Amnesty International Calls for ICE to Be Abolished

Amnesty International is done asking for better immigration enforcement. On Thursday, September 24, the human rights organization released a 168-page report calling on the United States to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, arguing that the agency's record of abuse runs too deep for reform to fix. It is one of the strongest positions a major international rights group has taken against a federal agency, and it lands in the middle of a congressional fight over how much money ICE gets next.

According to the report, ICE's suspected abuses span years and touch nearly every part of its operations. The document covers fatal shootings, including the deaths of Alex Pretti and Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, as well as attacks on protesters during enforcement actions. It also describes systemic problems inside detention centers, where immigration detainees have been denied access to attorneys and held in conditions the organization says may amount to torture. The report, reported by USA Today, concludes that these are not isolated failures by a few agents but patterns that run through the institution.

What Amnesty said at the news conference

At a Thursday news conference announcing the report, Amy Fischer, Amnesty's director for refugee and migrant rights in the U.S., said reform is not enough. "There are simply no reforms that would bring this agency into alignment with the United States's human rights obligations," Fischer said. "The scale, persistence and structural nature of these failures cannot be adequately addressed through piecemeal reform." The argument is not that ICE made mistakes and should try harder, but that the agency's structure makes abuse inevitable.

The report's central demand is stated plainly throughout its pages: Amnesty International calls for ICE to Be Abolished. The organization frames the question facing Washington as a choice between dismantling an agency it considers beyond repair and continuing to pour money into it.

Amnesty International is not a small advocacy group issuing a hot take. The organization was founded in the United Kingdom in the 1960s by lawyers working to free unjustly imprisoned people, and it won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977. When an institution with that history says an agency should be dismantled rather than repaired, it carries a different weight than a campaign slogan. For Gen Z readers who have watched ICE enforcement stories dominate feeds all year, from a shooting in Austin that wounded a DoorDash driver to a 200-school walkout in Colorado, this report is a bid to turn that outrage into a policy demand.

Why the timing matters

The report did not arrive in a vacuum. Congress is currently considering a reconciliation package that includes $70 billion in funding for ICE and Customs and Border Protection, which would be a massive expansion of both agencies. Amnesty is pushing back on that expansion directly, and Fischer urged lawmakers to spend that headline funding on food assistance and healthcare instead. "The last thing we need in this country is more cruelty at the hands of ICE and CBP," she said.

The group is also campaigning against the construction of a new family detention center in Alexandria, Louisiana, which it says is planned for a site on or near a toxic waste area. Alongside the report, Amnesty urged Congress to close existing detention centers and prevent the opening of new ones. For a generation that grew up with livestreams of raids and detention center exposés, the image of a family detention center built on contaminated ground is exactly the kind of detail that explains why the abolition argument is gaining ground.

The timing is deliberate. The report arrives amid an ongoing national debate over immigration policy, with Congress weighing whether to expand ICE or rein it in. Amnesty argues that more funding would mean more of the same abuses, because the failures it documented are structural rather than a management problem new leadership could fix. The group is not asking for new oversight rules or a new director. It is asking lawmakers to choose dismantlement over expansion, and to shut down detention centers instead of building new ones.

The White House pushed back

The White House dismissed the report almost immediately. Spokesperson Lauren Bis categorized the findings as "smears" and framed them as an attack on law enforcement officers. "These are smears by the far-Left to vilify ICE law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line every single day to arrest murderers, pedophiles, rapists, gang members, and terrorists from American communities," Bis said in a statement. She added that abolishing ICE would release dangerous people into communities and make Americans less safe. So far, ICE itself has not issued a public response to the report.

ICE was created in 2003, after the September 11 attacks, as part of a reshaping of federal law enforcement under the Department of Homeland Security. For most of its existence, criticism of the agency came from immigration advocates and some lawmakers on the left, while both parties continued to fund and expand it. The Amnesty report breaks with that history by arguing the agency cannot be salvaged. Whether Congress listens is another question. With that headline funding figure on the table, lawmakers are choosing between abolishing the agency and supercharging it. That vote, more than the report itself, is what will decide where this goes.