Are Democrats going to appease their radical base by abolishing ICE?

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is now putting forward a plan to restructure the federal deportation agency in a way that effectively guts its traditional role of arresting and deporting criminal aliens in the country. 

According to a Washington Times report by Stephen Dinan, Mayorkas revealed the idea last week in a telephone meeting with ICE personnel in Texas. In this call, Mayorkas proposed taking 4,000 members of ICE off the streets and transitioning them into roles of criminal investigators.

As a result of this proposed change, ICE agents would no longer be working to enforce laws against aliens illegally residing in the U.S. This entails reducing arrests and deportations.

A number of deportation officers said this move was similar to a major city police department shifting its beat cops into detective roles. As a result of this change, no one would be left to patrol the streets for lesser crimes.

“This is an administrative abolishment of ICE as we currently know it,” an ICE source told The Washington Times.

After the phone call, there were still many questions regarding Mayorkas’ intentions with ICE. Questions about what new training ICE agents would have to go through and the pay structure they would be subject to were not addressed.

According to The Washington Times, Mayorkas was of the opinion that ICE officers were in the wrong pay system. Mayorkas allegedly said that deportation officers are in the wrong pay scale but did suggest the idea of a pay raise.

Under the current federal government job system, deportation officers are categorized as GS-1801 jobs and usually fall under GS-12 pay scale. Criminal investigators hold GS-1811 jobs and fall under the GS-13 pay scale.

Mayorkas’ ploy is to use the promotion offers as a way to get ICE agents on board with his plan to gut deportation enforcement plans.

However, one source revealed that many officers feared that they were being forced out of their original jobs.

“It’s all spin,” the source declared. “We’re not going to abolish ICE, but we really are going to abolish ICE as you know it.”

The abolition of ICE is one of the chief slogans for the multicultural Left in recent years, which is committed to importing destabilization levels of migrants.

How ICE’s abolition would look is “tougher to pin down” as Dinan outlined.

Dinan continued:

They usually aren’t talking about investigating smugglers, street gangs or child pornographers. Homeland Security Investigations, with its 7,000-strong force of GS-1811 criminal investigators, perform those duties.

So far, the “Abolish ICE” crowd is in opposition to the Enforcement and Removal Operations, which is generally tasked with arrests, detention, and deportation of people illegally in the country.

Dinan listed off where the majority of these arrests came from: 

Most of those arrests come from deportation officers picking up people who end up in local prisons or jails. But some fraction are at-large arrests in the community — particularly in areas where state and local sanctuary policies block access to prisons or jails.

The administrative tweaks Mayorkas is implementing are indeed a way to defang ICE in a subtle manner. A traditional legislative effort would likely cause massive backlash from voters who would likely take their anger out on politicians at the polls in 2022.

Border security is crucial in maintaining a stable polity. Republicans who have any iota of nationalism in their bones would take this issue and run with it.

Immigration still remains an issue that resonates well with the grassroots.