Abolish ICE — and the DEA Too
Kathleen Frydl, Vox: Abolish ICE — and the DEA too
Left unchecked, the egregious harms imposed by ICE — deportations that do more to disrupt than protect American communities; the ill-conceived preference for immigration detention executed via a system that is a human rights disgrace — will resolve into a “new normal.”
That is the fate of recent conservative state-building in the United States: Policies and offices do not survive scrutiny so much as simply evade it.
I can say this with confidence because five years ago, I published a book examining the history of the worst policy failure in modern US history: the government’s war on drugs. In light of drug prohibition’s abysmal results, I made several recommendations, including abolishing the Drug Enforcement Administration, the architect and emblem of the government’s war on drugs.
I did so not because I think illicit drugs present trivial dangers, but because I know they carry very real and distressing ones. When evaluated on the basis of its own selected benchmarks, the drug war has driven key performance indicators like illicit drug price and potency in exactly the wrong direction.
Rightwingers are always accusing the Left of being tyrants for protecting the environment or getting people healthcare coverage, but its the militarization of law enforcement, at the border and on the streets, which are the real tools of a police state, even while they miserably fail at their assigned tasks.