Page T27From§Eachthe evening edition — 13 October 2026
As it ran on the front
I keep a folder for documents that answer each other, and this week it got thick enough to need a second rubber band.
Start where the folder starts. Thursday, October 8th, about four in the afternoon, in Marble Hill: an ICE agent shot and wounded Oscar Belgal, twenty-eight, sitting in his car with his five-year-old beside him. The next night, people marched under a two-word banner that has been treated like it couldn't be filed: Abolish ICE. By Monday, Mayor Mamdani had ordered a sweeping review — of the NYPD's use-of-force policy. The gun that fired belonged to a federal agency. The review landed on the local one. He called the agents who did the shooting "mass shooters," a description I have not found him using for his own department, which he was reviewing at the time.…
…(cont) Tuesday, the folder got its second half. Agents raided the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar. The same day, Rep. Delia Ramirez introduced a bill titled the Reimagining Safety Act. All together now — the clauses: it abolishes ICE. It abolishes Customs and Border Protection. It dismantles the Department of Homeland Security down to the studs, the agency built in 2003 after September 11th. It closes Guantanamo Bay. It bans federal wall funding. It ends immigration detention outright and moves the whole system to civil court, under the Justice Department, where a judge instead of an agent decides who stays.
I have read a lot of bills that gesture. This one does not gesture. It names the things it ends.
Here is the other half of the folder, dated three weeks earlier. September 21st, a line I'd underlined without knowing why yet: abolishing ICE was a "socialist pipe dream," the kind of thing serious people in Washington did not do. That sentence and this bill now sit three weeks apart in the same filing cabinet.
I am not going to tell you the pipe dream has landed, because a bill introduced is not a bill passed, and I don't know how many votes it has — nobody's counted them for me yet. I will tell you what I do know. The agency that fired the shots answered to no mayor's review. The man who wrote the pipe dream line didn't have to run a background check on who'd read it back to him first.
“They call it a pipe dream right up until a kid in the back seat gets shot at, and then suddenly there's a real bill with real clauses — abolish ICE, close Guantanamo, no more wall money. The agency that pulled the trigger doesn't answer to any mayor's review; it answers to a bill sitting in the same building that laughed at it three weeks ago. That's the whole con: they get to call it fantasy right up until the day it's filed.”
“Abolishing the agency that secures the border isn't a serious proposal — it's a talking point, not legislation. Except it is legislation, introduced this week, by a sitting member of Congress. That's not the point I wanted to make.”
Earlier in this story
The receipts
Republicans' reconciliation package puts $70 billion into ICE's department NBC News, May 2026
House Dem pushes bill to abolish Homeland Security after Ilhan Omar raid, NYC ICE shootingIllinois Rep. Delia Ramirez is pushing to abolish the Department of Homeland Security and cease all immigration detentions in the US in the wake of the raid on "Squad" Rep. Ilhan Omar's home and the shooting of Oscar Belgal in the Bronx.
ICE plans to spend up to $20 million on direct-contact electric shock gloves a UN torture rapporteur found incompatible with the absolute prohibition on torture ABC10 San Diego / UN Special Rapporteur finding, August 2026
'Squad' Democrat formally introduces bill to abolish ICE, Border Patrol and dismantle DHSThe sweeping bill would ban federal border wall funding, close Guantanamo Bay and dismantle Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.
In response to the agency's rampant abuses during President Donald Trump's second term, many elected Democrats have warmed to the idea of abolishing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But one progressive lawmaker is pushing to go a step further: abolishing the entire Department of Homeland Security. Rep.
· Think ‘abolish ICE’ is a socialist pipe dream? Look at how mainstream Democrats vote from the morgue, 21 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.