The Movement to Abolish ICE Is Gaining Momentum

Echoing activists across the country, the global human rights watchdog Amnesty International has called on the United States government to abolish Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Emerging from the #Not1More campaign organized by undocumented activists and groups like Puente and Juntos in 2014, and gaining momentum with concerted organizing by grassroots groups such as Mijente, Detention Watch Network, Freedom for Immigrants, La Resistencia, and many others, the movement to abolish ICE has been building for years.

However, to have a mainstream organization such as Amnesty International — which has 7 million members and a global budget nearing $400 million, and which is often turned to by corporate media outlets — officially endorsing the explicit call for abolition signals a shift in the movement’s momentum as public support for ICE dwindles.

While ICE has been accused of violating human rights since it was created in the early 2000s, the Trump administration’s racist mass deportation campaign has taken its abuses — including “unlawful killings by federal agents” — to a “perilous new level” that is putting the general public in danger, according to a new report released by Amnesty International on September 24.

In calling for ICE to be abolished, Amnesty International joins a growing movement to put an end to an agency that has invaded neighborhoods across the country with squads of violent, masked federal agents recruited under President Donald Trump. On September 24, a coalition of public officials, advocates for undocumented people, and civil rights groups lined up in support of the Reimagining Safety Act, federal legislation introduced by Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Illinois) that would dismantle ICE and rebuild its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), from the ground up.

“You cannot militarize our neighborhoods, surveil our families, and make people afraid to leave their homes and call that safety,” said Rep. Norma Hernandez, an Illinois state representative from Chicago, in a statement.

Meanwhile, the violence of mass deportation continues. ICE announced this week that Carlos Josué Marchena, a 36-year-old from Costa Rica, became the third person to die at a notorious immigration jail in Louisiana in less than six months on September 18.

Marchena reportedly told family members that he missed meals and the insulin shots he needed to control his diabetes. His story echoes widespread reports of medical neglect and the complaints made about inhumane conditions, which have sparked waves of hunger strikes by detainees. At least 55 people have died in ICE custody since Trump returned to office, including a record 31 deaths in 2025, according to Detention Watch Network. Experts suspect that is an undercount.

ICE has repeatedly claimed the medical care and conditions in its jails and prison camps are better than those in most hospitals and prisons, but polling suggests that a majority of voters are not buying these claims as the death count continues to rise. Videos of ICE officers apparently breaking the law while off-duty and violently violating basic constitutional rights of citizens and noncitizens alike when attempting to make arrests regularly go viral online.

“We’re going to keep pushing. We’re not going to apologize,” said Tom Homan, the White House border czar, in response to public scrutiny on September 24.

Trump and his senior officials unleashed masked and poorly trained ICE agents onto the streets while openly supporting violent and racist enforcement practices, creating an “institutional environment” for widespread abuses, according to Amnesty International’s report. The group, which examines human rights crises across the world, examined the large-scale, militarized ICE crackdowns that recently unfolded in the metro areas of Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; New Orleans; and the Twin Cities in Minnesota.

Researchers documented similar abuses in each city, including arbitrary arrests, harassment, intimidation, degrading treatment and unjustified use of force by federal agents, repression of protests with crowd-control weapons, unlawful use of surveillance and facial recognition technology, and denial of due process for detainees.

ICE agents have also shot and killed multiple people, most famously Alex Pretti and Renee Good, who were protesting the ICE invasion of Minneapolis. Amnesty International said this lethal use of force should be investigated as extrajudicial executions. On September 22, family members and witnesses of five people killed by ICE testified at a shadow hearing held by congressional Democrats. Republicans did not attend.

“We cannot separate any of this from the bigger agenda we are witnessing: an agenda that has disproportionately targeted Latino, immigrant, Black and Brown communities, treating the color of our skin, the language we speak, and where we come from as reasons to target us and treat us as if we are less human,” State Rep. Hernandez said.

Nadia Daar, the executive director of Amnesty International USA, said ICE’s militarized enforcement operations are intended to “instill fear” in immigrants and their families, but in practice, put everyone in danger.

“ICE is fundamentally broken and cannot be fixed,” Daar said in a statement on September 24. “For the U.S. government to have an immigration enforcement system that complies with international human rights law and standards, ICE needs to be abolished, and we need to start over.”

However, activists on the ground have been calling for ICE to be abolished for decades, according to Laura Hernández, executive director of Freedom for Immigrants, a group that supports people in ICE detention.

“ICE is not broken — it’s working exactly as intended, and that’s the problem,” Hernández told Truthout in an email.

Established along with DHS in 2003 as the Bush administration rode a wave of heated nationalism after the 9/11 attacks, ICE has accumulated a remarkable record of human rights abuses under both Democratic and Republican administrations as Congress repeatedly failed to pass immigration reforms.

For example, while the number of deaths in ICE custody skyrocketed during Trump’s second term, advocates have been ringing alarm bells about violence, abuse, and medical neglect in ICE’s network of jails and privately run prisons for years. Between 2017 and 2021, nearly 95 percent of deaths in ICE custody could have been prevented if proper medical care was provided, according to Physicians for Human Rights.

“At times its violence has been more visible or received more public attention, and certainly this administration is escalating the scale and speed of its cruelty,” Hernández said. “But fundamentally, ICE has always been an agency that was designed to terrorize communities, separate families, and forcibly detain and deport our people.”

Representative Ramirez, who represents an Illinois district targeted last year by ICE in “Operation Midway Blitz,” has joined other Democrats in calling for accountability and is perhaps the leading proponent of abolishing ICE in Congress. In January, Ramirez introduced a standalone bill to abolish ICE and redirect its funding to safety-net programs that can help people navigate the spiraling affordability crisis.

The Reimagining Safety Act would go further by dismantling and rebuilding the Department of Homeland Security as a federal public safety agency. ICE and Customs and Border Protection would be abolished and replaced with customs offices to limit government surveillance and militarized enforcement. DHS agencies that serve public safety — including the Transportation Security Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency — would be preserved as Congress begins the process of creating a separate and reformed immigration system.

Ramirez said the bill’s creation was “community-led,” with undocumented people and leaders from various immigrant communities contributing to the process.

“Building something new, creating in a time of destruction, is a revolutionary act. It is proof of our hope and belief in what is possible even in dark times,” Ramirez said in a statement. “The people have the power to reshape our government and to reimagine how we cultivate safety and collective well-being.”