Paramilitary Claim Explodes ICE Debate

When Abdul El-Sayed says “ICE has nothing to do with immigration,” he is not denying what the agency’s paperwork and statistics show; he is making a deeper abolitionist claim that ICE’s core function has drifted from administering immigration law to projecting militarized state power on U.S. streets.

Key Points

El-Sayed has built a consistent, years-long campaign message around abolishing ICE, casting it as a paramilitary threat to constitutional rights rather than an immigration agency.
Official DHS and ICE documents, along with removal statistics, clearly describe and demonstrate ICE as a major immigration-enforcement body.
The apparent contradiction—“ICE is not about immigration” versus “ICE enforces immigration law”—reflects abolitionist rhetoric that attacks institutional mission and structure, not the existence of immigration rules themselves.
El-Sayed’s position sits inside a broader tradition of institutional abolition campaigns that argue some enforcement bodies are structurally incompatible with democratic and constitutional norms.
The real policy question is not whether ICE touches immigration, but whether its current form can be reconciled with humane enforcement and constitutional accountability, or must be replaced altogether.

Abdul El-Sayed’s Claim: ICE as Paramilitary, Not Immigration Agency

Across speeches, interviews, and campaign materials, Abdul El-Sayed advances a blunt thesis: ICE is “not about immigration,” “not about the southern border,” but about “normalizing paramilitary force on our streets” and “weaponizing the idea of immigration against the Constitution itself.” He has tied his Senate run to this view since at least 2018, describing the agency as irredeemable and calling repeatedly for its abolition rather than reform.

In his extended television interviews, El-Sayed frames ICE as an agency “weaponized against the Constitution itself under the pretext of immigration,” explicitly rejecting the notion that more oversight or training would fix it. On the trail, he reiterates that “ICE cannot be reformed. ICE cannot be retrained. ICE has to be abolished,” often pairing the argument with specific cases of lethal enforcement encounters he views as emblematic of systemic abuse. His campaign advertising goes further, branding him “the only Senate candidate for abolishing ICE” and insisting that the agency is “fundamentally incompatible with a humane and just immigration system.”

This rhetoric is not a one-off flourish; it is a central plank in how he defines his candidacy. In rallies and convention speeches, El-Sayed portrays ICE as a domestic “paramilitary force” whose presence in cities like Minneapolis and Michigan is about “government thugs on the streets,” not lawful border control. The campaign’s own statement on ICE’s presence in Michigan declares, “this has never been about border security or even immigration. This is about normalizing a paramilitary force on peaceful streets,” before concluding, “we must abolish ICE, no amount of retraining or reforming will address this rot.”

He is careful, however, to distinguish this abolitionist stance from a blanket rejection of immigration enforcement. In the same extended interview where he says ICE is “not about immigration,” El-Sayed adds, “I believe we need a safe and secure southern border. I believe we need to enforce immigration policy, but not like this cuz this was never about that.” In other forums he stresses that Customs and Border Protection, not ICE, is responsible for securing the southern border, and says he supports lawful border enforcement while opposing ICE’s form of interior policing.[NBC transcript summary] In short, his claim is not that immigration rules or enforcement should vanish, but that ICE’s particular institutional design has diverged so far from legitimate immigration administration that it must be scrapped.

What ICE Says It Does: Mission Statements and Structure

Set against El-Sayed’s abolitionist critique is ICE’s own description of its role within the Department of Homeland Security. Mission statements and formal testimony present ICE as a central enforcement and investigative arm responsible for “criminal and civil enforcement of laws governing border control, customs, trade, and immigration.” In a statement to Congress, ICE is defined as the investigative branch of DHS whose “primary mission is to promote homeland security and public safety through the criminal and civil enforcement of federal laws governing border control, customs, trade, and immigration.”

Structurally, the agency is organized around functions that are recognizably immigration enforcement. Its Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) component is tasked with arresting, detaining, supervising, and removing noncitizens in civil immigration cases—effectively, interior deportation and detention. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) handles a mix of immigration-related and other transnational crime, but ERO’s remit is squarely focused on the application of immigration law to individuals already in the country.

