Debunking Third Way's Terrible Anti-Abolish-ICE Memo.
Part II of our recurring series, "Centrists Are So Desperate They're Faking Polls Now."
Americans from all walks of life have been activated by last week’s murder of Renee Good. Protestors marched in over a thousand anti-ICE demonstrations across the country. Veterans have compared ICE’s tactics to a warring army. Immigration activists have stepped up community self-defense programs. And centrists have blogged about why the fascist gang that murdered an unarmed mother of three should be left preserved.
Yesterday, the centrist think tank Third Way published a memo entitled “Democrats: Abolish ICE Abuses — Not ICE” that discourages calls to abolish ICE. As NBC News reported, the authors sent their memo to the media before sending it to elected officials. While documents like this appear like impartial advice for politicians, their true purpose is to set the media narrative on terms favorable to the political establishment. By the time Democrats read this memo, the news will already be talking about the “dangers of abolishing ICE,” scaring them away from going against the narrative and receiving bad press. The authors, Lanae Erickson and Sarah Pierce, are seasoned Washington D.C. insiders, so it’s no surprise they’re employing the tried-and-true tactic of pre-emptive media influence.
Composed of shoddy writing, childish reasoning, and outright lies, it’s clear Erickson and Pierce never expected their memo to be read, much less scrutinized. This was a fire-and-forget, a quick press release to dissuade conversations that challenge centrist politics. Well, let’s take a look at their work to see just how deceitful the D.C. political establishment really is.
Erickson and Pierce begin with table setting. They say calls to abolish ICE are “surging on the left,” with hyperlinks to a tweet from conservative activist Bill Kristol and another to this article by G. Elliott Morris. Calling the founder of an infamous neoconservative magazine “the left” gives insight into the authors’ integrity, while linking to an extensive breakdown of how anti-ICE politics are increasingly popular indicates their self-awareness. This is from the Morris article they linked to:
“The topline really understates the intensity of public backlash to ICE and its tactics. In February 2025, just 19% of Americans held a strongly unfavorable view of ICE, per YouGov/The Economist. Today, 40% do. It’s not just that there has been a general move in opinion against the agency. There is a growing and intense, angry opposition to [ICE] across America. — Support for abolishing ICE hits a new high
After detailing ICE’s recent aggression to avoid accusations of naivety, the authors write:
“While the current moment is shocking in the degree to which enforcement has become untethered from restraint, it is not entirely new. Long before Donald Trump returned to office, bipartisan critiques—including judges, lawmakers, and legal experts—raised alarms about ICE detention conditions, weak accountability for abuse, and an internal culture that too often prioritized arrest numbers over professionalism. These concerns predate Trump. What he has changed is the scale and visibility. He has also exposed the extent of the dangers of the broad immigration enforcement discretion granted to the executive. That history matters. But that does not mean immigration enforcement itself is the problem.”
What kind of Opposite Day logic is this? Erickson and Pierce detail ICE’s pre-Trump criminality as if that’s a reason to preserve ICE. It’s not! That’s even more of a reason the agency needs to be abolished! By their own admission, even if the Trump-era “heightened scale and visibility” diminished, ICE would still be abusing human rights and conducting gross misconduct. If your wife asks you to stop drinking because you got a DUI, reminding her you were plastered 24/7 before the DUI wouldn’t help your case. Only someone with an inebriated mental state — or a centrist pundit at the esteemed Third Way institute — would make such a foolish argument.
Next, the authors have to grapple with the central problem facing all 10,000 centrist think tanks. It’s difficult to argue that a left-wing policy, such as abolishing ICE, is “political suicide” when the Third Way-approved centrists who control the Democratic Party have already committed political suicide by losing all three branches to Donald Trump. To scapegoat ICE abolitionists for centrism’s failures, Third Way insults their readers’ intelligence by asking them to accept rewritten history. They write:
“In 2020, widespread outrage over police violence created a genuine opening for accountability reforms, including changes to qualified immunity. But that opening narrowed—and ultimately closed—when “defund the police” became the dominant frame. The slogan was easy to weaponize. It hardened opposition. And it helped preserve the very systems reformers sought to change.
The lesson is clear: when the debate sinks into polarizing slogans that read as anti-law or anti-safety, space for practical reform disappears.”
Putting aside the racist implications that Black Lives Matter protestors are to blame for the lack of police reform, claiming reform was lost because of the slogan “defund the police” is laugh-out-loud ridiculous. Summer 2020 was the peak of the “defund” movement. In the fall, Democrats won both the presidency and the House of Representatives while gaining three Senate seats. Very few politicians ran on defunding the police or abolishing ICE. To imply that meaningful change to systemically racist law enforcement was “closed” by a Twitter hashtag is nonsensical. The reason there was no police reform after 2020 isn’t because of activist chants. It’s the fault of President Joe Biden, who rode the protest energy into the White House and then limited his reforms to a few executive orders banning chokeholds and no-knock entries.
After the brief stint of Beltway historical fan fiction, Erickson and Pierce attempt to argue that abolishing ICE is currently politically unviable. They give three reasons:
Last week, Civiqs found 50% of voters oppose abolishing ICE, 42% support—though support has grown since 2018, it still remains 8 points underwater today.
Even among Democratic primary voters, Third Way’s own polling shows a clear preference for a balanced approach over abolition, 65% to 35%.
In June of 2025, before the height of this currently emotional moment, YouGov found only 27% of Americans supported abolishing ICE, including only 35% of Independents.
Let’s take these one by one.
