> ICE should never have been created (more of the fallout of the Americans surrendering so much of their civil liberties while panicked about 9/11)
ICE was created by stripping some non-enforcement functions out of INS (those became functions of Citizenship and Immigration Services), all of the lack of civil liberties that was found in ICE when it got that name and was put under DHS were already present when it was INS.
The idea that the name change was the point of origin of the problem is a story created in the last couple years by peopel who never paid attention to immigration policy before Trump's first term looking for a convenient excuse that is both systemic (rather than tied to a particular recent administration) and old enough to provide an excuse to make it unnecessary to discuss why certain problems persisted during the Biden Administration between the two Trump terms, but also recent enough to support a narrative that despite being systemic, it is a fairly new systemic change and reverting returns to a known good state that is recent enough that it is not out of touch with modern needs.
The problem is that, if you've paid any attention to immigration policy prior to Trump's first term (especially if it was both before and after the creation of ICE), its pretty hard to either consider the creation of ICE a significant sea change or the prior state a known good state.
The real sea change in the style of enforcement was Trump 1, and it was only partially unwound under Biden as a political decision that preserving a tough border image would avoid an electoral cost by appealing to swing voters with whom Trump's demagoguery on immigration had resonance but who were skeptical of some of his other policies, not because of some inherent structural change created when INS was reorganized into ICE that made ICE inherently and uniquely and incurably bad. But though the sea change was later than the "ICE is only 23 years old, and we can just go back" narrative suggests, the state before the sea change, much further back than the creation of ICE, also wasn't great.
Note that I support disbanding ICE and radically restructuring immigration enforcement alongside restructuring the immigration laws; but not because ICE was only created in 2003 and we had something workable before that, but because the system was broken well before 2003, and only avoided becoming a total shitshow up until Trump 1 because of how prior Administrations used (and in some cases exceeded) the broad discretion given them within the system to prevent that, not because the system was well-designed, well-structured, or resilient. And even then, it worked pretty badly, but in ways that the people not intended to be subject to it could (and did!) mostly ignore.