ICE Has Nothing to Do With Immigration

The real dispute over Abdul El-Sayed’s claim that “ICE has nothing to do with immigration” is not about whether the agency enforces immigration law—it plainly does—but about whether its contemporary design and tactics have transformed it from an immigration bureaucracy into a domestic security force that relies on the pretext of immigration to wield paramilitary power.

Key Points

Abdul El-Sayed has built his Michigan Senate campaign around a categorical call to abolish ICE, arguing it functions as a paramilitary tool of state violence rather than a normal immigration agency.
Official DHS and ICE documents, along with independent summaries, unambiguously define ICE’s core mission as civil and criminal immigration enforcement, including arrest, detention, and removal of noncitizens.
The evidence base here documents El-Sayed’s rhetoric and the agency’s stated mission, but lacks granular, audited data that would resolve how much of ICE’s activity is immigration administration versus broader domestic security operations.
El-Sayed’s abolitionist framing fits a wider tradition of “abolish the police”‑style arguments: the target is an institutional mission and method seen as irredeemable, not the existence of any immigration enforcement at all.
Without deeper empirical audits of ICE operations, the debate remains a clash of structural critique against institutional self-description, with both sides selectively emphasizing evidence that supports their narrative.

Abdul El-Sayed’s Campaign Claim: ICE as Paramilitary Force

Abdul El-Sayed has not made his ICE critique in passing; it is a central plank of his Senate campaign and a through-line of his public rhetoric since at least 2018. In interviews, speeches, and campaign statements, he describes ICE not as an immigration bureaucracy but as “a paramilitary force” that has been “weaponized against the Constitution itself under the pretext of immigration.” In a televised interview, he declares: “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.” His campaign website echoes the language, insisting that ICE “has never been about border security or even immigration” but about “normalizing a paramilitary force on peaceful streets” and that the agency “must be abolished, no amount of retraining or reforming will address this rot.”

El-Sayed consistently couples this institutional critique with specific allegations of lethal abuse. He points to federal law enforcement killings, including cases in Minneapolis, and asserts that ICE “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 progressive media appearances he describes ICE agents as “government thugs on the streets” and characterizes recent deaths linked to federal immigration enforcement as emblematic of a deeper culture of impunity. This is why, in his telling, the issue is not misbehavior by a few officers or reformable policy; it is the structure of ICE itself as “a private army for President Donald Trump” and a vehicle for “weaponiz[ing] hatred through the government.”

Crucially, El-Sayed separates abolition of ICE from abolition of immigration enforcement. He repeatedly clarifies that border enforcement is the job of Customs and Border Protection and that “we can and must secure our southern border” with a system that enforces immigration law but does not, in his view, corrode constitutional norms. In longer-form conversations, he talks about “abolish[ing] the ICE part and start[ing] fresh when it comes to immigration enforcement,” implying replacement with a differently structured agency rather than simply leaving immigration law unenforced.

What ICE Says It Is: Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Set against El-Sayed’s abolitionist rhetoric is a substantial body of documentary evidence about what ICE is officially designed to do. ICE was created in 2003 in the reorganization that followed the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, by combining investigative and interior enforcement functions from the former Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Customs Service. DHS formally describes ICE as “the investigative arm of DHS” whose mission is to promote homeland security and public safety by enforcing federal laws governing border control, customs, trade, and immigration. The agency’s own materials emphasize its role in “preventing terrorism and combating the illegal movement of people and goods,” with immigration enforcement as a central pillar.

Operationally, ICE is structured around two major components: Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). ERO handles arrests, detention, supervision, and removal of noncitizens in civil immigration cases, including interior enforcement and coordination with local jails and prisons. HSI conducts criminal investigations into cross-border crime—such as human smuggling, trafficking, trade fraud, and certain forms of cybercrime—that often intersect with immigration status. Independent explainer pieces and law-practice guides, even when critical of the agency, summarize ICE’s remit in these terms: enforcing immigration laws, detaining and deporting unauthorized immigrants, and conducting interior immigration enforcement through ERO.

