Forget the useless so-called “reforms” to ICE and policing currently on offer. We need much more fundamental change.
US federal immigration agents patrol in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on February 4, 2026.(Charly Triballeau / AFP via Getty Images)
As the scale and scope of state violence against migrants and the neighbors and community members who protect them—including the murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis and of Keith Porter and Silverio Villegas González by ICE in Los Angeles and Chicago—has rapidly escalated over the first year of the second Trump administration, so have the familiar calls for quick fixes for state violence.
Meanwhile, hopes placed in Democrats to save us by finally recognizing that the police state they have helped build is the vehicle through which authoritarianism is being consolidated are repeatedly dashed. This is true of the party’s recent, tepid proposals to put “guardrails” on ICE.
The plan calls on agents to stop wearing masks; identify themselves; don body cameras and standardized uniforms; follow existing laws that prohibit racial profiling and require a warrant for agents to enter private property; and verify whether a person is a US citizen before detaining them (thus continuing to legitimize detention of non-citizens).
All of these small fixes patently fail to present any real challenge to the systems and agencies that are waging war on our communities—though, if agreed to, they would clear the way for Democrats to vote for record funding for ICE.
The proposed “reforms” advanced in the face of mounting calls to defund and abolish ICE are simply a rogue’s gallery of the usual suspects trotted out whenever the violence of law enforcement shocks the public conscience. As discussed in detail in No More Police: A Case for Abolition, a book I cowrote with Mariame Kaba, they have been touted and tried over and over for decades, and in some cases, centuries, without changing the fundamental nature and practices of policing.
The failure of body cameras to prevent police violence while increasing the surveillance that fuels incarceration, detention, and deportation machines has been well documented. As widely reported, the agents who killed Good and Pretti were already wearing body cameras–as is the case for countless cops who have committed egregious violence on camera over the past decade. Yet policymakers continue to pour millions into the pockets of corporate cronies who sell them as solutions.
Prohibitions on racial profiling have not stopped law enforcement agents from employing a panoply of pretexts to engage in the practice, while warrant requirements didn’t stop police from killing Breonna Taylor, Aiyana Stanley Jones, Kathryn Johnson, to name just a few among many.
The failures of increased police training and oversight have been clear for generations. As many abolitionists have repeatedly pointed out, the Minneapolis Police Department had adopted the vast majority of what are considered “gold standard” reforms at the time of George Floyd’s murder. Derek Chauvin, a 19-year veteran of the MPD at the time of the murder, had been trained not to use the very method he used to kill Floyd.
Similarly, Jonathan Ross, who killed Renee Good, was not a recent recruit straight from the ranks of white supremacist gangs; he is a military veteran with nearly two decades of experience at ICE and the Border Patrol. The two Border Patrol agents who executed Alex Pretti had been in their jobs since 2014 and 2018, respectively. And agents shouldn’t have to be trained not to violate or sexually assault people in their custody. Meanwhile, demands for more training have been used to justify the construction of multimillion-dollar facilities at which law enforcement agents are being trained in the very tactics they are currently using to terrorize communities like Minneapolis.
Other calls for reform include:
Again, we know these “reforms” don’t work—and that calls for increased police prosecutions often wind up serving as a way to protect the image of the criminal punishment system rather than change its nature.
From Minneapolis to Venezuela, from Gaza to Washington, DC, this is a time of staggering chaos, cruelty, and violence.
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There is no silver bullet that will end our current nightmare. The truth is, we all wish there was—which is part of what keeps us reaching for “solutions” in the form of ineffective reforms and reliance on electoral and prosecutorial power. Instead of searching for quick fixes, we would be better served by careful assessment of what got us here, and of how we collectively build the will and power to fight our way out.
While there are many ways to approach these questions, the one people most often turn away from is examining and addressing the central role of criminalization in our current crisis. Criminalization is what got us here, criminalization is what is keeping us here, and more criminalization will definitely not get us out of here.
In order to understand the central role played by criminalization in advancing right-wing, authoritarian, and fascist agendas and regimes, it is important to understand it as a process that extends beyond the passage and enforcement of criminal laws. Criminalization is a political practice that manufactures groups of inherently criminalized “others” for whom rights do not exist in reality (no matter how much “due process” we demand) because they are framed as existential threats to society who must therefore be violently controlled, punished, and removed.
