NYC Council Joins 'Abolish ICE' Movement

NEW YORK CITY HALL — The New York City Council passed a resolution Wednesday calling for the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, making it the nation's first major municipal legislative body to formally endorse the burgeoning progressive cause.

Councilwoman Helen Rosenthal's resolution specifically calls on the U.S. Congress to pass the Establishing a Humane Immigration Enforcement System Act, which would dissolve ICE and create a commission to determine how to fulfill its functions.

That bill is unlikely to move forward in the Republican-controlled Congress. But with the resolution, the Council voiced its institutional support for eliminating an agency that lawmakers and advocates say has gotten out of control under President Donald Trump.

Rosenthal, a Manhattan Democrat, likened abolishing ICE to the city's plan to close the infamous Rikers Island jail complex: "Transforming institutions is hard work, but it must be done," she said. "It means starting with the goal of justice and designing institutions to achieve it, rather than starting with existing institutions and allowing them to limit our conception of justice."

The city councils in Los Angeles and Oakland, California have also considered resolutions calling for an end to ICE, but neither of those cities' measures have passed yet. Oakland's mayor, Libby Schaaf, signed a letter in July calling for ICE's abolition, according to the East Bay Times.

Abolishing ICE is a cause that has picked up steam just in the last several months amid heated national debate over immigration policy. The agency's enforcement activity in its New York City area of responsibility has greatly ramped up under the Trump administration, according to city officials.

Council members argued that ICE, which was formed in 2003 under the then-new Department of Homeland Security, has become an aggressive deportation force with no place in a just, humane immigration system. Rosenthal's resolution itself calls ICE an "opaque and rogue agency."

The measure easily passed with 35 members supporting it, eight voting no and four abstaining. Four members were absent from Wednesday's meeting.

But it barely got through the Committee on Immigration, where it was narrowly approved in a 4-3 vote earlier Wednesday. The three moderate Democrats who voted against it there — Mark Gjonaj, Robert Holden and Kalman Yeger — expressed concerns about the lack of a concrete plan to replace ICE once it's gone.

"We’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater," Holden said. "This is ill conceived. 'Abolish ICE' is a movement, but replace it with what?"

Holden noted that 74 percent of the people ICE arrests are "criminals." It's true that about 74 percent of people ICE arrested in the 2017 fiscal year had criminal convictions, but some were convicted of crimes as minor as traffic offenses.

Asked for comment on the Council's resolution, ICE called recent calls for its abolition "dangerously misguided."

"Instead of being insulted with politically-motivated attacks, the men and women of ICE should be praised for risking life and limb every day in the name of national security and public safety," ICE spokesperson Liz Johnson said in a statement.

(Lead image: Demonstrators call for the abolition of ICE in Chicago in August 2018. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)