Long before calls to disband ICE, there was a movement to end the INS

San Francisco Chronicle​

31-07-2025

On May 23, 1980, around 1,000 people, representing some 200 organizations from every border state, Colorado, Chicago and nearby Tijuana, assembled in San Diego for the National Chicano Immigration Conference by the Committee on Chicano Rights (CCR), a local grassroots activist group advocating for its community's self-determination.
The historic meeting was a culmination of years of collective rage against increasing violence emanating from the U.S. Border Patrol, police and vigilantes against Mexican migrants. Attendees determined that the current immigration system, built by Republicans and Democrats, could not be reformed, noting that the very category of 'illegal alien' was invented to exploit Mexican immigrants' labor. And so, they put forward a call for the 'abolishment of the INS/border patrol,' rejecting militarization as a solution to the U.S. immigration issue.
'Abolishment' was not a cynical call to start over. It was a means to imagine a more democratic border policy from the perspective of those most affected by it and end a system that took advantage of virtually rightless laborers. That framework continues to guide social movements seeking the abolition of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) today.
While people had always moved between the U.S.-Mexico border, migration increased exponentially after the U.S. government, facing a labor shortage in World War II, established the Bracero Program, which brought millions of Mexican contract workers to the U.S. After the program's termination in 1964, U.S. employers — now dependent on cheap, imported labor — continued recruiting Mexican migrant workers at the same pace. They did so despite a 40,000-person cap imposed by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
This created a growing population of vulnerable, undocumented workers in the 1960s and '70s who increasingly faced brutal apprehensions. The aggression was especially evident in the San Diego-Tijuana region, where migrants reported experiencing police brutality, family separation through deportation, wage theft and other types of abuse.
Chicano activists mobilized resistance. They documented reports of heinous strip-searches by border agents from hundreds of women of Mexican origin, along with other accounts of Border Patrol violence, and angrily wrote to government officials. In 1972, they succeeded in obtaining a congressional hearing that brought widespread attention to the issue of Border Patrol violence, but little structural change.
As apprehensions surpassed 1 million and continued climbing during President Jimmy Carter's administration, the CCR was among the Chicano Movement activist confronting the police violence, media scapegoating, and deportations targeting their communities. Despite their efforts, elected officials continued to make concessions to employers who hired undocumented migrants and increase border policing. By the time the CCR convened the 1980 conference, the continued escalation of violence had convinced activists: abolishment, not reform, was the only way forward.
There, in San Diego's St. Rita Catholic Church, under banners of Cuban revolutionary hero Ernesto 'Che' Guevara and Mexican Revolution leader Emiliano Zapata and the flags of Mexico, the U.S., and the United Farm Workers, conference attendees broke out into workshops to come up with solutions to immigration policy problems.
The Chicano/Mexicano Perspective Workshop, notably, considered an argument La Raza Unida Party had introduced as early as 1972 — that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the 1848 U.S.-Mexico War and granted U.S. citizenship to Mexicans living on land captured by the U.S., should also apply for 'easy entry of Mejicanos into the U.S. at any time.' This perspective defied the notion that Mexican-origin people were foreigners, positing that in fact they held legal rights to the territory. Activists also extended this anti-imperialist analysis to call for 'abolishing all quotas on immigration from countries where the USA has political, economic and military domination.'
The following year, attendees reconvened at the 1981 National Chicano Immigration Tribunal, where migrants and advocates testified to further incidents of violence, including the deaths of two children denied access to crossing the border. CCR sent these accounts, as well as the resolutions that had come out of the 1980 conference, to the presidents of the U.S. and Mexico, Ronald Reagan and Jose López Portillo. This laid the groundwork for the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), which created a pathway to citizenship protection for 3 million. However, the IRCA ignored Chicano abolitionists' fundamental call for change. Instead, it further militarized the border by allocating resources for more police, military equipment and infrastructure.
In 2025, immigration policy in the U.S. remains compromised by bipartisan interests that rely on immigrant labor but perceive immigrants themselves as a threat. But CCR's conference and tribunal show there is another way forward. And their proclamation 45 years ago — to reject the exploitation and racial violence of U.S. immigration system and to create something better led by those most impacted by the policy — continues to be advanced by advocates, organizers and community members who push for fundamental change today.
It's no coincidence that the 1,000-page tribunal document activists sent to Reagan and López Portillo began with the words of the formerly enslaved leader, Frederick Douglass. 'Power concedes nothing without a demand,' it noted. 'The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.'