Financial Times
By Ben Foldy
July 05, 2018
When Sean McElwee first tweeted “Abolish ICE” on February 23, 2017, it picked up 246 likes and 206 retweets. It was the first entry in a spreadsheet that keeps growing.
Calls to abolish ICE — Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the arm of the US Department of Homeland Security responsible for detaining and deporting undocumented aliens — are now being made across the Democratic party, not just from activists like Mr McElwee, but from congressmen and mayors and potential presidential candidates.
As the Democratic establishment wrestles with whether to embrace the slogan, or the policy, President Donald Trump has already seized on it as a weapon for the political war over immigration. He has denounced ICE’s critics as advocates of “open borders”. #AbolishICE has emerged as a possible touchstone for the midterm elections, or even 2020.
The simplicity of the slogan belies a strategic calculus behind it — reflecting its creator’s background. Mr McElwee, 25, is a graduate student at Columbia University, where he studies quantitative methods in the social sciences, and where his brand of online activism meshes with his studies.
On his Twitter biography, Mr McElwee calls himself an “Overton window mover”. The Overton window, named for the rightwing policy entrepreneur who first described it, is the range of a political idea’s acceptability, ranging from “unthinkable” to the point it becomes policy or law.
A year ago, the idea of abolishing ICE was in the “unthinkable” category for most politicians.
“You make maximalist demands that are rooted in a clear moral vision and you continue to make those demands until those demands are met,” said Mr McElwee. “This is an issue where activists have done a very good job of moving the discussion of what has to be done on immigration to the left very quickly.”
He has tracked the more than 250 times he has used the phrase in tweets in a spreadsheet, noting the responses. More than 14,000 Twitter users have used it as a hashtag, according to his recording of it.
If you are in a competitive Democratic primary and you want to tell your base that you’re where they’re at and ready to take on Trump, this is a way to do that
Sean McElwee, online activist
In January, after Dan Canon, a congressional candidate in southern Indiana, told Mr McElwee that he would support axing ICE, McElwee began actively lobbying candidates to adopt abolition in their platforms — all the while broadcasting his efforts to more than 77,000 followers.
“If you are in a competitive Democratic primary and you want to tell your base that you’re where they’re at and ready to take on Trump, this is a way to do that,” Mr McElwee said.
When the Trump administration announced it would begin separating children from parents in asylum-seeking families earlier this spring, the popular anger had a ready-made slogan.
Mr McElwee knows full well that ICE actually has little to do with the policy of separating families at the border. Its Enforcement and Removal Operations division focuses on apprehending and removing undocumented aliens that have already been living in the US, sometimes for decades.
“But the framework that people had to understand this was the ‘Abolish ICE’ framework,” said McElwee. “People began thinking something has to change dramatically.”
For establishment Democrats facing a potent insurgency from a young, liberal wing, “Abolish ICE” became an even more attractive catch-cry after last month’s unexpected victory of 28-year-old activist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a Democratic congressional primary in New York. At the height of the family separation controversy, she put “Abolish ICE” at the heart of her campaign.
In March, Senator Kamala Harris, tipped as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, told MSNBC: “ICE has a purpose, ICE has a role, ICE should exist.” By the end of last month, her position was different. “We need to probably think about starting from scratch,” Ms Harris said then. “There is a lot that is wrong in the way that it’s conducting itself and we need to deal with that.”
Kirsten Gillibrand, another senator who may run, told CNN: “I believe you should get rid of it, start over, reimagine it and build something that actually works.”
As some Democrats look to their left flank, party strategists fret. “This is going to be a politically winning issue for Republicans and President Trump,” said Ben Rohrbaugh, a consultant on border issues and a former adviser on border security issues during the Obama administration.
“In the last campaign, when Trump accused Democrats of being for open borders, it was false,” he added. “When you have candidates saying ‘abolish ICE’, you are making the president’s claim true. You are running on open borders, which is insane to me.”
Mr McElwee clearly disagrees with that — and his disagreement comes with a warning of more Ocasio-Cortez-style insurgencies.
“At the end of the day, Democrats are going to run on healthcare, tax cuts, maybe some weed and maybe some guns, depending on the district,” he said. “But I think they are going to have a congressional majority and they will know that if they continue to treat the lives of undocumented people as disposable, they’re maybe going to lose a primary next cycle.”
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