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By Kate Plummer
Senior US News Reporter
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When 37-year-old U.S. citizen Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed by Jonathan Ross, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer, it triggered an international debate about the reasonableness of his response.
Good was shot in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on a street in south Minneapolis, near East 34th Street and Portland Avenue, after agents asked her to exit her vehicle. The Trump administration defended Ross, with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claiming Good had "attempted to run a law enforcement officer over” before she was shot. But critics condemned the killing, with the city's mayor, Jacob Frey, calling it "reckless." Protests around the U.S. erupted. The nation pored over videos from the scene in efforts to make sense of what happened. The Department of Justice is not investigating the incident, but the nation remains jarred and divided.
Indeed, Good's death erupted beyond a discourse about the actions of one agent and became microcosm of a larger issue. From its ashes, a previously discarded progressive movement rose once more, posing the question: Should America abolish ICE?
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Jeff Migliozzi, communications director at the non-profit Freedom for Immigrants, told Newsweek: "People all across the country are waking up to the fact that ICE is antithetical to our shared values of fairness and freedom. As we have witnessed all over—from LA, to Chicago, to Minneapolis—immigration enforcement is deliberately violent, chaotic, and designed to sow fear and separate families."
Newsweek reached out to ICE by email to comment on this story.
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the subsidiary agency ICE were established under the Homeland Security Act in 2002, after 9/11. Tasked with public safety and national security amid former President George W. Bush's War on Terror, the agency was given powers to detain people they suspected were in the country illegally.
Within some 13 years, the political context had shifted. Discontent about the agency bubbled to the surface during President Donald Trump's first administration when DHS faced backlash for separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border. The so-called "Abolish ICE" movement attracted the support of high-profile progressives, but it fizzled out because it failed to gain the support of moderate Democrats, especially when former President Joe Biden took office in 2021, catapulting the Dems from opposition to governance.
But Trump's latest term has caused the dial to shift anew. Since assuming office for the second time in January 2025, he has made immigration enforcement a key pillar of his administration. The "One Big Beautiful Bill" spending package, which was passed by Congress in July, expands funding for ICE and the DHS agency U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), including allocating $8 billion to hire 10,000 new deportation officers.
Since his return to office, several ICE-involved shootings have occurred across the country, including in major cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, where Keith Porter, 43, was fatally shot by an off-duty ICE agent on New Year’s Eve in the Northridge neighborhood. DHS said the off-duty agent heard gunfire near his apartment and that when he went outside to inspect, he saw Porter holding a firearm.
So, by the time Good died, anti-ICE sentiment was already rising to the surface.
"People who want to abolish ICE are united by their belief that the agency does more harm than good," César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a professor of law and expert in civil rights at Ohio State University College of Law, told Newsweek.
Not everyone agrees that the agency should be shuttered. Senator Tina Smith, a Minnesota Democrat, told CNN's Inside Politics Sunday that ICE should be "reformed, not abolished."
Searchlight, a Democrat-aligned think tank, wrote in a policy memo that Democrats should advocate for reform rather than the abolition of ICE.
"Confronted by these excesses, some on the left have renewed their calls to 'abolish ICE,'" it said. "Advocating for abolishing ICE is tantamount to advocating for stopping enforcement of all of our immigration laws in the interior of the United States—a policy position that is both wrong on the merits and at odds with the American public on the issue.
“'Abolish ICE' is exchanging one kind of lawlessness for another. It means that you support getting rid of the agency responsible for enforcing immigration and customs laws, creating a lawless system where people who enter the country illegally can stay here indefinitely, leaving no agency charged with finding and removing them."
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Graham Platner, who is running to challenge Republican Senator Susan Collins in Maine's battleground race, wrote in a post to X: “When you send armed, under-trained amateurs into American communities with vague orders and no accountability, this is inevitable. ICE must be dismantled."
Former Representative Cori Bush, a Missouri Democrat who is seeking a rematch after losing her primary to Representative Wesley Bell, also said the agency should be abolished.
“ICE’s murder of a legal observer in Minneapolis is an outrage," she wrote. "We must stop this rogue agency and get these masked federal agents out of our cities now. Congress has to stand up to the president and put an end to this state violence. Abolish ICE.”
Moving the backlash from social media rhetoric to legislative action, Democratic Congressman Shri Thanedar of Michigan introduced the Abolish ICE Act earlier this month, arguing that "ICE has been weaponized to infict terror and hysteria." Thanedar’s legislation calls for the termination of federal funding to ICE, the rescission of its unobligated funds, and the formal dissolution of the agency within 90 days of enactment.
Given the GOP's majorities in Congress, the act is unlikely to pass, but if politicians wanted to abolish ICE, they might get the public on board. A YouGov/Economist poll conducted January 9-12 found 46 percent of Americans now support abolishing ICE, a huge increase from 27 percent in June 2025.
