I am concerned that the language being used by some Democrats to advocate for reform of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of Homeland Security is only going to undermine party unity and messaging in the 2018 election cycle.

We’ve done this before and it did not serve us well.  We allowed the other side to brand themselves “Right to Life” while branding us as “Pro-Abortion.”  The far more accurate descriptor, “Pro-choice,” fell by the wayside in the war of words and we continue to allow them to represent us as baby killers, while we defend our moral high ground with perfectly sound arguments about individual liberty and responsibility that get drowned out by the simple poisonous messaging that the Right does so much better than we, who place a high premium on truth and tolerance.

Now, in the understandable outrage felt by decent folks in the face of Donald Trump’s grotesque reign of incompetence and baby-snatching, we are once again in danger of losing the messaging war by reaching for a bigger and more empathetically distant target than we should be immediately addressing.

Yes, ICE is a badly flawed remnant of post 9/11 planning panic that was allowed to fester and grow its mission even under Obama.  It has created self-justifying enforcement redundancies,  and even un-American over-reach practices that should be dismantled in short order.

But we have to regain some control in Congress to have any hope of affecting beneficial change; and loudly calling for the “elimination of ICE” is unlikely to help us get there.

It’s a negative message that allows unprincipled Republicans to cynically charge that Democrats want to foster lawlessness.  

Whenever we rest on a negative message without providing the positive policy alternative, the Republicans are only too happy to leap into the breach and define a sinister significance  to the Democrats’ position.

This will never do.

Democrats must insist that their leaders get a better grip on messaging and use more constructive language.  Don’t say “Abolish ICE” and let them finish the sentence.  Talk about “reforming” the institution and remodeling the Homeland Security mission as a whole into something that more closely reflects our traditional American values concerning immigrants, who have been the lifeblood of our young and upwardly mobile nation.

By all means, keep elimination of ICE in mind as the ultimate goal, but don’t use that as your stand alone message.

We have much better immigration messages available, and we need look no further than the Statue of Liberty for the right language.