After a month of fierce resistance to state violence in Minnesota, many see its culmination in the congressional Democrats’ successful blocking of DHS funding, agreeing to a two-week extension while they negotiate conditions. Seventy-six percent of registered Democrats support abolishing ICE, but party leadership is set to advocate for the agency’s reform, not its termination. The disconnect here is not merely between the voters and their representation, but between reform and abolition itself — whether we preserve and work within an existing order or dismantle it altogether. Stephen Miller inadvertently articulated that order by lamenting its supposed erosion, complaining of an “import[ed] labor class … granted full political rights, including welfare and the right to vote.” The order he seeks to preserve, in which an “imported labor class” remains disenfranchised, is eerily reminiscent of another system, turned battleground between abolition and managed preservation.
Mid-19th century congressional moderates morally opposed slavery but tolerated the enslavement of three million people, compromising to neither expand nor abolish slavery for the sake of the Union. At the center of this compromise sat the Fugitive Slave Act, allowing patrols to capture and re-enslave runaway slaves living free in the North. The Act presented itself as a mere remedy to slaveholders’ economic losses. But even from its own stated economic purpose, the Act was wildly ineffective. Between 1850 and 1860, federal authorities captured and re-enslaved just 332 fugitives, all at an enormous public expense — the case of Anthony Burns alone costing $40,000 ($1.5 million today).
Today, Republicans’ mass deportation campaign also burdens the taxpayer, at $170 billion over four years, under flimsy economic and legal justifications: that it will help the economy (despite undocumented immigrants paying around $100 billion a year in taxes), reduce violent crime (despite immigrants committing fewer violent crimes than native-born citizens), and that the removal of undocumented immigrants is in itself crime reduction (despite immigration violations being civil offenses, not criminal). In both 1850 and 2026, legal and economic justifications were talking points that reformists could regurgitate while funneling fortunes into preserving the racial hierarchy, the true cost befalling the class they hold in subjugation.
That displacement is precisely what abolitionists reject. In doing so, they renounce the safety provided by the system they seek to abolish, however partial that safety may be. Lynchings and racial massacres exploded after emancipation, killing thousands of African Americans at every step of racial progress. Similar fates befell their white allies, from Elijah Lovejoy to Viola Liuzzo, killed as “race traitors.” The assassinations of Congressman James Hinds and Abraham Lincoln demonstrated that not even the power of federal office could protect those aligned with abolition, while Alex Pretti and Renee Good’s killings show how the dangers of allyship have gone nowhere.
While establishment Democrats perform opposition, they remain, as MLK warned, “allies more devoted to order than to justice,” their attachment to the racial order continually surfacing. Take House Democrats demanding records on the killing of Pretti and Good, not the six people of color killed by ICE this year. Or Speaker Hakeem Jeffries’ condemning Good’s killing on the basis that it “has nothing to do with … removing violent felons from this country,” underscoring his inability to condemn extrajudicial killings without parroting a demonstrably false talking point behind mass deportation. Most explicitly, 75 House Democrats, including Richard Neal, thanked ICE in June for “protecting the homeland” as part of a resolution denouncing an antisemitic attack in Boulder, Colorado last year.
In the coming days, these congressional Democrats will likely ensure that ICE agents unmask, mark their vans, and wear body cams, before greenlighting funding for them to continue enforcing the subjugation of the “imported labor class.” The question isn’t whether Democrats’ reforms will do enough, but whether we’ll do enough to push Democrats beyond reformism.
This election cycle, look to the 19th century abolitionists, who refused to shrink their demands to what seemed politically feasible. They pushed Lincoln — who initially insisted that he was not “in favor of bringing about … equality of the white and black races” — to the figure now remembered as the Great Emancipator. They elected the “Radical Republicans” to Congress, who solidified the most progressive agenda in American history, all while Andrew Johnson (the other impeached pardoner of thousands of Confederates) sat in the White House.
Today, one of their crowning achievements, the Fourteenth Amendment, erodes every day that our government disappears countless immigrants, detaining them without due process. What would abolitionists think if our response to these abductions, reminiscent of the Fugitive Slave Act, were not to end the practice, but to implement reforms to make ourselves more comfortable with its continuation?
Nate Watson lives in Northampton.