestic paramilitary force under an immigration pretext, rather than as a neutral immigration bureaucracy.
ICE’s own mission statements and activity reports emphatically describe immigration enforcement—arrests, detention, and removals—as core functions of the agency.
The clash is not over whether ICE touches immigration at all, but whether its current design and tactics are inseparable from constitutional abuse and political use of force, rendering reform impossible.
This debate belongs to a larger “abolitionist” strand in American politics, where critics argue some institutions cannot be fixed and must be dismantled and replaced with differently structured systems of public safety.

What El-Sayed Is Actually Claiming About ICE

Across speeches, interviews, and campaign materials, Abdul El-Sayed advances a consistent, categorical position: ICE is “irredeemable,” “not reformable,” “not retrainable,” and “has to be abolished.” In a televised interview, he distills the core of his critique into one blunt formulation: “ICE is not about immigration. ICE is not about the southern border. ICE is about normalizing paramilitary force on our streets.” That line is not a literal denial that ICE enforces immigration statutes; it is the shorthand for a structural indictment—an argument about what the agency is for in practice.

In his own campaign literature, El-Sayed pairs the abolition demand with an explicit distinction between border security and ICE as an institution. His ICE explainer states that “we must secure our border and work towards comprehensive immigration reform” while insisting that Democrats “must outright reject an agency that has demonstrated that it cannot operate within the bounds of the Constitution or human decency — it must be torn down and immigration enforcement must be rethought from scratch.” In long-form discussions, he repeats a similar formula: abolish ICE, “start fresh when it comes to immigration enforcement,” and build a new body with due process, high training standards, and a pathway to citizenship at its core. The “nothing to do with immigration” line is therefore best read as a claim about mission drift and weaponization, not a misunderstanding of ICE’s statutory portfolio.

ICE on Paper: Immigration Enforcement as Core Mission

To see why El-Sayed’s phrasing is so provocative, it helps to look at how ICE describes itself. Official Department of Homeland Security materials present ICE as “the investigative arm” of DHS, with a primary mission of promoting homeland security and public safety “through the criminal and civil enforcement of federal laws governing border control, customs, trade, and immigration.” ICE’s public-facing overviews explain the agency’s two principal operational components: Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), which handles arrests, detention, and removals in civil immigration cases, and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which focuses on criminal activity such as human trafficking, smuggling, and trade-based crimes that intersect with border and immigration law.

Activity data match that framing. ICE’s annual reports and independent statistical summaries show hundreds of thousands of immigration “book-ins,” removals, and detainers over recent years—direct evidence that large portions of the agency’s work are, in a straightforward sense, immigration enforcement. USAFacts, aggregating federal data, notes that between late 2014 and late 2024 ICE returned over two million individuals to their country of citizenship, an output that is hard to square with the bald literal reading that ICE has “nothing to do” with immigration. Even critical secondary analyses of ICE’s powers and controversies typically accept interior immigration enforcement as a central operational function before turning to questions of proportionality, tactics, and rights.

How Abolitionist Rhetoric Reframes Institutional Missions

El-Sayed’s language only fully makes sense inside a broader abolitionist tradition. In debates over policing, prisons, and other coercive institutions, abolitionist writers distinguish between what an agency says it does and what they argue it is structurally built to do. Academic work on police abolition is explicit on this point: abolition is not merely a call for incremental reform; it is a claim that certain institutions are so entangled with systemic harm that they must be ended and replaced. One strand of that literature defines abolition as eliminating a specific oppressive mission—such as the historic role of policing in “Black suppression”—rather than the generic idea of public safety itself.

Within that frame, saying “police don’t do what you think they do” or “policing isn’t about catching the bad guys” is a way of challenging public assumptions about institutional purpose. El-Sayed’s “ICE is not about immigration” belongs to the same rhetorical family. He is arguing that, despite the formal charter, ICE’s real-world design—its tactical gear, field operations, operational culture, and political deployment—makes it better described as a domestic paramilitary outfit than as an immigration-processing bureaucracy. That is also why he repeatedly emphasizes spectacle and fear: ICE “has been weaponized against the Constitution itself under the pretext of immigration,” he says, and exists “specifically to weaponize hatred through the government.”

Where the Evidence Is Strong—and Where It Is Thin

On one point, the record is clear and uncontested: El-Sayed has, for years, openly and repeatedly called to abolish ICE, and he centers that position in his Senate campaign. Multiple outlets—from local Metro Times coverage to national segments and his own ads—document him as “the only candidate” in the Michigan Senate field calling for total abolition. He frames the agency as “a paramilitary force,” “government thugs on the streets,” “unconstitutional,” and “a private army for President Donald Trump,” and he ties that language to specific cases in which ICE agents have used lethal force, which he characterizes as “murderous.”

