“Abolish ICE” makes for red-meat copy on the side of a Chicago street sweeper. But neither Mayor Brandon Johnson nor Democratic Senate candidate Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton really wants to abolish immigration and customs enforcement in the United States.

Having a say over who comes and goes into a country is an intrinsic part of what defines a country.

Any country. Every country.

No nation in the world — at least beyond a few microstates within a broader customs union — has no customs enforcement whatsoever. If paying attention to what arrives in suitcases or on container ships were to be abolished, we’d be awash in illegal drugs and weapons, and most every business in America would be howling about illegal imports. You can’t enforce domestic laws or keep a country’s citizens safe without customs. Even if some future far-left politicians sold America on the absurdity of open borders when it comes to immigration (also not what other countries do), they’d still have to hold on to customs. Or so one can hope.

Which brings us to the arrival of new Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who has floated the absurd idea of the federal government, being cheesed off about so-called sanctuary cities and the lack of cooperation therein with ICE, moving to limit the provision of customs services, a federal responsibility, at the airports within such cities.

Taken on its face, that would have to mean an end to international flights at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. Not to mention, Boston Logan International. New York City’s John F. Kennedy International, Los Angeles International, San Francisco International and Denver International, to name just a few examples.

Were that to happen, thousands of Americans would be thrown out of work, airline profitability would tank, international tourism would fall apart (beyond cruises and Walt Disney World, anyway) and U.S. commerce in these leading business centers would be severely impacted. And, of course, there would be chaos.

“If they’re a sanctuary city, should they really be processing customs into their city?” Mullin has said.

Even those of us who would like to see better cooperation between local jurisdictions and ICE when it comes to violent criminals surely can see that day-to-day customs enforcement and the urban guerrilla tactics of ICE and the U.S. Border Patrol under Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino are very different matters. There were valid reasons to protest the actions of those groups on the streets of Chicago and we did so vociferously. Several times. Moreover, the Illinois TRUST Act, enacted in 2017, restricts state and local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration authorities, so this is hardly in the control of the city of Chicago, which operates O’Hare, though of course we do have a welcoming city ordinance of our own.

But that’s not the main point. Rather than making these kinds of threats, inevitably generating equally unhelpful and aggressive responses from local politicians, we’d rather see the new secretary declare a new day at the Department of Homeland Security and show an interest in talking to local and state officials about increasing cooperation to remove violent undesirables and declaring his support for reasonable reforms (masks, body cameras, judicial warrants, he knows the drill) for ICE agents. In return for a better relationship.

We’d like a visit from him, too. We’re interested in what he plans to do differently from Noem and we are reasonable people who would hear him out.

In the meantime, let’s keep the nation’s customs and immigration laws in place at O’Hare, please.

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