Forget ‘Abolish ICE.’ Tom Steyer Wants to Jail ICE Agents.

THE SMOKE FROM ERIC SWALWELL’S POLITICAL IMPLOSION has not yet cleared from the California gubernatorial race, but one figure is deploying a giant political box fan to give himself some visibility. Billionaire liberal donor and environmental activist Tom Steyer’s recent ad buys total around $115 million, almost thirty times the total of his nearest Democratic competitor.

Swalwell’s exit from the scene appears to have benefited Steyer: He is leading at 20 percent in a new Emerson poll, with congressman and former HHS secretary Xavier Becerra close behind at 19 percent, also enjoying a bump in support following Swalwell’s exit.¹ Steyer also picked up a major endorsement from the influential California Teachers Association, which had supported Swalwell before he withdrew from the race.

But while some of Swalwell’s collapsed political presence has been recouped by other Democrats still in the race, much of it is now that swirl of political smoke: There is not yet a clear frontrunner, which gives rise to the distant possibility that Democratic disarray will allow two Republicans to sneak in to the gubernatorial runoff thanks to California’s jungle primary system.

Steyer is no dummy: While a Washington Post poll last fall found that 75 percent of Democratic voters and 60 percent of independents thought spending by billionaires on political campaigns is either bad or very bad, those voters also overwhelmingly oppose ICE, and 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.

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For his efforts, Steyer has received the backhanded gift of Trump lashing out over Fox News’s coverage of his candidacy, which Trump worries could have the effect of “putting him [Steyer] ‘into play’” to win the race.

It wasn’t just Trump who bristled at Steyer’s rise. Elon Musk retweeted a screenshot of the opening to Steyer’s blog post about his five-point plan for ICE with a single word of commentary: “Wow.” 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. But there is one thing that could trip him up in the lane he’s chosen for himself in this race—what some call his “original sin” on immigration.

“Is He Ready to Atone for Those Sins?”

In 2004, Steyer’s former hedge fund bought tens of millions of dollars’ worth of stock in the company now known as CoreCivic, a publicly traded detention company that has made hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts under Trump, tallying up allegations of poor medical care for sick detainees along the way.

Chris Newman, the general counsel for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) and an attorney for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man who was wrongfully sent to a prison camp in El Salvador last year, rejects the idea that a billionaire should be elected in California. He told me Steyer is “obviously” trying to “buy his way into the immigrant rights champion lane.”

“The guy profited from investing in commercial prison companies—is he ready to atone for those sins?” he asked.

Steyer has called this investment a “mistake.” When we spoke I asked him about it again, noting that his opponents see it as fundamentally undercutting his anti-ICE position.

“We did invest in it—it was twenty-two years ago—I realized over twenty years ago it was a mistake and got rid of it,” he told me, noting that he has since been endorsed by the leading rehabilitative-justice organization in the state, Smart Justice. “But I didn’t just do that,” he continued:

We worked for the next twenty years to push not just for fair treatment of immigrants but also against the era of mass incarceration. We worked to make California a sanctuary state in 2019, which means that California law officers cannot cooperate with ICE legally except with regards for violent felons. We pushed also in 2019 to make sure the state could not have contracts with private prisons.

Steyer framed the decision to invest in private prisons back in 2004 not just as a mistake or failure of judgment, but as an important personal turning point—“a wakeup call” that “changed my life,” he said. “And there’s a reason I walked away from my business and billions of dollars: because I want to have a different life than that, and being in that situation puts pressure on me to do things I’m not willing to do.”