A senior Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official emailed employees to tell them to turn in fellow coworkers they even just suspected of leaking agency information, an order which apparently was then promptly leaked to BuzzFeed News. “This isn't the first warning not to leak to media—we've reported on a few of those before,” reported Hamed Aleaziz. “Notable thing here is the request to report on colleagues 'suspected' of leaking information as well as any requests for info from colleagues that were suspect.”
Of course, it’s par for the course that DHS leadership would be angrier about whistleblowers exposing the department’s hateful policies than the hateful policies themselves. After all, it was whistleblowers who last year also revealed to BuzzFeed News that career officials were being instructed to deport asylum-seekers back to Guatemala even though the administration knew they would likely be sent to their deaths.
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“Last year, US immigration officials, including asylum and refugee officers, were told that they would be fired for leaking information to the media, according to an email sent to staff and obtained by BuzzFeed News,” Aleaziz reported. “The then–acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Mark Koumans, sent the email to employees telling them that as they regularly handle sensitive information, they need to guard it closely.”
Hey, but apparently now even just suspecting someone of leaking could get them in trouble. Aleaziz reported that the DHS official who emailed employees to spy on their coworkers warned that leaks risked violating both agency policy and law, but do we really think the same DHS led by an unlawfully appointed acting secretary who has repeatedly lied under oath to Congress and has signed policies later found unlawful by the courts is actually, really concerned about the law? Are we really playing along with this game?
“This is another way to say to people: People are watching you,” former DHS official and Ur Jaddou told BuzzFeed News. “It is not just us, but your fellow colleagues now have an eye on you.”
Unlawfully appointed acting DHS Sec. Chad Wolf should have his eye on actual terror threats facing the nation, but—yet again—a whistleblower exposed that he ordered intelligence findings altered to support impeached president Donald Trump’s political agenda. Unlawful Chad then used his “State of the Homeland Address” at the agency’s headquarters last month not to address actual terror threats, but to peddle anti-immigrant bullshit for his boss, complete with racist lies about “foreigners seeking to harm and kill Americans.”
Unlawful Chad also decided to publicly attack immigrant communities as supposed criminals just weeks before right-wing domestic terrorists plotted to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the popular Michigan governor publicly attacked by Unlawful Chad’s boss for taking public health steps to protect communities in her state. DHS leadership is also threatening its employees as its implementing White House aide and noted white supremacist Stephen Miller’s policy using the novel coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to quickly and unlawfully deport migrant children from the U.S.
“Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project described the order as ‘a complete bypass of the entire asylum system and (the) system protecting unaccompanied children,’” the Associated Press reported earlier this month. “’That is what the Trump administration has been trying to do for four years and they finally saw a window,’ he added.”
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