Why Immigration Agents Don’t Quit in Protest

Money(and power)

ICE at it's core is a jobs program

It's shitty but this is one way that fascism has historically rooted itself into a nation.

It shores up support by creating a defacto jobs program for disaffected, immiserated, and angry people that buys their loyalty by providing them a good salary and the promise of social status as an enforcer of the regime. And for others it is a job that was hiring in a economy with a precarious job's market. Which creates a golden handcuff problem under capitalism.

And the other side of this is that for many supposed "pragmatic" oppositional politicians they recognize this co-dependency and are scared of dismantling it. In part cause they might risk losing voters(see Talarico in Texas) but also cause they will simultaneously be beholden to their own oligarchical dependencies, typically thru the donor system or party disciplining, that prevent them from offering what is actually needed which is a replacement jobs program, or wholesale economic restructuring that deals not just with this problem but the larger driving forces of broad economic immiseration, alienation, and disaffection. But because that runs afoul with many of their donors(and in some cases constituents), they box themselves into this "reform" posture both toward ICE and larger economic fixes.

Which just ends up as someone being another do nothing Democrat.

And while this author gives good analysis to this economic relationship and offers some tactical advice for the oppositional movement, it similarly fails to offer a deeper fix for the underlying class and economic problems that not only risk still remaining, but actually risk intensifying if not addressed simultaneously.