Defunding ICE Would Be the Easy Part
What happens when people who have been taught that violence is acceptable are suddenly without a job?
ICE’s budget has grown dramatically in recent years, now rivaling, and in some cases exceeding, that of entire branches of the U.S. military. It has been given one mission: the deportation of over 10 million people with virtually no constraints.
Legally and ethically, ICE has pushed past acceptability. Due process is ignored, family members are lost to the system, and excessive enforcement methods have caused public outcry.
Demographically, this mission is setting the United States up for failure in the medium- and long-term. Like many Western countries, the U.S. birth rate is slowing; combined with a low-immigration scenario, this would lead to population decline and all the socio-economic complexities that this entails. With Trump’s deportation campaign, we are already seeing immigration and naturalization rates fall faster than at any point in recent history.
Serious immigration reform was never meant to be like this, and Americans know it. The mission and the agency are now being seriously questioned. Defunding and abolishing ICE are no longer fringe positions. In the upcoming midterm elections, Americans will decide whether ICE’s current mission still has a place in this country.
The danger, however, is in treating defunding and abolishing as the solution rather than the starting point. We need to confront harder, more consequential questions: Who enforces immigration law going forward? What would become of the personnel who, until recently, had a mission, carried guns, and have been told they have federal immunity?
Let’s start with the easier question.
How should immigration law be enforced?
Any functional immigration system rests on three things: the capacity of the host country to absorb newcomers, the ability of migrants to contribute, and the humanity to recognize that not everyone arrives under the same circumstances.
That last point matters more than it might seem. There is a fundamental difference between an economic migrant in search of opportunity and an asylum seeker in search of safety. The U.S. system stopped distinguishing meaningfully between the two, and that failure is a fundamental part of the current crisis.
Over the past forty years, legal immigration has become progressively harder. The reforms of the 1980s and 1990s (the Immigration Reform and Control Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act), as well as the post-September 11 expansion of enforcement through the creation of Homeland Security and the Secure Fence Act, steadily narrowed legal pathways and increased enforcement—whilst doing little to address the millions already here. While the government attempted to manage this contradiction, the underlying problem remained: legal immigration was too slow, too complex, and too opaque for a country that still represented opportunity to the world.
That gap was filled by asylum. Migrants learned that filing a claim triggered a legal process that allowed them to remain and work for years while awaiting a decision—a rational response to a broken system. An administrative system designed to handle tens of thousands of cases a year was suddenly handling close to a million. The backlog became the system.
Fixing this requires three things. First, legal immigration pathways need to be coherent and timely. Canada’s historical points-based system, which matches migrant skills to economic need, offers a useful model. Second, the asylum system needs to be properly staffed and designed to distinguish genuine refugees from economic migrants. The 2024 Border Act, voted down in the Senate under pressure from Trump, came close to addressing this by proposing thousands of additional asylum officers and a faster adjudication process. Third, there needs to be a path to legalization for people who have demonstrated they are contributing members of society. France allows undocumented residents of over three years to apply for legal status if they have worked for at least twelve of the previous twenty-four months, a pragmatic framework worth seriously considering here.
As for those with criminal records, existing agencies—local police, the FBI, and the DEA—are already equipped to handle them. Deportation remains a legitimate tool in those cases.
A humane, coherent immigration system is achievable, but it requires an agency that can differentiate between opportunity migrants, asylum seekers, and criminals. ICE was deliberately designed to blur those lines. It is impossible to turn an agency built for monodimensional paramilitary enforcement into one that makes civil, humane decisions.
What happens to the people shaped by ICE?
Many within ICE come from backgrounds marked by economic insecurity, limited opportunity, or social marginalization. ICE offers them something powerful: a uniform, authority, a sanctioned enemy, and a narrative. Over time, this mission becomes their moral framework. Loyalty and betrayal, order and chaos, us and them. As ICE agents become increasingly isolated from the public because of the job they are being asked to do, they must choose to either leave or double down.
Dismantling the agency or removing its authority without taking into account how it has shaped its employees thus creates certain risks.
Diffusion: Former personnel do not vanish. They could reappear in local law enforcement, private security, militias, and online extremist networks. While their location has changed, their self-image will remain the same.
Re-composition: Groups formerly under federal mandate often reorganize, explicitly or implicitly, around the same narratives that once justified their actions. Violence is no longer framed as enforcement, but as “defense,” “patriotism,” or “restoration of order.” Groups may start appearing outside the law, just like the KKK appeared right after the Civil War.
Moral inversion: Individuals who once acted under state sanction may even come to see the state itself as illegitimate. History shows this clearly: post-Reconstruction militias in the American South illustrate how former enforcers, stripped of formal authority, reinterpreted extra-legal violence as defending “order” against a state they no longer recognized. Internationally, the collapse of French Algeria offers an interesting parallel: after withdrawing from the colony in 1962, former counterinsurgency forces, the Organisation Armée Secrète, turned their violence against the French state, assassinating officials and bombing civilian targets in France. When state-sanctioned enforcers lose formal authority, the narratives that justified violence do not disappear. We may see the emergence of militia groups targeting what they believe is an illegitimate government.
In short: dismantling ICE without reintegration and oversight is more dangerous than anyone seems to realize.
The harder question
Calls to defund and abolish ICE remain morally compelling, but incomplete. We need to have a serious conversation about what the enforcers of yesterday will become tomorrow. History offers relevant precedents, the most striking of which is de-Nazification.
When Nazi Germany collapsed, its enforcers did not simply return to civilian life unchanged—dismantling the regime required significant investment in education, accountability, and a deliberate cultural reckoning to establish that the behavior of the prior regime was unacceptable. We may need to ask ourselves similar questions as to how we ensure ICE agents do not revert to violence. That might mean mandatory reintegration programs, psychological support for personnel leaving the agency, and explicit community engagement requirements before former agents can move into other roles.
Ending ICE is not just about cutting a line item. It is about ensuring that what ICE has built—the culture, the identity, the permission to use force—does not simply move somewhere it is even harder to control.
Benjamin Aimlin is a New York-based French-American Managing Director at an international consulting firm who writes about democratic institutions and policy.
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