And now, let’s talk about ICE…

With his limitless charm, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has managed to win over even the most hardened Democratic pragmatists—the kind of establishment politicians and operatives who typically wouldn’t shower a democratic socialist with the sort of praise the mayor has received since winning his election last November. But on Tuesday, Mamdani waded into the raging debate over the term “Abolish ICE,” and reminded his new centrist admirers that he is still very much a man of the left.

Appearing on The View, Mamdani was asked by host Alyssa Farah Griffin about “renewed calls” from progressives to abolish ICE in the wake of Renee Good’s killing in Minnesota, heated protests in Minneapolis and other cities, and videos circulating everywhere showing masked ICE agents behaving badly—clips that have so saturated our social media feeds that one study estimates ICE-related videos have generated 8.5 billion views in the last three weeks alone. “I am in support of abolishing ICE, and I will tell you why,” Mamdani said, earning applause from the studio audience. “Because what we see is an entity that has no interest in fulfilling its stated reason to exist. We’re seeing a government agency that is supposed to be enforcing some kind of an immigration law, but instead what it’s doing is terrorizing people no matter their immigration status, no matter the facts of the law, no matter the facts of the case.” His answer might not be a surprise. Mamdani leads a Democratic city, full of educated liberals and vulnerable immigrants, facing ongoing ICE raids and other threats from the Trump administration. One recent poll from YouGov, which I wrote about last week, found that 46 percent of Americans now support abolishing ICE. That number is surely higher in New York City. But beyond New York, in competitive House and Senate districts this year, Mamdani’s words will also serve as chum for G.O.P. campaign ads and messaging aimed at spooking voters—most of whom still side with Republicans over Democrats on matters of immigration, even if ICE itself has become a drag on Trump. That’s the fear, at least, of Adam Jentleson, the founder and president of the Searchlight Institute, the Democratic think tank he launched last year alongside other prominent operatives proudly hailing from the ideological middle. With a swirl of polling and memos, Searchlight has been urging Democratic candidates to avoid left-wing concepts and the sort of buzzy online slogans about crime, immigration, and sex that pulled the party outside the cultural mainstream during the Trump era and helped drag down Kamala Harris in 2024. One of those slogans was—and remains—“Abolish ICE.” To Jentleson, the words are simply a toxic rerun of “Defund the Police,” a phrase activists adopted in 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, that immediately repelled independent and swing voters, including many voters of color. Fairly or not, many years later, “Defund the Police” still comes up in focus groups with voters as an example of Democratic radicalism. “Abolish ICE is similar to Defund in that it is the least popular item on a list of otherwise very aggressive reforms that the public would support,” Jentleson told me. Among those reforms: prohibiting warrantless street grabs and masks for ICE agents, imposing real consequences on agents who violate their training, and committing to legal due process for everyone targeted by enforcement. But as Jentleson and his allies see it, the “Abolish ICE” slogan simply reads to voters as “Abolish Immigration Enforcement”—which is decidedly not what mainstream America wants to hear. “What we saw in 2020, with Defund the Police, was a moment that offered the potential for genuine reform on policing that would’ve helped the people who are suffering from these abuses,” he said. “And we squandered it because we decided to go all in on a dumb slogan that backfired.” I talked to Jentleson this week about the rhetorical fight over ICE and immigration reform that’s raging inside the Democratic Party; what he sees as bad messaging and good messaging; which politicians are getting it right; and why Democrats can’t lose sight of the fact that Trump and Republicans have a durable edge on immigration and border security even as ICE grows more unpopular by the day.

Peter Hamby: Last week, Searchlight sent out a memo urging activists and politicians to avoid using the term “Abolish ICE.” It was headlined “Reform and Retrain ICE, Don’t Abolish It,” making the case that the slogan would spark backlash and distract from real reforms that are possible at the agency. One of your old colleagues from the John Fetterman campaign, Brendan McPhillips, dunked on it pretty hard. He said, “If you are a Dem who received the Searchlight memo encouraging you to talk about ICE using the phrase ‘Reform and Retrain,’ please shred that dumbass advice before it seeps its way into your brain while your neighbors are out there getting shot in the face.” What’s your response to that? Adam Jentleson: You have to never lose sight of the American public. The Overton window swings both ways. And the worst thing you can do in a situation like this is take a stance that’s going to feed the kind of reactionary backlash that has helped Trump get back in office, and that squandered our chance at genuine police reform in 2020. And it didn’t go away. In 2024, Kamala paid dearly for a stance that she took in 2019. The words you use matter, and if you decide to take this stance now, in the heat of the moment, that is going to be on the record—and it’s going to come back at you a year from now, when public opinion has probably settled back down.

