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Abolishing ICE is not the answer

Ruben Navarrette Jr. on

SAN DIEGO -- Abolish ICE?

As political catchphrases go, it'll do just fine. It's pithy and punchy. It fits on a bumper sticker. Whether it infuriates or inspires you, it fires you up.

The one thing the slogan doesn't do is make you think, because that is not the point of it.

Think on this: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a baby bureaucracy. It was created from anger and fear in 2003, in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Things got off to an illogical start. ICE is charged with removing illegal immigrants; the 9/11 hijackers came to the United States legally. The hijackers were terrorists; ICE arrests housekeepers and gardeners. The terrorists were Muslim extremists who came to do us harm; the vast majority of those removed by ICE are Latinos who come to do our chores.

What about the fact that ICE has not yet reached puberty?

 

We don't trust a 15-year-old human being to have the judgment to vote, drive, buy liquor, gamble, join the military or do a bunch of other things that require the wisdom and restraint that come with experience.

But we trust a 15-year-old law-enforcement agency -- with an annual budget of more than $7 billion and a staff of about 20,000, and entrusted with enormous power rooted in both civil and criminal law -- to have the judgment to act as a deportation force that decides who stays in this country and who has to leave, in ways that separate and destroy families.

Oh, and -- according to wrongheaded folks on the right-wing -- no American taxpayer or elected official should dare question how this agency operates, much less call for its elimination.

Yet that is exactly what is happening on the left. Liberals are always looking for ways to show they're the most enlightened people on the planet. Demanding an end to ICE gives them a shorthand way of doing that.

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