We want our ICE crushed

The ICE problem mirrors 1990s Florida after Pablo Escobar was killed....

When Escobar died, a major power vacuum opened in the cocaine trade. The Ochoa organization moved in and aggressively expanded into Florida, using extreme violence to establish control and make it clear they were the new dominant force. The surge in drug trafficking and violence overwhelmed local law enforcement.

Because departments were understaffed and under pressure, hiring standards were repeatedly lowered. What had once been a requirement of two years without drug use was reduced to one year, then six months, then one month. At one point, the standard was so low that officers joked that if you weren’t high at that moment, you could qualify. The result was not stability, but a second crisis: widespread corruption. Some officers began extorting drug dealers, participating in racketeering, and working with criminal networks. This period later became the basis for major federal investigations and popular films about police corruption in Florida. The same structural failure is now playing out again.  Immigration enforcement has been underfunded and overwhelmed for decades. To fill positions quickly, the bar for employment has been lowered and we are now accepting low quality applicants. When agencies prioritize speed over quality, they inevitably create a workforce that is harder to supervise, harder to reform, and far more vulnerable to corruption. We are not just dealing with a few bad actors. We are dealing with the long-term consequences of a system that was underfunded and now trades standards for manpower. 

In addition when private prisons that detain immigrants are driven by stock price pressure and investor expectations, cost-cutting can directly affect safety and basic human needs. Reducing food budgets can lead to inadequate nutrition, while understaffing increases the risk of violence, delayed emergency response, and poor supervision. Limiting medical facilities or trained medical personnel can result in untreated illnesses, delayed diagnoses, and preventable complications. In detention settings—where individuals rely entirely on the facility for food, healthcare, and protection—financial decisions tied to market fluctuations can create conditions that undermine health, safety, and human dignity. Federal funding helps prevent this but is expensive. 

As for citizenship, I think one of the biggest things people are overlooking is what the Fourteenth Amendment was originally meant to do in the first place. The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution wasn’t just about giving citizenship based on location alone, it was about making sure that people who were already recognized as citizens, whether by birth or by being naturalized, could pass that citizenship down to their children without those children having to go through the naturalization process all over again. After the American Civil War, the goal was to make it clear that formerly enslaved people were citizens, and that their children born here would also be citizens, automatically, without question, because their parents were citizens. That establishes a system where citizenship carries forward generation to generation as a stable legal status. From that perspective, it doesn’t make sense to treat citizenship as something that is triggered purely by being physically present on U.S. soil at the moment of birth. The phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” implies a full legal and political connection to the United States, not just temporary presence. So if someone is not a citizen and does not have that full legal allegiance, it raises the question of whether simply having a child here should result in that child automatically becoming a citizen. That’s where the current interpretation, reinforced by cases like United States v. Wong Kim Ark, differs from what I think is a more consistent reading, which is that citizenship should follow the current status of the parents, not just the place of birth. Application for new citizenship in America should be required if you are not Naturalized and should be required if your parents are not already citizens. That being said, everyone is still entitled to certain inalienable rights within our territory, such as fourth amendment protections, but other rights such a Voting and Jury Duty are limited by citizenship status appropriately. Apparently we are having problems with noncitizen voting, but let's move forward.

Proposal: Community Work-Release Model for Immigration Detainees.

The Problem:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is overwhelmed and underfunded. This has produced two systemic failures:

Lowered hiring standards for officers

Staffing shortages have forced faster hiring with reduced screening and training. This has increased:

• Misconduct
• Corruption risk
• Use-of-force incidents
• Operational failures
• Extremely high detention costs

Non-violent immigration detainees often remain in custody 6–24 months while cases are processed, costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars per person per year.

At the same time, the U.S. already has a working model for managing large supervised populations: Department of Corrections work-release programs.

Core Idea:

Replace long-term ICE detention for non-violent, low-risk immigrants with a supervised community work-release system, modeled after DOC programs.

This would:

• Reduce detention costs
• Reduce pressure on ICE
• Eliminate reliance on private prisons
• Allow immigrants to support themselves
• Recover government costs
• Improve compliance and court appearance rates

Program Structure:

1. Eligibility:

Applies only to:

• Non-violent immigration detainees
• No serious criminal history
• No violent or trafficking offenses
• Passed risk screening

2. Housing Options:

Participants must live in one of two placements:

• A. Family or sponsor housing, if a verified family member or sponsor exists.
• B. Work-release housing: State-run or federally contracted facilities. Same structure as DOC halfway houses. No private for-profit prison operators.

3. Monitoring:

• GPS ankle monitoring
• Mandatory check-ins
• Employment verification
• Court date tracking
• One supervising officer can manage 30–50 participants, reducing staffing burden.

4. Employment & Income Recovery:

Participants are legally allowed to work while cases are processed. Currently they are not, and instead are housed on the taxpayer dollar for 6 months up to several years while waiting for approval. Up to 50% of earned income is automatically allocated.

Allocation Purpose:

• Legal processing
• Immigration court costs
• Housing costs
• If in work-release facility
• Supervision costs
• Monitoring & case management
• Personal savings
• Remainder held for release or return

This mirrors DOC Legal Financial Obligations (LFO) systems.

5. Fiscal Benefits:

Eliminates long-term detention housing costs

Reduces officer staffing pressure

Generates revenue to fund:

• Immigration courts
• ICE staffing
• Monitoring systems
• Participants pay taxes while employed and contribute to local economies

6. Why Not Private Prisons?

Private detention facilities are driven by shareholder pressure, which historically leads to:

• Understaffing
• Reduced medical care
• Food quality cuts
• Safety failures
• Abuse (sexual assault, etc)

Several facilities were shut down for these reasons.

A fully federal system avoids corruption but is prohibitively expensive to scale.

This proposal avoids both extremes by:

• Using community placement preferably with existing families
• Existing DOC work-release infrastructure
• Electronic monitoring instead of mass incarceration
• ICE Case Officers can effectively manage a caseload of 20 immigrants for monitoring using a DOC model.

Outcomes: 

• Lower taxpayer costs
• Reduced detention overcrowding
• Fewer civil rights incidents
• Better compliance with court orders
• Revenue recovery for the immigration system
• No expansion of private prison systems

This model treats immigration detention as a supervision and compliance issue, not a mass incarceration problem.