ICE’s own annual reports add quantitative weight to that description. Recent data compilations show millions of removals and “book-ins” to detention centers over the past decade, indicating sustained civil immigration enforcement at scale. A USAFacts analysis, for example, reports that ICE returned about 2.32 million detained individuals to their country of citizenship between late 2014 and late 2024. DHS materials also spotlight “life-saving missions,” such as anti-trafficking operations and child-exploitation investigations, as part of the agency’s enforcement narrative. In short, on paper and in aggregate numbers, ICE very much has “to do with immigration.”

Where the Evidence Clash Actually Lies

Given this documentary record, it is inaccurate on a literal level to say ICE has “nothing” to do with immigration; its statutory authorities and core operational components are built around immigration enforcement, and its own data shows large-scale arrests, detentions, and removals. The counter-evidence on Side B is straightforward and strong on this narrow point: mission statements, organizational charts, and national statistics demonstrate that immigration enforcement is central to what ICE does.

However, this does not directly answer the more nuanced version of El-Sayed’s claim, which is that ICE’s purpose has been transformed—especially under Trump—into something closer to a domestic paramilitary instrument that uses immigration as pretext. Here the record is much thinner. The official documents describe ICE’s intended mission and legal authorities but do not provide a forensic rebuttal to his specific allegations of militarized tactics, unconstitutional behavior, or partisan deployment. Nor do they quantify, in a way that would decisively settle the dispute, how much of ICE’s resource use is devoted to routine immigration administration versus tactical raids, high-risk arrests, surveillance, or other operations that might resemble paramilitary policing. That absence of granular, audited breakdown is precisely what both sides implicitly rely on: El-Sayed points to visible raids and controversial killings; ICE points to its mission language and headline statistics. Neither side, within this evidence set, produces the kind of internal activity audit that would resolve the structural question.

As a result, the disagreement is not about a simple factual dichotomy—immigration versus non‑immigration—but about institutional role and proportionality. ICE clearly performs immigration enforcement; El-Sayed argues that the nature and design of that enforcement make the agency fundamentally incompatible with constitutional democracy, in the same way police abolitionists describe contemporary policing as inseparable from racialized harm. The opposing case shows the agency’s stated missions and immigration outputs, yet leaves critics room to argue that those outputs are achieved through tactics that are overmilitarized or politicized relative to what an immigration bureaucracy should be.

Abolitionist Rhetoric and the “Not About X” Frame

El-Sayed’s declarations that ICE “is not about immigration” make more sense when placed within the broader abolitionist tradition. In debates over policing, abolitionists argue that, despite mission statements about crime prevention, police “don’t do what you think they do” and that the system as designed is inherently harmful and beyond reform. Contemporary abolitionist writing often targets the institutional mission—such as “Black suppression” or social control—rather than the notion of public safety itself. On this view, “abolition” means ending a particular configuration of power and replacing it with other systems of safety and support.

El-Sayed uses ICE in a similar way: he does not deny the existence of immigration law or the need for border enforcement; he denies that ICE, as configured, is truly an immigration agency rather than a vehicle for state violence and political spectacle. When he says ICE has “nothing” to do with immigration, he is effectively arguing that immigration is not its governing mission but its excuse. That rhetorical move is intentionally provocative—it invites headlines and charges of extremism—but it is consistent with a genre of structural critique in which the formal mission of an institution is treated as a facade for its actual function.

Opponents, of course, have strong incentives to seize on the absolutist phrasing and gloss over the underlying argument. Conservative and centrist outlets have framed El-Sayed as a “radical socialist” intent on “neuter[ing] our immigration laws” and portray his abolition call as an abandonment of border control. Campaign ads and social media amplifiers reduce the nuance to the slogan “Abolish ICE,” which is easy to tag as anti‑law‑and‑order in a political environment where immigration enforcement is equated with national security. This dynamic—a structural abolition critique flattened into a caricature of lawlessness—is familiar from police-abolition debates, and the ICE controversy slots neatly into that pattern.

