William Kristol, the political commentator who once shaped Republican foreign policy consensus from the pages of The Weekly Standard, posted a blunt demand on social media Monday: "Abolish ICE. Now." By Tuesday, he was urging followers to treat a Department of Homeland Security decision to temporarily halt migrant detentions during vehicle stops as a reason to escalate, not a reason to pause.
The two posts, delivered back-to-back on consecutive days, mark a striking endpoint for a figure who spent decades as a fixture of the Republican establishment. Kristol's call to dismantle Immigration and Customs Enforcement places him squarely alongside the most progressive voices in the Democratic Party, the same faction that made "Abolish ICE" a rallying cry during the Trump era.
What prompted the Tuesday post was DHS's decision to temporarily halt the detention of migrants during vehicle stops. That decision came after a second fatal shooting of a migrant driver during such stops, as Breitbart News reported. Kristol seized on the development not as a tragedy to be investigated but as leverage.
On Tuesday, Kristol posted on X:
"If ICE is telling the truth here, the lesson should be not be to declare victory (ok, take one minute to enjoy the victory), but to redouble pressure on the whole indecent mass deportation regime."
That framing is worth sitting with. A federal law enforcement agency pauses a specific operational tactic after two people die, and Kristol's instinct is to treat the pause as a battlefield win, then push harder. He does not call for an investigation into the shootings. He does not ask what went wrong. He calls for more pressure on the entire enforcement apparatus.
The parenthetical, "ok, take one minute to enjoy the victory", is especially revealing. For Kristol, a halt in immigration enforcement is something to celebrate, however briefly, before returning to the campaign against ICE's existence.
Kristol's journey did not happen overnight. In the early 2000s, he operated at the center of Republican power. His policy preferences on immigration and foreign intervention tracked closely with those of President George W. Bush. He championed an interventionist foreign policy and accepted the high-immigration economic framework that defined the Bush-era GOP consensus.
But that consensus fractured. When Donald Trump promised to curb migration and won the Republican nomination, Kristol became one of the most visible figures in the "NeverTrump" movement. He helped build The Bulwark, an outlet that has increasingly aligned with pro-migration Democrats on border and enforcement issues.
The trajectory is not subtle. A commentator who once helped define Republican orthodoxy now calls for abolishing the federal agency responsible for interior immigration enforcement, and frames the entire deportation system as "indecent."
His views are not new. In early 2017, Kristol laid out a vision of immigration that goes well beyond standard pro-business arguments for guest workers or legal reform. In a recorded statement, he said:
"You can make a case that America has been great because every, I think John Adams said this, basically if you are in free society, a capitalist society, after two or three, four, generations of hard work everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled, whatever. Then, luckily, you have these waves of people coming in from Italy, Ireland, Russia, and now Mexico, who really want to work hard and really want to succeed and really want their kids to live better lives than them and aren't sort of clipping coupons or hoping that they can hang on and meanwhile grew up as spoiled kids and so forth."
Read that again. Kristol's argument is not merely that immigration benefits the economy. It is that native-born Americans become "decadent, lazy, spoiled" after a few generations and need to be replaced by harder-working newcomers. The existing population is the problem. Immigration is the fix.
This is not a policy disagreement about visa caps or border security funding. It is a worldview that treats American citizens as a declining asset and mass migration as a corrective. And it comes from someone who spent his career in Washington think tanks and magazines, not from someone who ever competed for a job against cheaper foreign labor or watched his neighborhood change beyond recognition.
Kristol's Monday post reportedly drew a vigorous response from ordinary Americans, though the specific reactions were not detailed. The pattern is familiar. Figures who face no personal consequences from open borders or weakened enforcement lecture the public about the virtues of mass migration. The people who live with the results, depressed wages, strained schools, overwhelmed emergency rooms, communities reshaped without consent, push back.
The "Abolish ICE" movement has never been popular with the broad electorate. Democrats who adopted the slogan in 2018 and 2019 largely abandoned it when polling showed voters recoiled. Yet here is Kristol, a man who built his career inside the Republican Party, picking up the banner that even most Democrats dropped.
The DHS decision that triggered Kristol's Tuesday post raises its own set of questions, none of which Kristol appears interested in asking. The agency temporarily halted detentions of migrants during vehicle stops after a second fatal shooting of a migrant driver. The details of both shootings remain thin. What circumstances led to the use of lethal force? Were the drivers armed? Were passengers at risk? Was the halt a formal policy directive, a memo, or an informal operational pause?
None of these questions appear in Kristol's post. He skips past the facts and moves straight to the political conclusion: dismantle the enforcement regime. For someone who spent decades demanding rigorous analysis of foreign policy decisions, the lack of curiosity about domestic law enforcement operations is notable.
DHS pausing a specific tactic after fatal incidents is, on its face, a reasonable operational response, the kind of review any law enforcement agency might undertake. Treating it as proof that the entire agency should be abolished is a leap that reveals more about Kristol's destination than about the facts on the ground.
ICE is the primary federal agency responsible for interior immigration enforcement. Without it, the federal government would have no dedicated mechanism to locate, detain, and remove illegal immigrants who have already entered the country. Border security alone, even if fully funded and staffed, cannot address the millions of people who overstay visas, evade checkpoints, or settle in American communities in violation of federal law.
Abolishing ICE would not change immigration law. It would simply remove the agency tasked with enforcing it. The beneficiaries would be employers who rely on cheap, exploitable labor; political movements that see mass migration as a demographic strategy; and illegal immigrants themselves, who would face virtually no risk of removal once inside the country.
The losers would be American workers competing for jobs at the lower end of the wage scale, communities bearing the costs of uncontrolled population growth, and the basic principle that laws passed by Congress should be enforced by the executive branch.
Kristol's evolution is not unique. A cohort of former Republican commentators and operatives have followed a similar path, opposing Trump, then opposing Trump's policies, then opposing the policy positions that predated Trump but that Trump made central to his campaigns. Immigration enforcement is the clearest example. Opposition to illegal immigration was a mainstream Republican position long before Trump descended an escalator in 2015. But for figures like Kristol, hostility to Trump became hostility to enforcement itself.
The Bulwark, where Kristol and former GOP allies now operate, has moved steadily toward alignment with progressive positions on immigration. The shift is not incidental. When your audience becomes Democrats and anti-Trump independents, your incentives change. The positions follow the audience.
That is Kristol's right. Political views evolve. But voters deserve clarity about what is happening. A man who once helped set the Republican agenda now wants to abolish the agency that enforces immigration law, describes deportation as "indecent," and views American citizens as spoiled beneficiaries of earlier generations' work ethic who need to be refreshed by foreign labor.
That is not a conservative position. It is not a moderate position. It is a position to the left of most elected Democrats.
When a man spends decades telling a party what to think, then abandons every principle the party's voters hold dear, the question is not what changed about the party. The question is what the man was actually committed to all along.