The harder question is whether the evidence supports his deeper factual claim: that ICE has “nothing to do” with immigration as a mission. Here, the support is largely rhetorical and normative rather than forensic. The materials we have are speeches, interviews, and campaign documents; they do not include budget audits, internal directives, or systematic case-file analyses showing that ICE spends only a trivial share of its resources on immigration enforcement compared to other activities. Conversely, the official and secondary descriptions on Side B are mission statements and high-level overviews; they say what ICE is supposed to do and offer headline statistics, but they stop well short of a granular breakdown that would either confirm or disprove El-Sayed’s depiction of paramilitary predominance.

For a reader trying to adjudicate the literal contested claim—whether ICE “has nothing to do” with immigration—the balance of available evidence favors ICE’s own description and the statistical record of removals: immigration enforcement clearly occupies a large slice of ICE activity. To defend the stronger literal phrasing, one would need internal data showing that immigration work is negligible compared to other missions, and that is not present in the current record. That does not, however, settle the institutional critique. It remains entirely possible, and consistent with the evidence, that ICE both conducts large-scale immigration enforcement and does so through structures, tactics, and political alignment that resemble a paramilitary force more than an administrative agency.

Mission Drift, Militarization, and Constitutional Claims

The heart of El-Sayed’s argument lies in how he connects ICE’s mission to constitutional harm. He describes immigration law itself as “like a parking ticket,” contrasting the civil nature of many immigration violations with the level of coercive force ICE deploys in enforcement. He points to fatal shootings by long-serving ICE agents to argue that the problem is not training alone but the underlying culture and mission. In public events, he alleges that ICE “uses children as bait” and conducts raids in ways designed to terrify communities, making the presence of tactical, heavily armed agents in non-border locales a normalized feature of everyday life.

None of the official ICE or DHS materials in the record directly engage those allegations. Side B shows carefully worded descriptions of life-saving missions, trafficking investigations, and enforcement priorities; these emphasize public safety and national security, but they do not address whether the mix of civil and criminal authority has produced a pattern of constitutional overreach or selective, politically charged enforcement. Nor do they answer El-Sayed’s threshold question: if immigration violations are civil, why is the enforcement apparatus organized around armed federal agents, detention, and street-level raids rather than administrative processing?

Political Consequences: Extremism, Responsibility, and Reform

Because ICE sits at the intersection of immigration, national security, and partisan conflict, abolition rhetoric lands with unusual force. Conservative and establishment outlets seize on El-Sayed’s absolutist lines—“ICE has nothing to do with immigration,” “must be destroyed,” “cannot be reformed”—to portray him as dangerously naive or hostile to law enforcement. The risk for his camp is that these clips flatten his argument into a caricature: a candidate indifferent to border control, rather than one calling for a structurally different immigration enforcement body with explicit constitutional safeguards.

Yet abolitionist politics also create a clarifying contrast. In the Michigan Senate contest, El-Sayed’s insistence on abolition draws a bright line between his platform and that of rivals who propose reform—retraining, oversight, or changes in priorities—while preserving ICE itself. That contrast forces a substantive question into the campaign: is ICE a broken agency that can be fixed, or is its very design incompatible with a humane immigration system? On that question, the public record presented here is incomplete. It tells us what ICE claims to do and what El-Sayed alleges it has become; it does not yet supply the detailed operational audit that would settle, definitively, how much of ICE’s work is necessary immigration administration and how much is avoidable, constitutionally troubling paramilitary deployment.

How to Read “ICE Has Nothing to Do With Immigration” Going Forward

For an informed reader, the most accurate way to understand El-Sayed’s line is as a shorthand for a deeper critique: that ICE’s institutional architecture, political use, and tactical footprint are misaligned with the civil nature of many immigration violations, and that its practical mission has drifted into domestic security theater and punitive deterrence. The literal wording overreaches what the current data can support, given the extensive documented record of immigration arrests, detentions, and removals. But the structural concern—that immigration enforcement has been fused with militarized policing in ways that damage constitutional norms—is not answered simply by pointing to mission statements.

In that sense, the debate over whether ICE “has nothing to do with immigration” is less important than the debate over what kind of immigration enforcement system the country is willing to tolerate. El-Sayed’s abolitionist stance argues for starting over: end ICE as an institution, design a new body oriented toward due process rather than fear, and separate the administrative work of immigration law from paramilitary-style raids. ICE’s defenders, by contrast, present the agency as an essential instrument of border control and national security, open to reform but fundamentally legitimate. The choice between those visions will turn not on rhetoric, but on evidence—precise, disaggregated data about what ICE does, where, to whom, and with what consequences. That evidence is the missing layer in this debate, and it is the layer serious policymaking will ultimately require.