The federal agency that handles immigration enforcement within the United States and major homeland security investigations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), will come out of the Biden years unscathed.

Although President Joe Biden never promised to abolish ICE, progressives have pushed Democrats further left on the issue in recent elections. But Biden will finish out his one and only term without having lifted a finger against ICE.

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Muzaffar Chishti, senior fellow at the global Migration Policy Institute in Washington, told the Washington Examiner that the movement fell apart on its own, allowing Biden to get out of the hook.

“The era of people asking for mass migration or for abolishing ICE is gone,” said Chishti. “The abolishing ICE actually whimpered out soon after he got elected.”

How ICE became controversial

The agency was created in March 2003 and its two offices, Homeland Security Investigations as well as Enforcement and Removal Operations, carry out more than 400 federal statutes related to immigration. It is the second-largest criminal investigation organization in the government after the FBI.

ICE began to face public criticism during the Obama administration as deportation levels soared.

The cries to get rid of ICE came in June 2018 following the Trump administration’s decision to separate immigrant children from their parents at the southern border so that the adults could be prosecuted for illegal entry.

Retired ICE chief Thomas Homan told the Washington Examiner at the time that calls to abolish ICE were misdirected because his agents were not the ones separating families, and that the Border Patrol was the entity separating families.

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The movement to terminate ICE

The anti-ICE sentiment and predominant calls to end ICE came during the 2018 off-year election, when 435 members of Congress and roughly one-third of the Senate was up for election.

The idea of terminating ICE has been endorsed by some of the biggest Democratic voices, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY); New York City’s former mayor, Bill de Blasio; and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). The latter two, as well as Biden, ran for president in the 2020 Democratic primary, where the topic was revived during an official debate.

Eric Ruark, research director for Washington-based NumbersUSA, said Biden was not near as adamant as other Democratic candidates in 2020, but he faced significant pressure to get on board with the emerging platform.

“While President Biden never promised to ‘Abolish ICE,’ his campaign was supported by pro-illegal immigration advocacy groups who demanded it, and a video of Kamala Harris dancing and chanting ‘down with deportation’ endeared her to open-border advocates while reinforcing her reputation as a failed ‘Border Czar’ with the general public,” Ruark wrote in an email.

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But Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) told those behind the abolish ICE defund the police slogans the party had no room for their ill-informed ideas.

“If someone like James Clyburn with a strong civil rights record could say things like abolishing police and abolishing ICE is foolhardy, then it became easier for someone like a moderate Democratic president saying that [his previous support for it] was just a mistake,” said Chishti. 

“In many ways, the high-water mark of people using kind of old slogans to make a policy statement, ended soon after Biden got elected, and in many ways … it ended just because of the crisis at the border,” Chishti said.

In December 2020, Democratic lawmakers in the California Assembly and Senate tried to revive the issue. California state politicians sought to pressure Congress with a joint resolution that called for ICE to be shuttered. The state legislature does not have the legal ability to take apart a federal agency — only Congress has that authority.

“The only way we can move past the real damaging impact of ICE is to completely get rid of it and move on. I think with the Biden administration, there’s an opportunity to do that,” said Assemblyman Ash Kalra, one of the bill co-authors.

Although Biden has taken more than 600 actions related to immigration since 2021, according to the Migration Policy Institute, none of them resembled their wishes.

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Abolishing private contracts for ICE detention

In late 2023, calls to abolish ICE went mainstream again as immigration lawyers and civil rights groups are furious with the Biden administration following the release of an NPR report that exposed horrific medical, mental, and physical experiences that immigrants endured while in federal immigration detention.

At last count, more than 90% of illegal immigrant detainees were in facilities managed by private contractors, not the actual government, an increase from 80% during the Trump administration, according to Reuters.

Detention numbers have crept up since 2021, as have profits for one leading contractor, the GEO Group, who made more than $1 billion in 2022, according to its financial disclosures.

Opponents and immigrant rights activists have scorned the use of private contracts for detention, saying that corporations profit from it.

That has also frustrated the advocacy community given Biden’s lack of follow-through on a promise he made as a presidential candidate to do away with for-profit companies operating ICE’s detention centers if elected.

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“No business should profit from the suffering of desperate people fleeing violence,” Biden said on the campaign trail in 2020.

Although Biden took office and quickly issued an executive order to stop handing companies contracts to run the Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons, he did not do so for immigration jails, where noncitizens illegally in the United States may be held as they go through removal proceedings in court. Immigration offenses are not criminal and go before an administrative judge.

Not only has the Biden administration fallen short of a campaign promise, but it is moving forward on building a massive new headquarters for ICE at the Department of Homeland Security’s national headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Late last year, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced the 2024 groundbreaking of the new ICE facility as part of $288 million in projects to improve the department’s campus.

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Ruark maintained that Biden’s legacy would be in the border crisis, and the fact that as a leading issue on voters minds in 2024, they chose to vote him out.

“Biden and Harris will be remembered as Democrats who were responsible for a convincing electoral loss because American voters rejected their immigration policies,” added Ruark.