The child of a forced marriage between two defunct federal agencies — The United States Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service — ICE has long struggled to balance its dual roles of transnational criminal investigations and deportations. 
 
 Some agents in the investigations unit have said the Trump administration has prioritized ICE’s deportations mission. Thomas D. Homan, the acting director of ICE and former leader of its deportation unit, has been a vocal proponent of the administration’s immigration policies. 
 
 The more than 6,000 special agents assigned to Homeland Security Investigations focus on money laundering, drug trafficking, human smuggling, child exploitation and cybercrimes. The agents have been involved in some of the highest-profile criminal investigations in recent years, including the takedown of the Silk Road website, an online market where illegal drugs and fake identifications were sold. 
 
 The agency was also involved in the arrest and capture of drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as “El Chapo, who led the Sinaloa cartel before he was extradited to the United States last year. 
 
 H.S.I. is also the lead government agency for counter proliferation investigations, targeting individuals who illegally try to smuggle military and other high-tech equipment out of the country. The division has about 50 offices around the world. ||||| The upset victory on Tuesday night by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has forced one of her signature campaign issues into the national conversation about President Donald Trump’s immigration policy: the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The push to dissolve ICE is unusual in progressive policy circles for its simplicity and clarity, not weighed down by a stack of white papers or clever incentivizing of behavior. Adem Bunkeddeko, who nearly upset New York Rep. Yvette Clarke, similarly ran on a platform to abolish ICE, as have a growing number of progressive elected officials, challengers, and grassroots activists. The simplicity of the solution, though, leads to a number of follow-up questions that have lawmakers in both major parties on Capitol Hill skeptical of the push to end the agency. “‘To replace it with what?’ is the question. And I don’t have that answer right now,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who is facing a challenge from her left this November, told The Intercept while refusing to join the push to eliminate the agency. In the last week of June, the movement to abolish ICE found its footing on Capitol Hill, as Wisconsin Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan and Washington Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal introduced legislation that serves as a vehicle for this demand. The bill would eliminate ICE while setting up a commission to examine alternatives. 
 
 The argument to shut ICE down revolves around its cultural ecology. The agency has become corrupted with a military mentality that doesn’t respect civilian oversight and has little effective oversight. Once an institution’s culture has metastasized, reforming it can become impossible, with the only solution to abolish it and disperse its various authorities elsewhere. “What’s happened is as we’ve created ICE and given more and more authority with no accountability to ICE, in my opinion, it’s become a rogue agency,” Jayapal told The Intercept. The demand to eliminate the law enforcement agency started with a push by some grassroots immigration activists — which was signal-boosted on social media as #AbolishICE — that quickly spread to a number of progressive Democratic challengers. Ocasio-Cortez was one of at least 15 challengers who made eliminating the agency part of their platform. “ICE is now the second-largest criminal investigative agency in the United States, second only to the FBI. And the fact that they operate without the accountability of the Department of Justice is extremely concerning to us all,” she told The Intercept in May, explaining her position that it is better for the Department of Justice to oversee enforcement of those sort of matters — as it did under ICE’s predecessor, Immigration and Naturalization Services — rather than the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE. Both DHS and ICE were created in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. (Ocasio-Cortez went in depth into why ICE should be abolished, and what that would mean for immigration enforcement, in an interview with Jeremy Scahill.) The highest-profile Democratic challenger who has adopted this position is Cynthia Nixon, who is challenging incumbent New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the primary. “ICE has strayed so far away from its mission. It is supposed to be here to keep Americans safe, but what it has turned into frankly is a terrorist organization of its own that is terrorizing people who are coming to this country,” she said, when calling for the agency to be abolished. Democratic leadership, however, is not so keen on Pocan and Jayapal’s legislation. The House’s third-highest ranking Democrat, South Carolina’s Jim Clyburn, was dismissive of the bill. “I don’t think it’ll go anywhere. Why would we want to eliminate the ICE agency?” he said. The fourth-highest ranking Democrat, Rep. Joe Crowley of New York, said that what the agency has been doing recently has been “fascistic,” yet stopped short of calling for its abolition. Ocasio-Cortez challenged Crowley’s position as morally incoherent, and he is no longer the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House. Clyburn was unmoved by the argument that ICE is not accountable in its current form. “The ICE agency has an oversight committee,” he said. “That committee ought to deal with this. There’s a need for ICE. And we should not be eliminating the agency because it needs to have oversight. Provide the oversight that’s necessary. If this House will conduct its oversight responsibilities, we can rein in ICE.”
– On Wednesday, the Intercept declared that calls for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be dissolved are becoming "more mainstream." It points out that at least 15 Democratic congressional candidates—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez among them—have platforms that call for de-funding or getting rid of the 15-year-old agency altogether. Now, nearly 20 ICE agents have warmed to a version of the idea. In a jargony four-page letter sent to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, some 19 ICE investigators propose that ICE be done away with, and that two distinct entities emerge. The letter explains ICE is made up of two distinct components: Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI); those signing the letter work in the latter section. The letter outlines "numerous reasons" why turning those into two standalone agencies would make sense, among them the low approval ratings that have surfaced in employee surveys. But their larger point is that their work is polluted by that of ERO, which detains and deports undocumented immigrants, while HSI has an "extraordinary global reach" and focuses on "transnational criminal organizations that facilitate cross border crimes" like drug smuggling and human trafficking. They say there is misunderstanding about what HSI does, and that the "political nature" of what ERO does has led local law enforcement in some cases to refuse to work with HSI under the misguided idea that it is involved in the "politics of civil immigration"; others partner so long as "ICE" isn't referenced in any public-facing materials. A senior ICE official tells the New York Times some of the letter's points "merit some discussion."