Though the #AbolishICE movement is picking up steam with progressive congressional candidates, candidates for non-federal offices have been reluctant to join the call to abolish the federal government’s detention and deportation force. The excuse often given is that only Congress can abolish ICE, which is technically true. However, candidates for state and local offices can still stand for justice and serve as allies to the undocumented citizens they aim to represent. Moreover, if they truly want to make their cities and states sanctuaries, they must stand for the abolition of ICE. Currently, the only major-party Attorney General candidate brave enough to call for the abolition of ICE is New York’s Zephyr Teachout, who wrote that the “essential structure of the agency encourages lawlessness, cruelty and arbitrary abuses of power.” In an NBC News opinion piece explaining why she supports the #AbolishICE movement, she made the case against the agency’s very existence, irrespective of who sits in the Oval Office:

The organization was born in xenophobia and fear, and it is doing exactly what it was designed to do: terrorize immigrant communities, bring a police state inside our borders and treat people as less than human.

Teachout believes that the classification of immigrants as a national security threat fits into the larger issue of criminalizing racialized groups including immigrants. She recognizes that our criminal justice system targets and cages the most vulnerable in our society, criminalizing poverty, drug addiction, and minority identities while letting the powerful off easy for their wrongdoings.

Zephyr Teachout wants to fundamentally reshape how we view crime in the United States. As New York Attorney General, she intends to decriminalize poverty and instead focus on the abuses and corruption of the politicians and corporations that Democratic and Republican administrations alike have refused to hold accountable. She joined us on the podcast to explain how she hopes to do so and why she believes that her refusal to accept corporate campaign contributions makes her the most credible Democratic candidate in the Attorney General’s race. Listen on iTunes or in your browser below:

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