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Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Abolish ICE? Absolutely — and DHS too

No reform can fix Trump’s corrupt secret police — and the whole bureaucracy of repression should go as well

Published February 28, 2026 6:45AM (EST)

We might as well get this out of the way first, to preempt any swooning by the milquetoast wing of the Democratic Party: Yes, abolishing ICE would leave immigration statutes on the books, and those laws should be enforced. Anyone proposing to abolish ICE must also propose replacing it with a vastly improved successor organization.

But Democratic grandees have to get it through their heads that ICE is too politicized, too bloated and too corrupt to be reformed into anything like a legitimate agency of government operating under the rule of law. One might as well hope that the Ku Klux Klan could be reformed into a charitable social organization. ICE must be dismantled and another, different agency built over its bulldozed ruins.

To understand why that’s necessary may require a fuller examination of the history of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency’s full title. It was conceived in a lie, birthed through political logrolling by panicky politicians who didn’t know what they were doing, and housed within an equally dysfunctional parent bureaucracy. As a professional staff member of Congress, I was present at the creation. It didn’t make much sense to me at the time, except as a congressional effort to be seen as “doing something,” and an attempt to divert attention from George W. Bush’s failure to take seriously the many warning signs that preceded the worst terrorist attack in our history. In retrospect, it looks even worse than that.

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, gave rise to many evils. One of the most pernicious and least recognized was the Bush administration’s scapegoating of federal intelligence and law enforcement over the disaster. That there was complacency and lack of focus in the bureaucracy is incontestable. There often is. But if there was complacency and lack of focus in the lower ranks, the responsibility lay with the captain of the ship — President Bush — and his executive officers, meaning the vice president and Senate-confirmed senior administration officials.

ICE was conceived in a lie, birthed through political logrolling by panicky politicians who didn’t know what they were doing, and housed within an equally dysfunctional parent bureaucracy.

9/11 was less an intelligence agency failure than a cognitive intelligence failure of the Bush cabinet. In early August 2001, while Attorney General John Ashcroft (who relegated terrorism to a lower priority than the Clinton administration did) was staging a major press conference on the menace of internet porn, Bush was dismissing the CIA presenters of the President’s Daily Brief on Aug. 6, which stated, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.” “You covered your ass,” Bush told them, before going back to golf and brush-cutting during his four-week........

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