ICE’s own reporting underscores that immigration enforcement is not merely a nominal function. Between October 2014 and November 2024, the agency reports returning about 2.32 million “book-ins” to their country of citizenship, reflecting sustained deportation and removal activity over multiple administrations. Annual reports detail hundreds of thousands of arrests and removals, along with detention capacity and interior enforcement initiatives. Independent summaries and fact sheets, even when critical of ICE, consistently acknowledge that its work includes detaining and deporting unauthorized immigrants and conducting interior immigration enforcement.

On DHS’s public-facing materials, ICE is also linked to “life saving missions” such as combating human trafficking, child exploitation, and certain cross-border crimes, weaving immigration enforcement into a broader security narrative. That language illustrates one of the tensions El-Sayed exploits: by nesting immigration work inside a large, diffuse homeland security mandate, DHS blurs the line between administrative immigration processing and more expansive domestic security policing.

Reconciling “Not About Immigration” with an Immigration Mandate

At first glance, El-Sayed’s claim that ICE has “nothing to do with immigration” appears flatly contradicted by mission statements, organizational charts, and removal statistics. The agency enforces immigration laws and deportation orders; its name itself—Immigration and Customs Enforcement—advertises that mission. Yet abolitionist rhetoric typically operates at a different level than institutional self-description, and that distinction matters for understanding the dispute.

In contemporary abolitionist writing about policing, one strand of argument insists that “police officers don’t do what you think they do,” stressing that their day-to-day functions are less about catching dangerous criminals than about reproducing patterns of harm, especially in marginalized communities. Another strand defines abolition not only as disbanding an institution but as abolishing a specific mission—such as “the mission of Black suppression”—from public safety structures and replacing it with a different mandate. In that vocabulary, saying “this institution is not about public safety” does not deny that officers respond to crimes; it asserts that the deeper logic and lived effects of the institution contradict its stated purpose.

El-Sayed’s language about ICE follows that template. When he calls ICE “a paramilitary force” and “a private army for President Donald Trump,” he is pointing not to what DHS puts in an org chart but to how he believes the agency is used: as a tool to “criminalize immigration,” to “make a show out of detentions,” and to intimidate communities under a partisan banner. His campaign statement frames the entire ICE presence as “about normalizing a paramilitary force on peaceful streets,” arguing that the vocabulary of immigration is being used as a pretext for domestic power projection.

That is why he can, in the same breath, say ICE is “not about immigration” and also insist “we can and must secure our southern border, and there is a role for immigration enforcement.” The target of abolition is ICE’s mission and structure as he understands them, not the concept of immigration enforcement itself. In abolitionist terms, he is attacking what he sees as an inseparable fusion of immigration policy with militarized street-level intimidation; his answer is to end that fusion by abolishing the agency and “start[ing] fresh when it comes to immigration enforcement.”

The Evidence Gap: What We Know and What We Don’t

Both sides of the dispute rest on real, documented facts—but different kinds of facts. On El-Sayed’s side, the record is rich in rhetoric, normative judgment, and anecdotal examples. He points to fatal shootings, “government thugs on the streets,” and the relocation of ICE activity into cities far from the southern border as markers of mission drift. His speeches emphasize intent and effect: an agency “rushed into existence with expansive power and minimal oversight in the wake of 9/11,” now “working exactly as President Donald Trump wants it to,” as a means to “weaponize hatred through the government.”

What the available material does not supply for his case is forensic institutional evidence. There are no internal ICE documents, budget breakdowns, or operational audits showing, for example, what proportion of ICE resources go to immigration arrests versus other tactical operations, nor detailed data on the share of activity that could plausibly be characterized as “paramilitary” rather than administrative.[Primary claim summary] The argument that ICE is primarily—or functionally—about paramilitary presence rather than immigration enforcement remains largely an interpretive account grounded in observation and political theory rather than in granular agency records.

