Centrists Out of Step: Abolish ICE Is the Majority Position

Since the mass deportation surge began last year, ICE’s record of brutality and criminality have driven millions of people into the streets, the largest sustained anti-ICE mobilization this country has seen. The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and the victory of Minneapolis over ICE that followed, poured fuel on a fire that was already burning.

The public’s verdict on the Trump regime’s mask-off turn has been swift and unambiguous. According to the Economist/YouGov poll conducted February 27–March 2, 2026, half of all Americans now support abolishing ICE, among them a majority of independents (52 percent) and nearly a quarter of Republicans (23 percent)¹.A clear majority of Americans say ICE uses excessive force. Nearly half say they have no confidence in the agency at all.

This is what we mean when we say the morning after is already here. The new world struggles to be born, and the centrists line up to kill it in the cradle.

Centrists Intend to Kill the Movement

The Democratic Party’s centrist establishment has not been subtle about its intentions. Third Way, the corporate-funded outfit that exists largely to police the party’s left flank, put out a memo in January warning that abolishing ICE risks “squandering one of the clearest opportunities in years to secure meaningful reform” while “handing Republicans exactly the fight they want.”² Third Way speaks for the people whose money funds it, the same financial and corporate interests that benefit from a workforce kept precarious, deportable, and afraid to organize. The public’s anger, in their telling, is a resource to be managed rather than something that might determine policy. That is not a strategic assessment. It is a class position.

This is the familiar playbook. Reform the rhetoric. Keep the structure. Buy enough time for the anger to fade. The centrists positioning themselves for 2028 are not neutral managers of a difficult moment. They are representatives of a class that has always found ICE useful. They are already working to transform majority support for abolition into a years-long negotiation about body cameras, training, and supervisory chains of command.

This is not a disagreement about tactics. It is a disagreement about whose interests the Democratic Party exists to serve and what role the state should play in the class struggle. The centrists have answered that question consistently for fifty years. There is no reason to expect a different answer now.

There Is No Southern Exception

The South is not exempt from these national trends. The January 2026 NPR/PBS News/Marist poll tells a story that defies efforts to set the lowest expectations. Fifty-eight percent of Southerners say ICE is making Americans less safe. Sixty percent say ICE has gone too far in enforcing immigration laws. A majority view the anti-ICE demonstrations as mostly legitimate protests.³ “Abolish ICE” does not stop at the Mason-Dixon Line, no matter what our politicians pretend.

And we sure have some pretenders here in Northeast Tennessee. Some even wear their accommodation with ICE as a pragmatic virtue, noting warm relationships with local sheriffs, describing their votes for ICE collaboration as unavoidable, consoling themselves with the thought that a “no” vote would not have changed the outcome anyway. They express something like regret and ultimately conclude that the right response to facilitating a harmful system is to seek a humane working relationship with those who run it.

287(g) Helps ICE and Hurts Us, No Matter How You Spin It

The fight to abolish ICE must begin in our cities and in our counties, and we must reject local accommodation, no matter how much our centrists wish to give it the appearance of “reasonable” policy-making. 287(g) agreements are a prime example. The program deputizes local law enforcement to carry out federal immigration enforcement, and serves as a force multiplier for ICE’s masked men.

Our county sheriffs, constables, and commissioners have been all too willing to sign on. Sullivan County operates under both the Warrant Service Officer model and the Task Force Model, the latter of which authorizes deputies to stop, question, and detain people on suspicion of “illegal” status during ordinary patrol duties—traffic stops, calls for service, encounters on the street. It’s a warrant for racial profiling and terror, and Sheriff Cassidy is all aboard. Washington County operates under the WSO model alone, which Sheriff Sexton sold to commissioners as purely administrative, confined to the jail. Nothing changes, he said. Just paperwork. And every single Washington County Commissioner backed him up.

But there is no version of 287(g) that is just paperwork. Every model serves to bolster an agency the majority of Americans want abolished, and to enable the real and devastating deportation of community members–farmworkers, kitchen workers, parents of children in our schools–picked up for something as trivial as a speeding ticket.

Sullivan County: The People Said No, The Commission Said Yes

In February, ICE conducted a sweep in Sullivan County in close coordination with Sheriff Cassidy’s office. Twenty-nine people were taken.⁴ The operation bore the hallmarks of ICE at its most inhumane—not “paperwork,” but community raids that left people feeling unsafe in their own neighborhoods.

Just days later, the Sullivan County Commission met to consider accepting $215,000 from the Department of Homeland Security and the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security to formally expand and equip Sheriff Cassidy’s 287(g) Task Force operation. The commission chambers were packed. Speaker after speaker rose in opposition. “This is where we get to decide what side of history we’re going to be on,” one attendee told the commission.⁵

The commission placed both resolutions on the consent agenda and passed them unanimously, without permitting the full public comment the packed room had come to deliver. And is it any wonder? This is the same commission that voted to make the still-unfinished Sullivan County jail the most expensive construction project in the county’s history. They chose concrete and cages over the affordable housing, healthcare, and education. Cages for immigrants and cages for the poor are two expressions of the same politics, and the Sullivan County Commission has enthusiastically endorsed both. At least they didn’t bother with the performative hand-wringing we’ve seen in Washington County.

What Is To Be Done

The people who packed that Sullivan County commission chamber knew exactly what they were there for. They came because they oppose ICE, because they oppose their county’s collaboration with ICE, and because they understand that the morning-after fight is happening now, in these rooms, on these agendas. That room full of people is the proof that abolition has a home in Northeast Tennessee, whatever our commissioners and sheriffs pretend.

Our immediate demands follow directly from that reality:

No to any new funding from ICE for any purpose in any county in our region.

No to any commissioner approving any increase in the sheriff’s budget until 287(g) agreements are cancelled.

Our long-term position is that of today’s majority: abolish ICE, plain and simple.

We are not naïve about the terrain. The right dominates the Sullivan County Commission and most of the offices in Northeast Tennessee. Their position on ICE is an honest one: they support it, and they say so.
For us, the first task is to win the battle against the centrists intent on giving ICE collaboration an appearance of reasonableness while castigating the majority as extremists. Break that false consensus and more people will see the right’s position for what it actually is: a minority opinion in defiance of the public will.

If a new world is to be born, it will be people like those who packed the Sullivan County Commission chambers who will ensure it happens. Sustained, organized working-class power, rooted in communities and built through relationships, is what turns a majority position into a political reality.

That is what the morning after looks like when it is built from below. If this is your fight too, it is time to get involved. Join us at northeasttndsa.org.

References:

1. Economist/YouGov Poll, Feb. 27–Mar. 2, 2026. https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/54225-support-for-abolishing-ice-reaches-50-percent-february-27-march-2-2026-economist-yougov-poll
2. Third Way memo, January 2026. https://www.thirdway.org/memo/democrats-abolish-ice-abuses-not-ice
3. NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll, Jan. 27–30, 2026.
   https://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/NPR_PBS-News_Marist-Poll_USA-NOS-and-Tables_202602021147.pdf
4. WJHL News. https://www.wjhl.com/news/local/29-illegal-immigrant-located-during-local-ice-operation-sheriffs-office-says/
5. WJHL News. https://www.wjhl.com/news/local/sullivan-co-commission-approves-immigration-funding-resolutions-during-contentious-meeting/