Newsweek Discovers Border Violence After 'Abolish ICE' Calls Surge
Newsweek highlighted a 2018 surge in 'Abolish ICE' calls after a deadly Minnesota shooting, (Newsweek.com, 2018) framing it as a reactive, localized outcry. What the endless scroll of mainstream news conveniently forgets is that calls to abolish ICE didn't begin with a single incident. This agency, created in 2003, built on a legacy of federal immigration enforcement that has consistently sparked
controversy and resistance, from family separations to questionable detention conditions, long before any single high-profile news event. The 'surge' they identified was simply the spotlight briefly flickering onto an ongoing struggle, not its inception. One might wonder why the systemic issues, the human rights reports, and the decades of activism didn't warrant the same headline until a specific
type of tragedy occurred. Perhaps some narratives just don't fit the 'both sides' framing until they're recontextualized into a convenient outrage cycle. Suddenly, the consequences of a harsh immigration system become newsworthy, rather than the system itself.