Vice President Kamala Harris, set to replace President Joe Biden as the Democrat nominee for president, once suggested support for the “Abolish ICE” movement, which seeks to eliminate Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is tasked with detaining and deporting illegal aliens.
The Abolish ICE movement gained traction within the Democrat Party in mid-2018 when open borders activists demanded that all arrests and deportations of illegal aliens be stopped. When Biden and Harris took office in late January 2021, they temporarily halted deportations for 100 days.
In June 2018, MSNBC reporter Kasie Hunt interviewed Harris, a United States senator representing California at the time, about her position on the Abolish ICE movement.
“A lot of the signs at the rally you just held were people standing there saying, ‘Abolish ICE.’ Is that a position that you agree with?” Hunt asked, to which Harris responded:
Listen, I think there’s no question that we’ve got to critically reexamine ICE and its role and the way that it is being administered and the work it is doing, and we need to probably think about starting from scratch because there’s a lot that is wrong with the way that it is conducting itself, and we need to deal with that. [Emphasis added]
Harris went on to say that ICE’s “mission is very much in question and has to be reexamined.”
At the time, Breitbart News found that had ICE been abolished five years prior, there would have been about 1.4 million criminal illegal aliens released into American communities rather than being arrested and deported from the U.S.
Soon after taking office, Biden named Harris the White House’s “border czar” — putting her in charge of the nation’s illegal immigration crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Critics have claimed that the Biden-Harris administration has been abolishing ICE from within the agency by making dramatic policy changes to cut down the number of illegal aliens arrested and deported from the interior of the U.S.
ICE data from Fiscal Year 2023 revealed that illegal aliens have just a less than five percent chance of being deported from the U.S. on Biden and Harris’s watch.
In Fiscal Year 2023, more than 3.2 million illegal aliens were encountered at the nation’s borders while just 142,580 illegal aliens were deported by ICE agents over the same period. In practice, illegal aliens who arrived in the U.S. in 2023 had just a 4.4 percent chance of being deported within the year.
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Randy Clark / BreitbartJohn Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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