Once upon a time, near the end of the 2010s — in a decade when political movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter powered ambitious dreams of a more progressive United States, at least for some — the first wave of Donald Trump-led abuses, including the forced separation of families at the southern border, sparked a brief rallying cry: Abolish ICE.

This sound argument — that America had been better off before 2003, when it wasn’t spending billions of dollars to criminalize desperate refugees — was quickly shushed by leading Democrats after their party lost a few 2020 congressional races it had expected to win. They blamed “abolish ICE” and its less-vocalized first cousin, “defund the police” — the slogan of leftists who wanted to redirect money from law enforcement to social programs after a cop murdered George Floyd.

Five years later, how many citizens like Marisa must be thrown out into the rain, how many 4-year-old U.S.-born pediatric cancer patients need to be deported without their meds, how many refugees with innocuous tattoos need to be shackled and flown to a Salvadoran concentration camp, and how many grad students need to be snatched off the street for coauthoring an op-ed, before people admit that maybe the “left-wing lunatics” actually had a good point?

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Hong said that during the 1980s — when Ronald Reagan was president and most of today’s anti-immigration right-wingers thought America was on track — U.S. immigration detention was as low as 35 people. “Not 35,000, or 3,500,” Hong said. “35!” Since ICE was created two years after the 2001 terror attack, the detention number has spiked to today’s nearly 48,000, with hellhole facilities like Miami’s squalid Krome Detention Center that were designed for 600 detainees now holding about 1,700, many sleeping on filthy concrete floors.