David Michael Miller
Madison’s congressman Mark Pocan is a skilled politician with excellent political instincts. But nobody bats a thousand and Pocan’s proposal to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is a political strike out.
Pocan’s argument on the merits is that we did fine before ICE was created in 2003 as part of the response to the 911 attacks and that the agency has been used by President Trump to enforce his inhumane and harsh immigration policies. What brought it to a head for Pocan was a visit to the Mexican border where he saw firsthand the impacts of the family separations that ICE is enforcing on behalf of the president.
But that last point is what matters. ICE is just an arm of the federal government. It will enforce whatever policies elected officials endorse. Pocan is, maybe inadvertently, suggesting that what we have here is a rogue agency that needs to be stopped. But what we actually have is a rogue president who needs to be stopped.
Focusing on ICE takes the focus off Trump. The images of separated families should outrage and inspire liberals to get out and vote and it should help move those few persuadable voters in the middle to vote against the president and his policies.
So it’s a blunder for Democrats to confuse the narrative by tossing ICE into the mix as a bogeyman. The bad guy in this story is Donald J. Trump and the legislators who support his policies, not a bunch of faceless bureaucrats who are just carrying out policies designed by those who should be held accountable. Ending ICE is like cutting off the flower of a weed without getting at the root. It’ll just grow back, in the case of the policies that ICE is enforcing, in some other form. (My Isthmus colleague, Alan Talaga, takes the opposite view.)
If Pocan’s political intent was to excite the base, that’s unnecessary. The left was plenty excited even before Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement put everyone into overdrive. Look at the victories in Virginia, Alabama, in Wisconsin’s 10th and 1st state Senate districts and in our most recent Supreme Court race. Look at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s surprising victory in the Democratic congressional primary in the Bronx. Nobody needs to find another issue to get the left going.
On the other hand, abolishing ICE will sound like a radical idea to moderate voters who might hate Trump’s immigration policies and yet also feel that immigrants need vetting. Pocan’s statement on the subject explains how enforcement of reasonable immigration laws would still take place and could even be improved without the focus on rounding up otherwise law-abiding people, but in a world of Twitter wars, that kind of detail is going to go unheard.
Swing voters — what remains of them — will only hear that the Democrats are proposing that we drop our border protections altogether. That’s wrong, but unfortunately, in a world dominated by social media and choose-your-own-news outlets, the subtle rational argument will not necessarily win the day. In fact, you can pretty much bet the farm that it won’t.
In politics it’s important to keep your eyes on the prize and the prize right now is winning a bunch of elections in November. As a practical matter, ICE won’t be abolished and talking about it does not help the bigger cause.
