When uniformed thugs from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided Erika Andiola’s home and abducted her mother and brother, the first media notes on the event identified Andiola as a prominent “immigration reform” activist and suggested petitioning prominent kingpins in the government immigration and “homeland security” racket for their release.

While I sympathize with Andiola’s specific predicament, I’m saddened to see her wasting her time agitating for political band-aids like the DREAM Act, which is just another regulatory scheme cobbled together by politicians. It’s no different in principle than the Arizona-specific legislation which singled her out for college scholarship ineligibility and then made her unemployable as an “illegal immigrant.”

At first glance, the DREAM Act looks like an improvement on the current repressive immigration regimes of both the federal government and those of several states like Arizona. It supposedly exempts immigrants who arrived in the US as minors (Andiola came to America at the age of 11), from ICE’s reign of terror if they jump through various political hoops such as service in the US military and/or enrollment in and graduation from government-approved indoctrina … er, “higher education” … programs.

But there are several major problems with the DREAM Act.

The first is that, as described above, it’s a nasty piece of extortion from top to bottom. Immigrants should not, any more than people born inside the imaginary lines (“borders”) drawn by our dominant street gang, be required to render service to that gang in return for being left alone.

The second is that the politicians who draft, and the goons who enforce, state regulatory schemes can’t be trusted to go by their own rules in any case. If they could, this wouldn’t even be an issue, seeing as how the US Constitution specifically and indisputably forbids the federal government to involve itself in immigration at all, apart from levying a maximum ten dollar tax on each immigrant. By what logic would we expect ICE to abide by subordinate rules like the DREAM Act when its very existence is a violation of “the Supreme Law of the Land?”

While it’s possible that the several states would develop similarly stump-stupid immigration rules if left to do so as the US Constitution requires, chances are that at least some of them would compete to entice immigrants rather than terrorize them with onerous impositions like Arizona’s SB 1070, which was sold as an “enforcement” hook for those federal rules (I’ve personally dubbed it “the Know-Nothing Appeasement Act”).

But even devolution to the state level is insufficient to guarantee the rights of America’s immigrants. The only real solution, as with every other social problem, is to abolition of the state itself.

Shiny badges and expensive offices notwithstanding, ICE is no less a criminal enterprise than Los Zetas or the Gambino family, and its abduction of Andiola’s family no less a crime. It’s time to recognize that and respond accordingly. “Reform” of the existing system through the DREAM Act or other political legerdemain would be meaningless window-dressing.