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.
