11 Days to Go: Abolish ICE and Build a Just Immigration System
With just eleven days until the primary, I am using each day to discuss an issue I have highlighted on the campaign trail. For Day 11, I am highlighting the need to build a just, humane, and functional immigration system.
Business owners across NH-1 can’t find workers to keep their doors open. Families are being snatched from their homes on the way to work. ICE agents are killing people in the streets.
The system is broken, and cruelty is not a plan.
I have said “Abolish ICE” many times on the campaign trail, but for those words to be more than a slogan, we have to tell voters what comes next.
ICE is not a broken agency that needs fixing; it is an agency whose design produces the exact outcomes that we are now witnessing.
When an institution is built to enforce a broken system without due process protections, without meaningful accountability, and with a culture that has consistently shielded agents from consequences for misconduct and killing, reform is insufficient. The institution must be replaced.
Abolishing ICE does not mean abolishing immigration enforcement. It means replacing a failed institution with one that is built from the ground up with civil rights protections, democratic accountability, and a mission that’s oriented toward a functional immigration system rather than fear and punishment.
Here’s what that looks like:
Replacing ICE with a Civil Immigration Enforcement Agency (CIEA), reconstituted criminal immigration enforcement, independent immigration courts system, and Civil Detention Standards and Oversight Board.
Fixing the “No Line” problem by creating legal pathways for residency, including expanding visa categories, modernizing the family reunification system, restoring and expanding asylum protections, and creating a path to permanent legal status for the approximately 11 million undocumented people currently living in the United States.
Reinvesting in border infrastructure that actually works, including expanding processing capacity, immigration courts, asylum officers, and case management systems that can handle the volume of people seeking to enter the country through legal channels.
Restoring relationships with municipalities and states by codifying the right of state and local governments to decline immigration enforcement partnerships, restoring federal funding that was withheld as coercion, and establishing a new framework for voluntary cooperation based on genuine community safety needs, not political pressure.
Reckoning with the harm that has already been done by launching independent investigations into every death in ICE custody, compensating families separated by the Trump administration, repaying municipalities, counties, medical providers, and states that are owed money by ICE under existing contracts, and restoring legal status for people deported without due process and a mechanism for return for those who were wrongly removed.
I am running for Congress because local action, as necessary as it is, can only go so far. The comprehensive reform this country needs to abolish ICE and build a just system in its place, to create legal pathways to citizenship that reflect both our values and our reality, requires legislative power.
This is my answer to the question: Would I abolish ICE? This is what I would do. And I intend to go to Washington to do it.
None of this is possible without winning. Thanks for supporting me in this work.
