The Pen and the Gun

Joe Abraham
Joe Abraham is executive director of VOICE (Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement).

Something deeply troubling is happening in the way we talk about immigration enforcement.

After an ICE operation in New York City, the rush to condemn the agent has been striking. Before the facts were fully established, Mayor Zohran Mamdani called the shooting an outrage, demanded an end to ICE enforcement in the city, and declared that ICE must be abolished. The use of force deserves scrutiny, but why are so many leaders so quick to condemn the agency before an investigation establishes what happened?

What happened to due process? What happened to the presumption that allegations must be examined against evidence before conclusions are reached? Those principles should apply to everyone, including federal officers. Scrutiny is necessary. Presuming guilt before the facts are established is not accountability.

The answer, in part, lies in the worldview that treats ICE not as a law enforcement agency carrying out laws enacted by the government, but as an inherently oppressive institution. When the starting assumption is that ICE is racist, illegitimate, or dangerous by definition, every encounter becomes evidence for a predetermined conclusion. The solution then becomes abolishing the agency, not examining the facts and correcting failures.

We have seen a similar argument before. After George Floyd’s death, calls to defund or dismantle police departments gained national prominence. Now the target is immigration enforcement. But if ICE is abolished, what replaces it? If enforcement itself is the problem, what happens to a nation’s ability to control its borders and enforce its laws? And if the answer is simply that we no longer need those functions, who will accept responsibility for the consequences?

No society can function safely without law enforcement or meaningful immigration control. The question is not whether these institutions should be accountable. They must be. The question is whether accountability means improving their performance or dismantling their ability to perform their essential functions.

Unfortunately, we are becoming far too familiar with another disturbing escalation: vehicles weighing thousands of pounds being turned into weapons against law enforcement. According to the federal government’s account of the New York encounter, the driver used his vehicle in a manner that endangered officers. His choices and conduct matter, just as the agent’s decisions must be examined. We cannot demand accountability for one person while erasing the agency of another.

I know something about this inversion because I have lived it.

My daughter Katie was 20 years old when she was killed on the streets of Sanctuary Urbana, Illinois. The man who killed her was an intoxicated illegal immigrant who had previously been deported, unlawfully returned to the United States, used aliases and fraudulent documents, and obtained an Illinois driver’s license. Yet his history did not prevent him from getting behind the wheel intoxicated that night.

Katie paid the ultimate price for a chain of failures that began long before he reached that intersection.

I have watched the circumstances surrounding the person responsible for Katie’s death receive more contextualization than the life of the innocent young woman whose life was taken. Katie’s innocence should not require a qualifying paragraph before it can be acknowledged.

That is the larger problem in our national conversation. We have created a one-sided ledger of compassion, and the imbalance is difficult to ignore. On one side, an individual with a history of illegalities and criminal conduct receives layers of context and explanation. On the other, an innocent young woman who did nothing wrong is reduced to the circumstances of her death. The very facts that should matter most, innocence on one side and responsibility on the other, seem to receive the least attention.

When did compassion become something we allocate according to political usefulness? Why does acknowledging one person’s humanity increasingly seem to require diminishing someone else’s?

There is another question we need to ask, and it requires us to look upstream.

For years, federal immigration laws remained on the books while executive decisions and enforcement priorities changed how they were applied. The consequences of those choices did not remain in Washington. They reached communities, overwhelmed systems and, in cases like Katie’s, intersected with individual lives in devastating ways.

If policymakers did not understand the consequences of weakening enforcement, that raises serious questions about their judgment and preparation. If they understood the risks and proceeded anyway, the questions about responsibility become even more pressing. Either way, consequences do not disappear because the people who made the decisions are no longer standing downstream.

This is why I keep coming back to the same point:

Everyone wants to examine the gun at the end of the chain. I want to examine the pen that wrote the policies upstream.

That does not mean the gun should not be examined. It means it should not be the only thing examined.

Intentions are written upstream, but consequences are lived downstream. Those consequences have names, families, empty bedrooms, and graves.

Katie’s grave is a reminder that government decisions are not abstractions. The Katies of this country should not become collateral damage in a political argument over whose humanity deserves the most attention.

Every victim matters. Every officer who puts themselves in harm’s way matters. And every policymaker should be willing to own the consequences of the choices they make.

If we are going to demand accountability, we need the courage to follow the entire chain.

Katie is the why.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.