During the agents’ violent attack on a delivery worker Saturday morning in DC, bystanders repeatedly demanded the agents share their badge numbers. One of them—his face fully obscured by a black balaklava—eventually shot back, “Do I have to answer to you?”
“You guys are ruining this country. You know that, right?” one bystander said to the agents at one point during the incident. An agent, ironically clad in a rainbow face mask, replied “Liberals already ruined it.”
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Last week on stage at the Netroots conference in New Orleans, I spoke with Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (D-IL) about ICE: specifically that she believes it should be abolished. It’s a stance that’s considered far left, but after witnessing ICE and other federal agents in DC this week, abolishing ICE should be the baseline Democratic position.
“ICE is a terrorist organization,” Ramirez told me. “It needs to be defunded and needs to be abolished.”
Immigration is the most limited it’s been in US history, accounting to somewhere around 2,000 legal immigrants annually. We could start by raising that cap. If your parents or grandparents immigrated to the US before roughly 50 years ago, they were “illegal” immigrants. There was no such distinction until fairly recently. Anybody who immigrated through Ellis Island would be considered illegal today.
ICE is completely unnecessary. It’s only been around for about two decades - I’m roughly twice as old as that branch of the government. The same with the NSA. Both are largely security theatre started post-9/11 that are ineffectual at the jobs that they supposedly were created to do.