ICE officials reportedly met with ‘abolish ICE’ activist to discuss ‘future concepts’

Officials representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reportedly held a private event on Thursday where they discussed the future of the department with a panelist who has previously advocated for the abolition the agency.

The meeting was reported by the Daily Caller News Foundation, who cited an internal document and a source with knowledge of what was discussed in the meeting.

According to the Daily Caller, ICE used the event “to share ideas and inform future concepts” on the “Alternatives to Detention” program, which the agency implemented in 2004 to monitor illegal immigrants released into the country with trackers like ankle bracelets and cell phones as they await court proceedings.

One of the panelist at the event was Peter Markowitz, a professor of law who serves as the Associate Dean of Equity in Curriculum and Teaching, at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Markowitz is also the director of the school’s Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic.

The source, who requested anonymity, told the Daily Caller that Markowitz criticized ICE’s monitoring of illegal immigrants during the meeting.

As the Daily Caller noted, Markowitz has been a harsh critic of ICE, and in a 2019 piece for the Yale Law Journal, called for the abolition of ICE in order to create a new immigration system.

“ICE has failed by every measure. It has brutalized communities, wasted billions of dollars, and failed to increase compliance with immigration laws,” Markowitz reportedly said at the time.

He continued, “The four pillars set forth above provide a blueprint for how a radically new vision for immigration enforcement could increase compliance while simultaneously reducing the human and fiscal costs of enforcement. This blueprint would allow us to abolish ICE and to create an effective and humane enforcement system without the need for any dedicated agency of immigration police.”

He later explained in the piece that the immigration system he had in mind would be one “that is not dependent on mass detention and deportation.”

According to the Daily Caller’s source, Markowitz said that illegal immigrants feel there is a lack of freedom under ICE’s current “Alternatives for Detention” program, and he suggested that they should be allowed to self-report their whereabouts without being tracked.