Criminalization allows for the creation and expansion of categories of “enemies within” who threaten an existing or imagined social order, and who therefore must be caged, expelled, and eradicated. Criminalization is the process of creating an “us” and “them,” of dehumanizing and labeling entire populations and groups of people—whether Somali, Venezuelan, or Palestinian, migrants, “antifa,” or trans people—as unworthy of a place in our society, a share in our collective resources, and ultimately, of existence.
In other words, criminalization of an ever-expanding group of people—for instance, a recent presidential edict targets anyone who expresses views deemed “anti-American”—is literally at the core of how fascism and authoritarianism operate, are legitimized, manufacture consent, prey on people’s fears and insecurities, and scapegoat entire communities.
That is why, contrary to baseless assertions that movements to defund and abolish prisons, police, and ICE are partially to blame for where we find ourselves, the refusal to heed these calls is precisely what paved the way for the current regime to seize the reins of repression embedded in the most powerful, resourced, and armed law enforcement apparatus in the world. And it’s why Democrats’ continued commitment to criminalization is the kryptonite to their capacity to offer any meaningful challenge to the consolidation of authoritarian power.
The refusal to recognize how criminalization underpins the egregious state violence we are currently witnessing allows for the exceptionalization of ICE as a “rogue” agency. In fact, it is part of a broader policing nexus terrorizing communities every day across the country, from Customs and Border Protection, Border Patrol, and countless other federal, state, and local enforcement agencies. It also enables people to ignore how ICE tactics mirror those of the cops people are at such pains to distinguish them from.
For every horrifying action by ICE or CBP agents that has catapulted into the headlines—breaking into people’s homes and cars without warrants; hunting people down based on the color of their skin or the language they speak; tossing chemical weapons into homes, cars, and classrooms filled with children and families and spraying them directly into people’s eyes and faces; abandoning children (and cars) by the side of the road or alone at home in the wake of an abduction; storming schools and lying in wait at pick up and drop off to kidnap parents and children—I can point to identical incidents committed with cruel and usual regularity by local, state, and federal law enforcement. (Many of these are documented in my books Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, and No More Police: A Case for Abolition, as well as countless other articles, publications, zines, and oral histories.)
The distinctions between the everyday violence of policing and the spectacular violence of ICE are not one of methodology or intent, but rather of scale, scope, and, sometimes, as in the cases of Good and Pretti, the identity of the victims—although, as ICE activity in Minneapolis and across the country has demonstrated, Indigenous, Black and brown people remain the primary targets. I say this not to normalize ICE’s actions—we cannot normalize any acts of violence, nor the rapid consolidation of fascism they further—but to call into question what we have come to take for granted in the way of everyday violence that goes hand in hand with criminalization.
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We are witnessing an acute eruption of what is otherwise a consistent low-grade fever that is foundational to this nation, not an exception to the norm. This does not mean we throw our hands up and say, “Same as it ever was.”
There are effective steps we can take to stop the violence of ICE, many of which are gathered in Interrupting Criminalization’s “Block It! Don’t Build It, Don’t Fill it, Don’t Fuel It!” toolkit, and to confront and reduce the violence policing more generally, as outlined in “So is this Actually an Abolitionist Proposal or Strategy?.” But if ICE’s rampage in Minnesota teaches us anything, it’s that we have to directly confront the forces that got us here. There is no way around the truth that any solutions proffered to ICE violence that fail to strike at the heart of the system that underpins it will leave the door open to resurgence in current and new forms.
Criminalization under any political regime normalizes and legitimizes a certain level of violence, denial of care, and deprivation of necessities for targeted groups. That’s true whether we’re talking about the violence of family separation at the border or prison wall, the violence of solitary confinement, the violence of ICE arrests, cops arresting unhoused people, or police brutalizing protesters. There is also the violence of denying healthcare to migrants, pregnant people, disabled people, or trans people, or the violence of denying access to information, community, and spaces of learning.
Criminalization creates the infrastructure for the escalation of all these forms of violence under authoritarianism and fascism, as we are currently seeing. This includes the expansion of the prison-industrial complex to repress dissent, target adversaries, and disappear disfavored communities, but it is not limited to it. Criminalization manufactures consent for all the extreme forms of state violence necessary to advance and buttress authoritarian regimes.
