U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have killed 53 of our neighbors since January of 2025 — most recently in Biddeford, Maine. ICE operates without regard to peoples’ humanity. The federal agents in our streets are acting against the best interests of our communities, discriminating against our Black and Brown neighbors, regardless of immigration status, and acting as judge, jury and executioner in cases that are about paperwork. No crime is punishable by death without due process of the law.
We must dismantle the United States’s immigration system as it exists today. The Department of Homeland Security has been far exceeding their scope of power and is killing more people every year. We have to start over from a place of human dignity and respect. This is especially true because the U.S. government is responsible for the conditions that are forcing people to leave their homelands around the globe.
For decades, U.S.-backed wars and bombs have caused death and destruction all over the world. U.S. intervention in Central America has made living conditions unbearable, forcing families to flee looking for safer places to raise their children. U.S. funded bombs in Gaza, Iran and other Arab countries have led to generations of people migrating to safer conditions. When it is possible to leave war zones, families flee to places like the U.S., but we make it incredibly difficult for them to get asylum, get greed cards or become citizens. If we want people to stop migrating to the U.S., the answer isn’t restricting people’s ability to move — the answer is ending wars of mass destruction.
The U.S. burns more fossil fuels per capita than the rest of the world. Current proposed policies keep that trend instead of transitioning to cheaper, cleaner renewable energy. Fossil fuel consumption increases the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, leading to unprecedented changes to our climate. Storms, floods, fires, droughts and sea level rise are becoming exponentially more extreme and are causing mass migration around the globe. People are leaving their homes because of uninhabitable conditions worsened by the climate crisis. The U.S. contributes to this trend by refusing to transition to clean energy. As long as the climate crisis gets worse, people will move to safer conditions.
Migration is inevitable when massive destruction is happening. We need to treat human migration as a right and not a privilege. How many of us have chosen the home we live in because it feels safe? It is inhumane to deny that ability to other people just because of where they were born.
The first step toward changing our immigration system has to be abolishing ICE. We have to end the inhumane treatment of immigrants — they’re just our neighbors, after all. We all share this planet together.
Rebecca Beaulieu is the executive director of 350 New Hampshire.