This past Saturday, the Connecticut Democratic Socialists of America (CT DSA) held an emergency meeting to organize around abolishing United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). There’s been a lot of news about ICE lately, as many of the other recent articles on the Nutmeg Socialist cover.
We’ve heard a lot about ICE recently. But what about the other word in this phrase: “abolish”?
This word “abolish” got a lot of attention in the recent past too. Who remembers hearing the phrase “abolish the police” during the Black Lives Matter protest era? During that time, this idea of “abolishing” the police got mixed in with ideas of “defunding” the police or “reforming” the police or solutions like body cameras that lead to more funding for the police.
So we want to be clear about what we mean today. When we say “abolish” ICE or “abolish” police, prisons, and borders, we do not mean “defund” or “reform.”
We mean we demand a world with no police, prisons, bombs, borders, ICE. Further, we demand a world without capitalism.
When we use the word “abolish,” we’re speaking in the language of the tradition of “abolition” as a political concept. Abolition, as an idea, has a history and school of thought behind it that reaches far beyond—and before—ICE.
Abolition means, in its simplest form, ending a system entirely and completely. We accomplish this by making the conditions that created that system obsolete. We’ll come back to this word “obsolete” in a bit. In its most frequent usages in the US, abolition meant abolishing slavery originally, and in more recent history, means abolishing prisons and police and borders
As you’re reading this, let’s do a quick exercise:
- Take a moment and get comfortable. Close your eyes if you feel like it.
- Think about the concept of safety.
- Try to imagine a time when you actually felt safe.
- It could be a single experience, a period of time in your life, or whatever comes to mind.
- During that time, what did feeling safe feel like?
- Who or what contributed to that feeling of safety?
- Take a minute and think.
Once you’re done thinking, let’s reflect. What did you notice about what helped you feel safe? And, just as importantly, what didn’t contribute to those feelings of safety?
Did police or prisons or borders or bombs or wars help you feel safe?
We’re taught that we as human beings cannot keep ourselves safe.
We’re taught that we need men on our streets with guns and body armor, people in prisons for most of their lives, fighter jets flying all over the world, borders separating human beings from each other based on where they were born, and bombs dropped on innocent civilians abroad. And we’re taught that all this harm is justified, because that’s what keeps us safe.
This idea that these things keep us safe is repeated constantly: in school, in the media, in politics, in children reciting the pledge of allegiance. Military flyovers roar overhead at our sports games.
When something goes wrong, the solution we’re offered is almost always more police, more military, more punishment, or longer prison sentences.
And yet, when we question into the nature of our own safety, rarely do cops, prisons, or borders come to mind.
In reality, police often show up after harm has already occurred—or cause the harm themselves. Prisons remove people from their communities without addressing the root causes of violence or instability—and contribute to further community instability. Borders divide us even further. Yet still, we’re told these systems are necessary for our safety.
And that’s a lie. Police surveil us, prisons jail us, and communities that could thrive instead suffer. Communities of color face the most severe forms of surveillance and punishment.
Police and prisons entrench systems of racist and colonial domination, and the violence that once structured our history is carried forward today—most brutally—in the bodies and lives of Black, brown, and immigrant communities.
So what can we do about it?
These systems—of police, prisons, borders, ICE—have grown so large that they feel inevitable, indestructible, invincible. How could we ever exist in a world without them?
Let’s look to a quote from Harsha Walia for inspiration:
“Empires crumble, capitalism is not inevitable, gender is not biology, whiteness is not immutable, prisons are not inescapable, and borders are not natural law.”
– Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Harsha Walia
And this is where abolition comes in: this idea of working to end these harmful systems that are not inevitable and can be ended.
It’s challenging to envision a world without these oppressive systems. Let’s let Angela Davis help us imagine how we get there:
“What, then, would it mean to imagine a system in which punishment is not allowed to become the source of corporate profit? How can we imagine a society in which race and class are not primary determinants of punishment? Or one in which punishment itself is no longer the central concern in the making of justice?
“An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be looking for prison-like substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment—demilitarization of schools, revitalisation of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance…
“…rather than try to imagine one single alternative to the existing system of incarceration, we might envision an array of alternatives that will require radical transformations of many aspects of our society.”
– Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis
Rather than simply dismantling harmful systems, abolition is a project of reconstruction. It requires us to reimagine safety, justice, community, and humanity on new terms—rooted in care, accountability, and material support. It is about creating the infrastructure for collective thriving: housing, health care, education, nourishment, clean water, and more.
Importantly, abolitionist futures are not utopian dreams for the distant future. The process of striving for an abolitionist future requires presence and grounding in our current moment: understanding both its flaws and its potential. It asks us to confront fear, scarcity, and punishment-based thinking—and to replace them with solidarity, resource redistribution, and humanity.
So when we say abolish prisons, abolish the police, abolish borders, abolish ICE—this is what we mean: we envision a world in which we have made the racist, colonial, and oppressive systems of policing, prisons, borders, and ICE obsolete, and we organize together to build that world.
When you thought about the concept of safety earlier, what things came to mind? Would you trade cops, prisons, and borders for those things? In short, that’s what abolition means.
If these are the conditions which keep us safe, then how can we organize to create these conditions within our communities? And how can we connect this organizing to an abolitionist horizon? More on that to follow in a future article.
Footnotes:
- This quote is slightly adapted from the quote “Do you believe in universal healthcare, housing for everyone, and a universal income? Would you want those things in this world? Would you trade prisons and police for that? That’s what abolition is.” From Emile DeWeaver, as cited in this article: https://visualizingabolition.ucsc.edu/staging/study-guides/abolition-futures.html. I’ve switched the emphasis in the quote from things we might expect the state to give us (health care, housing, universal income) to the things we innately desire for ourselves as humans, which we can organize for together, independent of the state.
- This article is adopted from my talking points shared during the February 7th, 2026, abolish ICE event in Hartford hosted by CT DSA.