There are good and bad uses of issue-based polling. One of the approaches we take at Searchlight is to try to separate those two. A bad use is to get caught up in what are likely short-term trends. A good use is to utilize it to understand what are likely the fundamental features of American public opinion. And one of those features is that people want to see strong enforcement of immigration laws. They want it to be fair, they want it to be just, and they want it to be based in due process. They don’t want agents to be wearing masks, but fundamentally, they believe that our immigration laws should be enforced, and that’s not going to change. Support for ICE specifically might toggle up and down, but Americans are never going to want to stop seeing real enforcement of immigration laws. So what do you think voters hear when they hear the slogan? When you say “Abolish ICE,” it is entirely reasonable for a voter to conclude that you want to get rid of the agency that is charged primarily with enforcing our immigration laws within our borders. I know that when people say it, they go on to say, Well, I don’t really mean get rid of it altogether. I mean get rid of it and then immediately build something back up in its place. But it would be completely reasonable for a voter to conclude from that statement that you just want to get rid of this agency altogether. They might not hear the second part of what you say, and Republicans certainly are going to try to make sure they don’t hear it, which is another thing that reminds me deeply of Defund, where everybody said, Well, I don't really mean Defund. I mean reallocate, I mean shift funding, blah, blah, blah. That’s the same dynamic we’re walking into here. Zohran Mamdani, I think we both agree, is a very good messenger on the economy. But he is from New York. He is not from Central Pennsylvania. And he went on The View and said flatly that we should abolish ICE. I guess your worry is that his clip gets plugged into Republican campaign ads and digital content in frontline, purple districts all over the country? I’m absolutely worried, because that’s definitely going to happen! And I admire Zohran a lot. I probably would’ve voted for him if I lived in New York, but that is not going to play well in the states we need to win if we’re going to have any hope of taking back the Senate. It’s a fine stance for him to take for New York City, but that’s not going to play well in Texas or Ohio or Florida or North Carolina. And that’s the problem—that this conversation happens on Twitter, and it happens in a bubble. What we really need to be thinking about is, what is the right fit for the states that are going to make or break our ability to take back the Senate? Instead of asking what Zohran can get away with in New York, we should be thinking about what’s going to help Roy Cooper win North Carolina, and work backward from there.

What about impeaching Kristi Noem? That’s also out there. I think impeachment is overplayed at this point. Do I want her out of office? Sure. Is there any chance of that happening? Absolutely not. And do I think that it would be a good use of the Democrats’ time if they had to take back the House? Probably not, because it’s not going to go anywhere in the Senate. I think we’re doing a lot of performative politics these days, the goal of which is not winning back power, and I think that’s a problem.

You tweeted out some Wall Street Journal polling indicating that, as much as Trump is in the dumps on a variety of issues, Democrats still are not trusted by most voters on a range of issues, other than healthcare and a few others. How can Democrats regain trust with voters on border security in this moment, especially after the Joe Biden years? Rather than just saying, “Abolish ICE is bad,” what should they say? I actually would push back on it a little, because I think Democrats within our recent memory were trusted by voters over Republicans on immigration… and I think it’s very fatalistic to just say, We’re never going to win on this issue, Republicans are always going to win. It leads us to bad places strategically. Politics is fundamentally about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and one of those top needs is security. If Democrats just give up on the idea that we can be preferred by voters on security, then we are, at best, fighting with one hand tied behind our back, and, at worst, going to really struggle to ever win at the national level again. We need to think very hard about how we can convince voters that we take enforcement of immigration laws seriously. Go back to 2012, 2013—there are clips of Barack Obama where he would eventually get to points about pathways to citizenship and DACA and protecting Dreamers, but he tended to lead with the need for a strong and secure border. He leaned into talking about how he was intending to deport criminals. You just don’t hear Democrats talking like that anymore. We should be leading with that. That is something the public wants to see. It’s the right thing to do because it’s what the laws say. Taking enforcement seriously is something we need to center on, and not just get around to as sort of the fifth or sixth point after three follow-up questions.

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