Criminalization is what made the killing of Renee Good possible by framing people defending their neighbors as “disorderly” and “violent,” and lesbians as outlaws, and it is how the administration is trying to justify the killing of Alex Pretti, a white man who was a VA nurse. But the violence they suffered is experienced as “normal” when it happens to Black people, Indigenous people, unhoused people, people with unmet mental health needs, disabled people, trans people, drug users, “gang members,” people whose opinions we don’t agree with, or people who have done harm. It’s just not “normal” when it starts to happen to people we identify with, in public, or at a scale that forces us to come face-to-face with its consequences.
Criminalization doesn’t stop at the enforcement of criminal laws and policies. As we are seeing with ICE, it is deployed in the administration of civil and administrative laws, regulations, procedures, and practices. We are also witnessing the current regime make use of every tool at its disposal to target any group it deems a threat to its power and agenda through civil subpoenas and investigations, actual or threatened funding cuts, book bans, and attacks on healthcare, family, public benefits, education, and employment.
Criminalization also operates to neutralize resistance—whether used by the regime to paint targets as deserving of violence, or by “our side” when we make distinctions between “regular arrests” and ICE enforcement actions.
When we decry detention and deportation of migrants “with no criminal convictions,” leaving unchallenged incarceration, torture, and extraordinary rendition of “criminals” who are presumed to be deserving of their fate, or when we or insist that resistance be “nonviolent” and non-disruptive, even as federal officials declare that any monitoring or opposition to ICE activity (or their political agenda for that matter) constitutes “violence,” we are playing the other side’s game.
In order to fight our way out, we are going to have to fight for everybody, which requires us to divest ourselves from the notion that some people are not worth fighting for—whether because they are “criminals” or they’re criminalized for being migrants, trans, unhoused, disabled, drug users, pregnant, or their political views.
We are going to have to recognize that no one should be chained to a bed while in need of medical care, whether by ICE or a prison guard or a psychiatric facility. We are going to have to commit to a world where no one is kidnapped from their home, where we don’t pile violence on violence without ending it. We are going to have to recognize that the violence of policing cannot be fixed with cosmetic changes. We are going to have to end our collective investment in criminalization as the default response to every conflict, harm, and need, and as the means by which we build and exercise power.
We are going to have to find another way forward, one rooted in care for all of us. Communities in Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, and across the country are showing us the way. Collective care includes accountability. That requires conditions under which people can recognize, take responsibility for, and repair harm, and transform the conditions that produce it. It means giving things up for the collective good, while simultaneously contending with right-wing narratives that someone is here to “take something” from us. The people really taking from us are the billionaires and kleptocrats robbing workers of the value of their labor, shredding an already porous safety net, and destroying our planet.
The answer is not more criminalization; the answer is a refusal of all death-dealing practices, and a social contract that reflects a collective commitment to the common good.
Interrupting criminalization must therefore be at the core of our response to right-wing, fascist, and authoritarian agendas—not just as a way of defending our movements, or resisting the repression of dissent, migrants, abortion, autism, or trans personhood, but also to treat criminalization as a root of fascism we need to pull on with all our might. In other words, it is by confronting and challenging criminalization at its core that we have the best chance to stop the violence it enables.
Resources
• Check out Block It! Don’t Build It! Don’t Fill It! Don’t Fuel It! A Mini Toolkit to Take Action to Disrupt the ICE Kidnapping, Detention, and Deportation Machine
• Are you a healthcare worker? Join the Beyond Do No Harm Network of healthcare workers committed to interrupting criminalization in the context of access to care.
• Are you a journalist? Check out our Don’t Be a Copagandist series
• Are you a community organizer? Check out One Million Experiments
• Block and Build, but Make It Abolitionist
• So Is This Actually an Abolitionist Proposal or Strategy?
Andrea J. RitchieAndrea J. Ritchie is a nationally recognized expert on policing and criminalization, and supports organizers across the country working to build safer communities. She is cofounder of Interrupting Criminalization, the author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, and the co-author (with Mariame Kaba) of No More Police (The New Press). She lives in Detroit.