SOMETIMES THE LEFT HAND DOESN’T KNOW WHAT THE FAR LEFT HAND IS DOING: Democrats Are Begging Radical Members Not To Revive the ‘Abolish ICE’ Craze. It’s Not Working.

Sensible Democrats who care about winning elections are begging their elected leaders to ignore the screeching activists who are (once again) hounding them to abolish ICE, the immigration enforcement agency.

It’s not going very well.

Two left-leaning advocacy groups published memos this week urging Democrats not to get swept up in the frenzy of anti-ICE rhetoric unleashed after an ICE officer shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis. The Searchlight Institute, a think tank founded by former Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) adviser Adam Jentleson, thought it was necessary to remind Democrats that “advocating for abolishing ICE is tantamount to advocating for stopping enforcement of all of our immigration laws,” a policy that is “wrong on the merits and at odds with the American public.”

Third Way, another moderate think tank, warned Democrats that caving to the “abolish ICE” mob would be politically “lethal” and squander “one of the clearest opportunities in years” for meaningful reform. That is precisely what happened in 2020, the group argued, when enough Democrats embraced (or refused to condemn) the activist-led campaign to “defund the police” following George Floyd’s death. “We shouldn’t be the party against enforcement entirely,” Third Way wrote on X.

The rhetoric on the left could get even zanier:

If you were to pin Walz or Omar or any of them down in an interview, their answers would eventually land on this, but we have a media that not only refuses to do that, but agrees with them.

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) January 15, 2026

(Classical allusion in headline.)