David Axelrod Warns Democrats Not to Campaign on Abolishing ICE: ‘People Believe You Should Come to the Country Legally’

Legendary Democratic strategist David Axelrod warned Democrats against pushing for ICE to be abolished in their campaigns on Thursday.

Axelrod joined CNN’s Boris Sanchez and Brianna Keilar on air amid calls from some Democrats to abolish ICE following the deaths of 37-year-old protesters Renee Good  and Alex Pretti during altercations with federal agents in Minneapolis this month.

Sanchez brought up a Fox poll showing that support for abolishing ICE has doubled since 2018 (now standing at 36%). Among Democrats, 59% in the survey said they supported such a measure. Only 16% of Republicans said the same.

Axelrod warned that campaigning to abolish ICE will not be a winning campaign message for Democrats, arguing most Americans believe in some sort of “immigration enforcement in the country.” He argued a movement to abolish ICE could end up like defund the police calls in 2020, with the public not supporting the “implication” of such an extreme move.

He said:

I think that people believe you should come to the country legally, and if you don’t, you know, there should some penalty for that. They do believe that. But I don’t think they want to abolish ICE. Well, you know the problem that we’ve seen before when people said abolish the police or defund the police. I don’t think most people who said it believed that there should be no policing function in cities, but the implication was that there could be. So I don’t think Democrats want to get into that. Again, I do think they want fundamental root and branch reform. And if it means getting rid of the name ICE, which has become a very bad brand, that’s one thing. If it means that we’re just gonna abandon immigration enforcement. I don’t think Democrats or Republicans would support that in large numbers.

Watch above via CNN.

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