Is the outcry against ICE happening due to its operating methods or is it contesting the legitimacy of ICE altogether?
The hope is that by disbanding ICE and handing its responsibilities over to new management with a better track record, we might get a better outcome.
I don’t think the proponents of this plan would support simply rebadging current ICE employees without some kind of filtering process.
(I don’t have a strong opinion on the matter, just restating the arguments as I understand them.)
- The current administration is super-racist
- The last administration wasn't much better because it used immigration enforcement to appease the right in hopes of obtaining political concessions
- After 9-11 DHS was set up, which was a Bad Idea, and what used to be the Immigration and Naturalization Service was split up into separate administrative (USCIS) and enforcement (ICE) wings; this was bad and correlated with a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment
- Most of the current immigration law dates back to 1996, when an imperfectly working system was swapped out for one that was far more draconian and arguably designed not to work but instead to maximize the number of people deemed 'illegal', which it definitely did
- since the late 60s/early 1970s the primary drivers behind stricter immigration policy have been white supremacists, most notably a guy called John Tanton who set up tons of front groups like FAIR, CIS, US English and so on to promote his extremist views
- but when you get down it US immigration policy has been characterized by waves of racist reaction towards Mexicans, Chinese, Irish, Germans, Italians, etc.
- not to mention the whole slavery/civil war thing, which I mention because today's Abolitionists explicitly model themselves on John Brown and also have fundamental philosophical disagreements with the role and scope of police in society, and finally
- indigenous and non-White (=/= non-caucasian) people are really sick of colonial bullshit.
To sum up, while you might or might not agree with these political stance, and the movement doesn't do the best job of communicating it, Abolitionists are fundamentally opposed to the existing order of society, are solidly grounded in the liberatory traditions of the Enlightenment, and mean business.