It’s true the Civiqs poll shows abolishing ICE is currently underwater, with 49% opposition and 42% support. But the note that it has “grown since 2018” is deeply misleading. Below is Civiqs’ polling measurement over time. You’ll notice support for abolition bottoms out at 19% in August 2024 before skyrocketing to 42% today — support for abolishing ICE more than doubled in less than 18 months. Opposition to abolition peaked at 66% the same month and has since collapsed to 49%. An important point to note is that the number of Americans “unsure” about whether to abolish ICE has been shrinking since August 2024. Americans aren’t moving from opposing abolition to thinking about it — they’re jumping straight from wanting to keep ICE to wanting to abolish ICE.
Third Way’s summarization of this poll is technically true. However, it’s a zoomed-in snapshot that avoids the real story: More and more Americans who once supported ICE want it destroyed. To make matters worse for the authors, this Civiqs poll is their strongest point of the three.
As soon as Third Way cited itself, I knew we were in for a wild ride. The memo’s second point states “Third Way’s own polling” proves Democratic voters prefer a “balanced approach” over abolition. This set off my bullshit detector, as a balanced approach to… what? The question at hand is, should ICE be abolished? It’s a straight yes or no, up-and-down answer. What needs to be balanced?
Here’s the polling question Erickson and Pierce claim shows that Democratic voters don’t want ICE abolished.
“We gave these voters a choice between 1) investing in immigration enforcement that deports convicted criminals but protects eligible, law-abiding immigrants like Dreamers, and provides a path to citizenship or 2) decriminalizing the border and abolishing ICE. Democratic primary voters prefer the former 65% to 35%.”
There’s a lot to unpack here. First, the question at hand is not about immigration. It’s whether we should stop the president’s personal blackshirts from executing suburban mothers and terrorizing Democrat-voting constituencies. Second — Yeah, no shit that respondents chose option one over option two. Everything described in the “former” option is America’s dream immigration policy, which will never manifest because Republicans block immigration reform so they can excite their racist base. Marco Rubio single-handedly sank something close to option one in 2018, and it helped him become Secretary of State. When you put Americans’ dream immigration policy behind Door A and the left-wing policies you’re trying to sabotage behind Door B, respondents are going to choose the former. This doesn’t tell us anything about whether or not Americans want to abolish ICE. But it does show us Third Way’s fraduelency is an organizational trait, not limited to Lanae Erickson and Sarah Pierce.
For the third point, the memo references a six-month-old YouGov poll showing abolitionist sentiment is underwater. The authors couch the poll, saying it’s from “before the height of this currently emotional moment.” This attempt to discredit current feelings is weird because… things change over time. I’m sure the desire to wage war on Imperial Japan was low on December 6th, 1941. But then there was an “emotional moment” at Pearl Harbor, and Americans felt differently. It doesn’t take a political strategist to know many people changed their opinions about ICE after watching an agent shoot a woman in the head in broad daylight. Pretending that Americans’ new anti-ICE sentiment is a product of irrational emotion instead of rational observance reeks of the D.C. elitism that puts organizations such as Third Way out of touch with the American electorate. Not wanting more state murder is as rational and unemotional as it gets, and don’t let any six-figure consultant who brags about voting for Ross Perot in the sixth-grade tell you otherwise. Whatever Americans thought about abolishing ICE in June of 2025 is irrelevant to how they feel about it in January of 2026. Fortunately for us, YouGov, the polling firm Erickson and Pierce point to, released a new poll on the very same day their memo was published.
In the January 2026 poll (you know, the month we’re currently in), YouGov found Americans favor abolishing ICE 46% to 43%. Independents — i.e. the people Democrats need to win elections — favor abolishing ICE by 12 points (47% to 35%). As the pollsters state, they’ve found higher support for abolishing ICE in every subsequent survey — a trend that isn’t reversing anytime soon.
While Erickson and Pierce chastized ICE abolitionists for promoting an “anti-safety” slogan, the YouGov poll found the opposite: abolishing ICE would make Americans feel safer, while preserving ICE would make them feel less safe. Americans feel ICE is making America less safe by 13 points (47% say less safe, 34% say safer). Independents are even more likely to say the agency is decreasing safety, with 50% feeling that way, compared with 24% who believe it’s increasing it.
If the Very Serious wonks at Third Way want to make Americans safer and help Democrats defeat Republicans, then they should listen to voters’ wishes and encourage the abolition of ICE. Keep in mind that scrapping ICE is already at a net-positive approval on its own. About 2% of Democrats champion abolition, while the remaining 98% oppose it along with the entire Republican Party and the media, who are happy to take bad-faith memos such as these at face value. With even a little support from public officials highlighting the well-documented abuses of this fascist gang, it’s not unreasonable to expect support for abolishing ICE reach, if not exceed, 60%.
Of course, neither keeping Americans safe nor helping Democrats win is Third Way’s intention. Their goal is to suppress the Democrats’ left wing and help corporate-friendly centrists maintain their dominance over the party. I wouldn’t be surprised if Lanae Erickson and Sarah Pierce prefer a more nativist country, but honestly, I don’t think their intention in writing this has anything to do with ICE or even immigration. Rather, Third Way knows that if “Abolish ICE” becomes the Democratic battlecry, then voters will turn to figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Chris Van Hollen, who will promote Medicare-For-All, a higher minimum wage, and other pro-worker policies that keep Lanae Erickson and Sarah Pierce up at night. This is the same reason The Welcome Party created a fake poll saying Medicare for All is unpopular.
As we’ve covered before, the left is surging in America, and it's making the centrists nervous. The future of the Democratic Party, and by extension, American politics, will be decided in the next two years. The good news is that centrists are so shook they’re resorting to fake polls and fabricated memos. The bad news is that the lying and trickery will continue until the centrist political establishment is pushed out of power for good.
If you enjoyed this article, please hit the ❤️ and subscribe to support my work. If you’re a returning JoeWrote reader, consider upgrading to a supporting subscription. It’s only $5 a month and ensures I can continue creating content such as this.