Explaining crazy: Abolishment
One criticism I hear a lot about the left is whenever the term “abolish” is used. Abolish the police, prison abolition, abolish ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement).
In a recent interview with Pod Save America (video above), Adam Smith, a member of the house of representatives for Washington's 9th congressional district, mentioned how around 10 years ago, abolish ICE “became a thing.” He said that it was a bad slogan and that “we have to have border enforcement.” The implication is that if we don’t have ICE, people will just be able to easily cross the border and we won’t have any border enforcement.
They don’t know what abolishment truly means. The word abolish is defined as the ending or doing away with something, as defined by websters-dictionary.
The mistake that critics of abolishment is that they believe that to abolish a system means to not carry out the duties that the system was in charge of. Police, prisons, ICE, FBI, and the CIA are all law enforcement systems that WE CREATED.
Modern day police started in the early 1700’s where it’s duties were just “Slave Patrol.” By the 1900’s, police departments were created to enforce local lawas, focused on enforcing Jim Crow laws. Over time, police started getting more duties over time, until it became what we know it is today.
People may think that putting people in prisons long term as punishment was something people always did, it wasn’t until after the Revolutionary War (~ 1783) that prisons were used regularly (short term jail sentences did occur in Europe before then).
At the beginning of the 20th century, as the population in cities and around the country increased, the FBI was created to deal with major crime across the United States. After World War II, the CIA was created, taking over gathering foreign intelligence from the FBI and the U.S. Armed Services.
ICE wasn’t created until 2003, within the Department of Homeland Security, while absorbing parts of 22 different federal agencies. It’s not that we didn’t have border security before 2003, it was just done by different agencies.
When people on the left call for Abolishing ICE, they aren’t saying that there shouldn’t be any security on the border, and everyone should be let in no matter what. They are asking for us to do border security in a more humane way. Not only that, doing it humanely maybe even more efficient then what we are currently doing.
ICE spent roughly $3.5 billion dollars on immigration detention centers, around three times more then the $840 million on the immigration court system and $424 million on the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ refugee and asylum division. Spending more money on detention then trying to get through the cases for those who are detained end up causing an increase of backlogs and delays, causing more problems then it solves.
We created these systems over 300 years of the history of our country. These systems were created by people who didn’t have access to the information and resources we have now, in a society that is completely different then the one we live in now. Maybe we could use the information we have now to start building new systems.
This is what many people critical of the left do, they isolate each belief the left has, then act as if that is the only thing they want done in relation to that belief.
When “the left” called for the decriminalization of crossing the border (illegally), they weren’t saying that we should let anyone cross the border and go whereever they want, they were saying that most people who cross the borders aren’t bad people, but most of them are people escaping horrible enviornments. It didn’t mean we weren’t going to deport anyone here illegally, it meant that the system we currently have is inhumane, so while we fix it over time, we should treat them with dignity.
Before ICE was created, the INS and US Customs Service was responsible for many of the duties ICE was in charge of. When “the left” calls for the abolishment of ICE, it doesn’t mean that all the duties that ICE have are not going to get done, but that we are going to build new systems to take care of those duties more humanely.
As for the other times abolish is used, it is usually used on systems that are hundreds of years old, and most likely outdated and inefficient. Its not that we don’t want to do what those systems are doing, but we want to build new systems to do them better. It’s time to start building something new, instead of trying to rework things that have stopped working.