President Donald Trump got a massive danger sign in a new poll released this week: for the first time, more voters support abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement than oppose doing so.
This comes amid a national uproar sparked by graphic video footage of an ICE agent in Minneapolis fatally shooting a mother of three in the head as she tried to move her car around them.
According to Forbes, “The poll published Jan. 13 from The Economist and YouGov found 46% of people support abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, compared to 43% who are in opposition of the movement; 12% were unsure. It represents a significant change in public opinion since July, when the same polling group found 27% were in support of ICE’s abolishment.”
By contrast, the report noted, “When The Economist and YouGov asked the same question in 2019 — a year after the ‘Abolish ICE’ movement began — Americans showed an unfavorable opinion of the federal agency, but just 32% felt it should be eliminated.”
Only a handful of Democrats have ever openly supported abolishing ICE up to this point, but Republicans aggressively used these positions in attack ads in the 2022 and 2024 elections.
While the United States has had immigration laws since its founding, and border security laws of some sort dating back to the 1920s, ICE as an agency, with its current structure, is relatively new, first being created as part of the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, replacing earlier agencies with a similar role like the Department of Labor’s Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Not all activists or politicians who advocate abolishing ICE support the outright end of immigration enforcement, with some simply wanting it to be enforced by a smaller agency with reduced militarization or increased oversight, as used to be the case.
Short of ICE abolition, a growing number of Democratic lawmakers are demanding accountability reforms, including an end to the practice of ICE agents patrolling with masks to conceal their identities.
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