The counter-case is stronger on mission-description evidence. ICE and DHS documents, independent fact sheets, and government statistics make it difficult to deny that immigration enforcement sits at the core of the agency’s authority and daily activity. Yet here, too, important gaps remain. The materials show what ICE says it does and how often it deports people, but they do not directly address whether its tactics have become so militarized or politicized that the institution is beyond reform. Nor do they quantify the relative weight of immigration enforcement versus other homeland security functions in resource allocation.[Counter-evidence summary]

In that sense, the dispute is not between a true and a false description of ICE, but between a narrow institutional account—mission statements, org charts, outputs—and a broader constitutional and political critique that treats those same outputs as evidence of structural harm. The data we have clearly support that ICE is deeply involved in immigration enforcement; they do not, on their own, answer the abolitionist claim that the form of that enforcement is fundamentally incompatible with constitutional rule-of-law or community safety.

ICE Abolition in the Larger Politics of Institutional Rhetoric

El-Sayed’s attack on ICE fits into a wider pattern in American political discourse where “abolish” becomes a rallying word against institutions seen as structurally harmful. Contemporary police abolition movements, for instance, argue either for ending all police agencies or for abolishing specific missions—like racialized control—from those agencies and replacing them with alternative systems of public safety. Critics often treat “abolish” as an inherently extreme, literal demand to eliminate any organized enforcement; proponents emphasize redesigning missions, powers, and structures while maintaining safety functions through other means.

El-Sayed consciously adopts this abolitionist frame. He insists that abolishing ICE “does not mean abandoning immigration enforcement altogether,” but “rejecting a system designed to corrode our constitution and replacing it with one designed to uphold it.” He describes ICE as “dangerous” not only to immigrant communities but to democracy itself, linking its presence to broader concerns about militarized state violence, foreign policy, and corporate influence over politics. In doing so, he invites the same backlash abolitionist projects routinely attract: opponents recast his demand as “extreme abolitionism” and argue that dismantling ICE would “neuter our immigration laws,” presenting the agency as essential to border control and national security.

For a reader trying to make sense of the claim that “ICE has nothing to do with immigration,” the most useful lens is this abolitionist rhetoric tradition. Within that frame, “nothing to do” is not a literal denial of ICE’s statutory jurisdiction; it is an assertion that the institution’s prevailing mission, tactics, and political deployment have diverged so far from legitimate immigration administration that, in a normative sense, its work is about something else entirely—paramilitary control, partisan theater, or constitutional erosion.

The Policy Stakes: Reform, Replacement, or Retrenchment

The practical stakes of El-Sayed’s argument are less about semantics and more about institutional design. If one accepts ICE’s self-description, the natural policy conversation centers on how to regulate, oversee, and improve immigration enforcement—tightening rules of engagement, increasing transparency, or revising detention practices. If one accepts El-Sayed’s abolitionist premise, these incremental reforms miss the point: an agency “rushed into existence with expansive power and minimal oversight” that has become “a paramilitary force” cannot simply be retrained; it must be dissolved and replaced.

Between those poles lies a zone of genuine, unresolved questions. What would a “fresh” immigration enforcement institution look like in practice—what powers would it have, what oversight mechanisms would constrain it, and how would it differ concretely from ICE’s current structure? How much of ICE’s existing workload, from deportations to criminal investigations, is necessary under any plausible immigration regime, and how much reflects discretionary priorities that could be rolled back without undermining public safety or rule of law? These are the kinds of questions that a serious audit of ICE’s programs, budgets, and directives could answer, but that neither side’s public rhetoric yet resolves.

For now, the evidence supports two firm conclusions. First, ICE is, by its own design and public record, a major immigration enforcement agency; there is no factual basis for denying that it enforces immigration law. Second, El-Sayed’s claim that ICE “has nothing to do with immigration” is best understood as a structural, abolitionist critique of how that enforcement is carried out and to what ends—not as a claim about statutory jurisdiction. Whether one finds that critique persuasive hinges less on mission statements and more on one’s judgment about the proper relationship between immigration, domestic policing, and constitutional protections.