Oh, here we go again. Whenever things are so bad that elected Democrats are actually calling for what voters want, some fresh, shiny-faced crop of party operatives start playing Paul Revere. This time, they're warning that Dems risk falling into a “trap” of Donald Trump’s making if they revive calls for the abolition of ICE, comparing it to the results of the "Defund The Police" movement. Via the Bulwark:

The memo, put together by Searchlight Institute and released on Wednesday, draws a direct comparison between the anger felt by voters following last week’s shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis and the killing of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin in the same city in 2020. The calls to “defund the police” in the wake of that tragedy, the group writes, may have felt righteous in the moment. But it constituted bad policy when adopted literally, and handed a massive cudgel to Republicans electorally. The same, writes Blas Nuñez-Neto, a senior policy fellow at Searchlight, is true of “Abolish ICE” now.

“‘Abolish ICE’ is not some proxy for more humane immigration enforcement, or to change ICE’s culture to adhere to due process, or to impose accountability on rogue officers. Itʼs advocating for an extreme,” the memo reads. “Unless you truly believe that the United States should not have an agency that enforces immigration and customs laws within our borders, and you want to increase illegal immigration, you should not say you want to abolish ICE.” Instead, the memo encourages Democrats to adopt an alternative approach toward ICE, one it calls “Reform and Retrain.”

Dear Senior Policy Fellow, let's go back to Sesame Street. Because one of these things is not like the other!

Cops are actual trained police officers. In most of the country, the job requires at least an associates degree and supervised training. But because they're cops, and they're gotten away with shit for so long, they see any infringement on their "right" to do whatever the fuck they want as a existential threat BECAUSE they're cops. All over the country, cops slowed down their work or even stopped completely in the wake of the George Floyd protests, because their fee-fees are so hurt. Here in Philadelphia, some cops just folded their arms and watched as looters destroyed our neighborhoods. "You want to defund the police? This is what it looks like." (Just for clarity: It was never protesters who looted our stores. It was criminal gangs organized on social media.)

The public, being the ill- or partially-informed bunch so many of them are, freaked out when they heard "Defund the police." Many of them lived in crime-ridden neighborhoods and count on the police to keep them safe, and that was the perfect opening for the Republicans.

Voters thought it meant taking cops off the street, period. It was a failure of Democratic messaging, not message. Dems were talking about splitting off functions that were more like social work, because those things are effective in reducing crime -- but they didn't say that. So the messaging was a mess. It has to fit on a bumper sticker.

Now, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and Border Patrol have become violent, lawless paramilitary troops who follow the orders of Mafia Don and Stephen Miller. In fact, Mafia Don rode to reelection by fabricating the need for a massive surge of officers to fight imaginary mobs at the border -- and the media ran with it.

Right now, Americans see unfiltered ICE and Border Patrol in action on social media every single day, all over the country. We just saw a young mom get shot and killed at point-blank range, and Americans are watching in disgust as local shopkeepers, workers, teachers, and retail workers are brutally hauled off in their neighborhoods. People with no criminal records, and many of them U.S. citizens. I mean, they've even detained Native Americans! Where do they expect to deport them? Not to mention some of these people just... disappear.

Thanks to cell phones, we get to see what they're doing, and it has nothing to do with the law.

Let's just say when you have little old ladies standing out in freezing temperatures on the suburban highways with signs saying "Abolish Ice," Dems should listen, not run in the opposite direction.