SAN FRANCISCO — In case you missed it, Tom Steyer’s aggressive plan to stop ICE from terrorizing Californians was featured in The Bulwark. Steyer gave a wide-ranging interview outlining his plan to abolish ICE, establish an investigative unit to oversee ICE operations, and monitor conditions within detention centers. 

Key excerpts are below and the full piece can be read here.

• … Steyer has worked hard to position himself as the anti-ICE candidate. He has called for abolishing the agency and jailing its agents who have broken the law; in a blog post he published last week detailing these plans, he described ICE as a “violent extremist group.”
  Don’t just take my word for it (or his). New York Times opinion contributor Jean Guerrero, who last week moderated a California gubernatorial debate, wrote that while the Democratic candidates should be stronger on immigration, Steyer “came across as the boldest defender of immigrants” on the debate stage.
  “We need immigration services, we need it absolutely, but we don’t need a criminal organization with masks and assault rifles terrorizing our citizens and racially profiling them, and it’s not right,” Steyer told me in an interview a week ago.
• …The plan calls for not just abolishing ICE and forbidding all law enforcement agencies from racial profiling, but also creating an investigative unit to monitor ICE in California, as well as conditions in the agency’s detention centers. Steyer told me he also wants to create a legal-defense “superfund” for people who have been “kidnapped” by ICE—a plan modeled on an initiative he took on with his wife in 2018 wherein the couple provided around $3.3 million to cover legal representation for people under threat of deportation during Trump 1.0
• Steyer is proud of the criticism and alarm he’s elicited from Trump and Musk, and by all accounts, he’s serious about opposing ICE in California.
• …“One of the questions has always been . . . should we be providing health care for people without documentation? The answer is: Yes, absolutely,” Steyer told me. “Health care is a right; the people of California need to have health care.”
• …Latinos are the biggest group in California, Steyer said, and they disproportionately work in physically difficult and underpaid jobs. Helping them, he said, dovetails with his campaign’s commitment to affordability.
• “When I’m talking about dropping the cost of rent, dropping the cost of health care, dropping the cost of electricity, putting a windfall profits tax on gasoline and sending it back to California directly, I’m talking about Latinos,” he said. “I’m talking about people who do the hardest jobs for the lowest money. . . . Anytime I’m talking about costs coming down, I’m talking about Latinos being able to afford the life they want. Anytime I’m talking about bringing in money so that we can have better education so our kids can do better, I’m talking overwhelmingly about Latino kids.”

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