What the Evidence Still Cannot Tell Us

For a reader looking beyond rhetoric, the most important limitation in the available record is empirical. We have: clear documentation of El-Sayed’s position and language; official mission statements and structural descriptions of ICE as an immigration‑enforcement and investigative agency; and high‑level statistics about detentions and removals. We do not have, in this set, a detailed, independently audited breakdown of ICE’s operational activity and resource allocation that would let us say, with confidence, how much of the agency’s work is routine immigration processing versus militarized domestic enforcement or politically directed operations.

Nor do we have internal directives, training materials, or chain‑of‑command documents that would show whether ICE leadership conceptualizes the agency primarily as an immigration bureaucracy, a homeland security force, or something closer to a flexible domestic instrument responsive to presidential priorities. Without that, claims that ICE is “a private army” for a particular administration remain political allegations rather than testable institutional facts, and claims that it is simply a neutral enforcer of immigration law rest heavily on mission language rather than on operational scrutiny.

This evidentiary gap matters. It allows El-Sayed and other critics to fill the vacuum with narrative—stories of raids, deaths, community fear—and it allows ICE and its defenders to lean on law‑and‑order framing, emphasizing deportation numbers and statutory mandates. Both sides may be partly right: ICE may be genuinely central to immigration enforcement and simultaneously overmilitarized or structured in ways that invite politicization. Only deeper, methodical analysis of the agency’s practices can move the debate beyond mutually reinforcing caricatures.

How to Think About the “Nothing to Do with Immigration” Line

For an informed observer, the most intellectually honest way to parse El-Sayed’s statement is to separate anatomy from judgment. Anatomically, ICE is an immigration and customs enforcement agency by design: its statutory authorities, organizational chart, and public outputs are built around civil and criminal immigration enforcement, supplemented by trade and border‑related investigations. On that descriptive level, it plainly has “to do with immigration.”

Judgmentally, El-Sayed is making a structural claim: that ICE, as it operates today, is so far removed from what a legitimate immigration system should look like—so steeped in paramilitary tactics, constitutional overreach, and partisan deployment—that to treat it as an “immigration agency” is to accept a dangerous category error. That is an abolitionist argument about institutional mission and harm, not a factual assertion about statutory text. Whether one finds it persuasive should depend less on agreement with his rhetoric and more on the quality of future evidence about ICE’s day‑to‑day operations.

Political Stakes and Public Perception

Finally, it is worth noting why this debate has acquired such salience in the Michigan Senate race. El-Sayed’s insistence on abolishing ICE differentiates him sharply from his primary opponents, who call for major reforms and tighter oversight but stop well short of abolition. It also reinforces his broader campaign identity as a candidate who rejects corporate and special‑interest money, attacks AIPAC’s influence, and links foreign policy, immigration enforcement, and domestic inequality into a single narrative of misallocated power and resources. For voters, the ICE question becomes a proxy for deeper choices about how comfortable they are with the post‑9/11 security apparatus and how far they are willing to go in reshaping it.

On the other side, law‑and‑order networks and anti‑immigration constituencies have every reason to portray abolition of ICE as reckless, especially in a political climate where border security is a high‑salience issue. Their messaging leans on the agency’s formal mission and deportation statistics, arguing that dismantling ICE would endanger public safety and undermine the rule of law. In a polarized environment, the nuanced distinction El-Sayed draws—abolish ICE, not immigration enforcement per se—is easily lost.

What Would Improve This Debate

If this controversy is to move beyond slogans, the next step is not another round of rhetorical escalation but a more disciplined empirical inquiry. That would include disaggregated audits of ICE’s budget and operations by program; longitudinal analysis of enforcement priorities under different administrations; and sworn testimony from career leadership about how the agency interprets its mission in practice. It would also benefit from comparative work that situates ICE alongside other federal law‑enforcement bodies, clarifying whether its tactics and authorities are unusually militarized or politicized relative to peers.

Until that work is done, the conversation will continue to be driven by the starkest framings: El-Sayed’s portrayal of ICE as a paramilitary threat to constitutional democracy, and ICE’s self‑presentation as a necessary immigration‑enforcement engine at the core of homeland security. Both capture real concerns. Neither, on the evidence presently available, is complete.