Meanwhile, according to a recent CBS News/YouGov poll, 61 percent of Americans believe ICE tactics are "too tough." A further 52 percent said ICE is making communities "less safe" where it conducts operations, compared to 31 percent who said communities are "more safe."
With some celebrities, including Ariana Grande, Mark Ruffalo and Wanda Sykes, wearing anti-ICE pins at the Golden Globe awards earlier this month, it is clear the sentiment has taken root.
Matt Boaz, a law professor specializing in immigration at the University of Kentucky, told Newsweek: "There is a widespread desire among both Republican and Democratic constituents to move out of the extreme violence that we are observing. When the government sends masked agents with guns, pepper spray, and unmarked vehicles to interrogate minorities on the street, the people (writ large) begin to ask some pretty pointed questions regardless of their political affiliation."
Maureen Sweeney, a law school professor at the University of Maryland, said: "It is important to remember that immigration enforcement is a civil matter in the U.S., neither criminal nor, much less, military. Many people find that the current enforcement atmosphere has grossly exceeded what is appropriate for government agents charged with enforcing the civil immigration laws. It can be helpful to think about analogous civil law enforcement systems: how would the public react if enforcers of tax or environmental or worker safety law at the IRS, the EPA or OSHA were to take to the streets in military gear, face masks and weapons to enforce those laws?"
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As ICE backlash rumbles on, academics have opined on the feasibility of abolishing the agency. Hernández told Newsweek: "It is not difficult to imagine the United States without ICE. Like the rest of DHS, ICE was formally created in 2002 and effectively launched in 2003, making it less than 25 years old. Many of us can remember life without ICE. From the late 19th century through all of the 20th century, policymakers altered immigration law as the political winds demanded. Sometimes there was more enforcement; other times there was less. Always without ICE."
He said that such a plan would lead to less immigration enforcement in the country.
"Were Congress to abolish ICE now, without altering immigration law in any other way, there would be less enforcement of immigration laws within the interior of the United States in the parts of the country where the Border Patrol typically doesn’t operate," Hernández said. "There is no right answer to how forcefully the United States government should enforce immigration law; that is instead just a reflection of how much a person weighs the costs of people violating immigration law versus the costs of enforcing immigration laws, including the financial cost of financing ICE and the human toll of detaining and deporting people. Supporters of the agency would surely find less enforcement troubling, while ICE’s critics—who weigh more heavily than its supporters the harms that enforcement metes out—would find that refreshing."
"It is difficult to imagine Congress abolishing ICE without it also restructuring immigration law to better reflect the modern world," he added.
But Sweeney said: "Abolishing ICE does not necessarily mean that there would be no immigration enforcement, just that it would not be what it is currently."
"There is actually no provision in our country’s founding documents, including the Constitution, that authorizes the federal government to regulate immigration," she told Newsweek. "As a result, the shape and scope and limits of immigration law are the result of laws passed by Congress and by the interpretations by courts of those laws and their enforcement."
Boez said the administration could implement other strategies to address enforcement.
"Because immigration violations are civil in nature, the United States could utilize its bureaucratic expertise to respond with options for regularizing one’s status rather than just focusing on aggressive enforcement," he told Newsweek. "At present, non-compliance is met with a single sanction—deportation."
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This could prove cost-saving, he added.
"A primary purpose of immigration detention is to ensure one’s appearance for their immigration court proceedings. However, detaining individuals is extremely expensive—anywhere from $150 per day for single men, to $300 per person per day for families, to more than $100,000 per person per day for those held in Guantanamo," Boaz said. "Alternatives to detention (ATD) programs, which monitor individuals through apps or other reporting mechanisms, frequently cost just $5 per day or less, but have been largely abandoned in favor of detention under the current administration."
He continued: "Moreover, many of those who are held in detention are likely eligible for some form of relief—a significant proportion will eventually gain status in the United States, either through asylum, their relationship to a U.S. citizen, or some other form of protection. Yet the government spends billions of dollars each year to detain hundreds of thousands of people at various points in their removal proceedings. Some believe that this is an effort to cajole those who are imprisoned to give up their claims for relief."
The money allocated to ICE could fund other projects, immigration advocates argue.
"These agencies have an immense amount of funding that could instead be going towards our real needs like education, housing, and food," Migliozzi said.
Sarah Sherman-Stokes, associate director and clinical associate professor at the Immigrants' Rights and Human Trafficking Program at Boston University School of Law, told Newsweek: "Abolishing ICE would create space to reimagine a humane immigration system that acknowledges the humanity of immigrants, their families, and their communities."
Regardless of how durable the agency is, it is inevitable that it will continue to draw scrutiny while Trump implements his immigration agenda. Boaz said: "Though it has taken the extreme acts of the present administration to compel this realization, support for abolishing ICE is seemingly at an apex. With good reason—the American people do not want community members literally torn from the arms of their families or shot dead in the streets in the name of enforcing immigration law."
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