Rep. Delia Ramirez Introduces Landmark Bill to Abolish DHS, ICE, and CBP

Rep. Delia C. Ramirez (D-Illinois) has introduced a bill that would abolish not just ICE, but the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) altogether, repealing the 2002 law establishing the agency and replacing it with one focused on protecting civil and human rights.

The wide-ranging legislation, dubbed the Reimagining Safety Act, would repeal the Homeland Security Act. Signed by President George W. Bush as part of his administration’s post-9/11 “war on terror,” the transformational bill created DHS and led to the establishment of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The bill would abolish DHS, CBP, and ICE — going further than the progressive call to abolish ICE. Other offices currently housed within the department, like Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Coast Guard, Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the customs functions of CBP would be broken off into different authorities.

“We know that DHS was intentionally established with an overbroad mission and unchecked power. The last two years have made it visible what so many communities have actually been saying for decades: That DHS, frankly, is the single greatest threat to our public safety today,” Ramirez said in a press conference previewing the legislation last month. “We must strip away every single tool they are using to terrorize us.”

In DHS’s place, Ramirez’s bill would create a cabinet-level “Department of Community Safety,” which would address community concerns ranging from gun violence to disaster relief, using a public health-based approach. All immigration detention centers would be shuttered.

The legislation comes as DHS has ballooned into one of the largest agencies in the U.S. government in just 24 years of existence, with its authorities having been expanded by every subsequent presidential administration since its establishment.

Now, it has become central in executing President Donald Trump’s agenda, carrying out his administration’s fascist campaign of mass deportation, surveillance, and suppression of communities across the U.S.

The legislation is cosponsored by Representatives Adelita Grijalva (D-Arizona), Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), as well as over 40 advocacy and progressive groups.

“From its inception, those in power have wielded DHS as a weapon. Widespread illegal and abusive detention of immigrants, violent racial profiling, and state overreach — including domestic surveillance, civil rights violations via the USA PATRIOT Act,” Ramirez said.

“The bottom line is this: From its establishment, DHS has always been empowered to violate our rights, under the pretense of securing our safety,” Ramirez said. “Enough is enough.”

The administration has targeted hundreds of thousands of immigrants with arrests, detention, and deportations, often openly defying court orders and even constitutional safeguards to wreak havoc and invoke fear. At least eight people have been killed on the streets by DHS agents since the beginning of Trump’s second term, at least 57 have died in immigration detention, and thousands have been “disappeared” within the shadowy detention network or to places abroad. Meanwhile, journalists, activists, elected officials, and more, have repeatedly been caught in DHS’s ever-expanding dragnet.

Ramirez’s new bill also seeks to defang numerous other post-9/11-era policies and actions. It calls for the closure of the Guantánamo Bay military detention center, which Trump has used to imprison Somali immigrants. President Joe Biden pledged to and failed to close the center that became a notorious symbol of torture and indefinite detention under Bush, who once declared that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the U.S.’s detainees at Guantánamo Bay and other CIA black sites established by the U.S. as it waged war on Iraq.

The bill additionally targets two sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act aimed at prosecuting supposed “terrorism.” It sunsets Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which directs the federal government to designate and sanction “foreign terrorist organizations.” And it repeals language in the bill establishing “the statutory grounds that render noncitizens inadmissible based on “terrorist” affiliations, which would stop people in the U.S. from being deported under these grounds, according to the bill’s summary.

Ramirez has previously introduced a resolution calling for the U.S. to move away from militarization and toward a newer definition of public safety. The resolution built upon her call, after immigration agents’ killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti earlier this year, for DHS to be dismantled and for ICE to be abolished.