Amnesty International has spent years documenting human rights violations by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Their conclusion, after more than two decades of evidence and a fresh investigation across four American cities, is simple: it's time to abolish the agency. Not reform, not defund, not send it to sensitivity training - abolish.
The latest findings, published by Amnesty International USA's director of refugee and migrant rights, Amy Fischer, reveal a chilling pattern that has reached what the organization calls "a new and dangerous scale" under the Trump administration. In large-scale immigration enforcement operations in Chicago, Minneapolis-St Paul, New Orleans and Washington DC, federal agents repeatedly racially profiled and arbitrarily detained people based on their perceived race. Agents targeted workplaces and neighborhoods associated with Black and brown immigrant communities. Fischer spoke with dozens of people - Indigenous people, Black and brown US citizens, and people with legal immigration status - who were racially profiled, stopped, and arbitrarily detained.
In all four cities, people described federal officers using intimidation and unlawful force, including lethal force, against people they were attempting to detain, as well as against community members observing or defending their neighbors. Agents broke down doors with guns drawn, smashed vehicle windows without justification, and threw people to the ground. They used teargas and pepper spray against protesters and observers in public places, often impacting children and surrounding neighborhoods. They also deployed facial recognition technology, drones, and helicopters to unlawfully surveil and intimidate people simultaneously. As a Washington DC resident, Fischer remembers helicopters shaking the windows of her home.
Inside detention facilities, the abuses continued. People were held for prolonged periods in overcrowded, unsanitary facilities not designed for long-term detention, with minimal food, no access to healthcare, and severely restricted access to lawyers. Amnesty concluded these conditions constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and, in some circumstances, may amount to torture. They also documented unlawful incommunicado detention and possible acts of enforced disappearance, including cases where families and lawyers could not locate people in ICE custody. Fischer listened to panicked family members desperately seeking loved ones who had been snatched by masked men in their communities, without a trace and no way to locate them.
The significance isn't just the brutality of individual incidents - it's their consistency. These violations were committed across four cities, involving different communities, operations, and agents, yet they were strikingly similar. They are characteristic of the Trump administration's cruel mass detention and deportation machine, including an immigration enforcement system in which safeguards have been weakened, oversight dismantled, and accountability reduced to a buzzword.
When a pattern of human rights violations is so undeniably occurring and completely embedded within an institution for decades, with pervasive impunity, Amnesty argues the only solution is to start over. That's why they are calling for ICE to be abolished.
The Trump administration's deliberately cruel and racist practices have left entire communities across the US living in fear. Families are being torn apart. Fischer's friends are being deported. People are afraid to leave home to go to work, take their children to school, or seek medical care.
The United States has an obligation to respect and protect the human rights of all of us. Immigration enforcement does not exempt any government from that responsibility. Yet the Trump administration has turned the country's immigration enforcement system into a monster which repeatedly violates people's rights.
ICE is not an inevitable feature of the US government. It was created in the aftermath of 9/11 to turn immigration into a national security issue, and has been problematic since. However, the scale and horror witnessed since January 2025, fueled by billions of new dollars and persistent impunity, has reached new levels. It has become clear that no amount of defunding, training, or disciplinary measures will be enough. The extent and scale of the abuses and failures documented lead to only one possible road to justice: ICE must be abolished.
But that's not the end of the work. A future without ICE is a threshold step toward building an immigration system that complies with international human rights law and standards, centers family unity and compassion, and does not rely on cruelty and fear.
In fact, across the four cities investigated, communities have refused to accept cruelty and fear as inevitable. People have built rapid-response networks and hotlines. They walk neighbors to school and work. They provide food, financial assistance, legal support, and medical care. They document abuses. They support families who have been torn apart. They protect one another. Their solidarity shows what communities can do when people refuse to abandon one another.
We don't have to look farther than these communities to know that we can create a future where all of us are cared for, ICE agents don't have free rein to terrorize our communities, government power is subject to accountability, and every person can enjoy their human rights. It is past time to build an immigration system grounded in human rights and human dignity. It starts by abolishing ICE.