“Abolish ICE!” To left-wing activists, it’s a demand. To too many Washington Democrats, it’s a promise. And to voters across the country, it’s evidence — evidence that today’s Democrats are increasingly, and openly, committed to undermining the rule of law across the land.
“Abolish ICE!” is often paired with some variation of “Defund the police!” And when the two slogans are joined by the ever-popular-on-the-left “Abolish prisons,” it forms the leftist trifecta that shows how differently than the rest of us does the hardcore Marxist think of the rule of law.
The hardcore Marxist left sees the rule of law differently because the hard-core Marxist left sees society differently.
Because the hardcore Marxist left sees the capitalist state as fundamentally a class state, it sees prisons, courts, and police as elements of an establishment that undergirds the coercive force necessary to maintain the prevailing social, political, and economic order. In this view, the legal/judicial establishment as a whole protects the property relations and social relations upon which the capitalist society depends.
This attitude is fundamental to the DSA’s strategy to build the “classless society”: “For all of the working class to achieve collective liberation we must constrain, diminish, and abolish the carceral forces of the state,” explains a document from the DSA’s Abolition Working Group.
That’s why the DSA’s stated demands include cutting police budgets annually toward zero, reducing criminalization, freeing what it calls “incarcerated people” (read: prisoners), “demilitarizing” police, and investing instead in “community self-governance and care.”
So remember — any time you see the word “defund,” you should read the word “abolish,” because that is the ultimate end goal.
“Abolish ICE” goes one step further — because ICE is a specific police force, dedicated to enforcing immigration law. That brings in an additional element: international working-class solidarity, and another example of the capitalist society dividing the working classes, this time between nationalities.
The Marxists who run the DSA reject the idea that citizenship status should determine which workers possess fundamental economic and political rights. A recent DSA party platform called for “uninhibited transnational free movement of people,” abolition of both ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), decriminalization of immigration, and citizenship for illegal aliens.
Its current platform is just as explicit — “Abolish ICE,” along with calls for ending ICE detention and deportation, amnesty, and ending visa caps and quotas.
But these are just the radicals on the far-left fringe of the Democratic Party, right? They’re not calling the shots for the Democrats, are they?
Well, consider this: Kamala Harris — who served four years as vice president and was the Democratic Party’s last nominee for president, thereby putting her at the top of the Washington Democrat establishment — declared that “we have to redirect resources” away from the police and toward other areas of government, and then followed up by saying, “we have to reimagine public safety in America” and arguing that “for too long, people have confused achieving public safety with putting more cops on the street.”
That’s straight from the mouth of the nominee Democratic Party leaders chose to represent them in the presidential campaign that took place just two years ago. While that’s an extraordinarily radical position to take, it’s not coming from a fringe player — it’s coming from the holder of the party’s last presidential nomination, its most prized possession.
Want more? Consider this: Earlier this year, the vast majority of Democrats in both chambers of Congress were so determined to block funding for ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that when it came time to vote on funding for the Department of Homeland Security — where ICE and CBP funding are located — all but seven Democrats in the House voted against it. In the Senate, every Democrat other than Pennsylvania’s Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) voted against it. Washington Democrats’ insistence on defunding ICE and CBP led to a 75-day shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, and, remarkably, a 116-day funding lapse for ICE and CBP.
Voting to defund federal immigration law enforcement efforts is as extreme as it gets — it doesn’t just contribute to lawlessness at home, it goes further, to erode national sovereignty as it weakens our border security.
Of the 254 total votes cast against the funding bill in the House and the Senate, 252 of them were cast by Democrats.
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Washington Democrats have now made mainstream among themselves what the rest of the country quite properly views as extraordinarily radical and extreme.
Voters should remember that when making their voting decisions.
Jenny Beth Martin is Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action.