Reflections On the Larger Meaning of Abolish ICE

Portland, Oregon Protest, 1/10/26

The protest on January 10th in Portland was deeply inspiring, informative, nourishing, heartfelt, and a gift on every level. People of all ages and ethnicities gathered to listen to speakers and march and stand in peaceful solidarity with countless other human beings in our beautiful city and nationwide in our shared collective grief, outrage, support, and passion for working together for a more just, caring, and peaceful nation and world. 

There are so many lifelines to truth and sanity and wisdom and maintaining open-heartedness in these overwhelming, chaotic, and traumatic times — and these rallies and marches are certainly among them. This was also the third protest that my husband and I had attended in four days in the wake of the killing of Renee Good.

One thing which set this rally apart from the others that Ron and I had recently participated in was the quality of wisdom, truth, and information presented in the speeches. I was deeply moved by all of them. Those who spoke were truly amazing, courageous, inspiring, and wise human beings.

I will be trying to capture in this post the essence of one of the speeches in which we were given a much larger meaning behind "Abolish ICE." So many interwoven issues were connected that I hadn't yet fully recognized, absorbed, and integrated myself. And I am so grateful for each and every experience which expands my knowledge, wisdom, empowerment, and commitment to standing in truth and protection of all humans and nonhumans and our sacred Earth Mother.

I had been unaware that ICE was created as part of the Homeland Security Act of 2002.  That said, I have been conscious of the immense cruelty perpetrated by ICE for some time and have been out there for years protesting through both Democrat and Republican administrations.

Today I am certainly also aware that unless we are among the First Nations Peoples, we are all immigrants. And no one is illegal on stolen indigenous lands. 

Beyond that, what I heard very clearly at Saturday's protest was the truth of how those immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers who are being targeted by ICE for deportation, criminalization, incarceration, and other acts of violence and terror come from countries which — without exception — have been impacted by the foreign policies of the United States. These policies and practices have impoverished the people, poisoned their lands, created the desperation that has given rise to violent gangs, and replaced democratically elected leaders with those who would enable the U.S. to steal their resources.

Think about that. Deeply. 

Through its foreign policies, the United States has created the traumatic and violent circumstances which have given rise to the vast influx of immigrants seeking refuge in our country. And yet ICE and both Democrat and Republican administrations have criminalized, terrorized, and blamed immigrants for their desperation to save themselves and their families — a desperation which has its roots in the imperialism of the American government.

And this is where I was so moved by the immigrant who gave the speech about a much more expansive context for what abolishing ICE means. It isn't just that ICE must be completely dismantled. What needs to happen goes way beyond that to dismantling the circumstances that have given rise to millions worldwide feeling forced to leave their countries of origin because of:

• The endless wars engaged in by the United States
• The resources extracted by the United States from other countries to further enrich the most wealthy while impoverishing the indigenous populations
• The poisoning and environmental destruction of the lands in which the United States has invested in extracting the natural resources
• The catastrophic climate crisis fueled by the refusal of the United States to declare a climate emergency and to join the worldwide efforts to radically shift away from fossil fuels onto renewables
• The dehumanization by our government of those who are the victims of U.S. imperialism
• They and their loved ones are at risk of extreme poverty, imprisonment, torture, and death if they remain in their home countries

Those who are in the late stages of addiction to power and greed in the American government have moved us from the neoliberal/neoconservative eras into this horrifying fascist era that we are now faced with. And this is, certainly in large part, made possible by turning us against each other. 

The poisonous propaganda of polarization disempowers, disinforms, and divides us into believing that immigrants are the problem — or those of the other political party, or those of color, or those of different religions or ethnicities or sexual orientations, and on and on. The us versus the Other is a deadly ideology which completely severs our connection with the wisdom that we are all related, all family, all sacred, all matter.

So, yes, we absolutely need to abolish ICE. And we humans need to come together to dismantle the systems which have given rise to ICE in the first place. 

There is such a deep need to recognize, heal, and transform the impacts within us individually and collectively of the imperialist, white-supremacist, misogynist, capitalist, patriarchal culture that we here in America have been born into. The roots of delusion arising out of the trauma embedded in the ancestral and cultural legacies we have been blindly handed cannot be overstated. 

We are all impacted. And we are responsible, individually and collectively, for what we do with the trauma we carry. May we all come to increasingly embody what we and our world needs to heal.

Bless us all, no exceptions —

Molly