The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has called for the dismantling of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), describing nearly two decades’ worth of “violence, the stoking of fear and a lack of oversight” that have now culminated in the brazen, public kidnappings of demonstrators protesting police violence in Portland, Oregon.
“The tactics deployed by DHS agents are unlawful and shocking, but they are no surprise,” ACLU president Anthony Romero writes in a USA Today op-ed. “Back in 2002, we at the ACLU called the initial blueprints for the behemoth bureaucracy ‘constitutionally bankrupt.’ And for nearly 20 years, we have seen many of our warnings about DHS become tragic realities.”
“The fearsome tactics of DHS are well known to the communities against whom they are used,” Romero writes. “Its dysfunction is one of the Beltway’s worst kept secrets. DHS’s overbroad mandate and unchecked powers have turned it into a tinderbox, now ignited by a president willing to trample on the constitutional limits of presidential powers.”
Among the wholly untrained federal agents unleashed on Portland protesters by the Trump administration were members of the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, or BORTAC, referred to by retired border agent Jenn Budd as among “the most violent and racist in all law enforcement,” The Guardian reported. Just days after wreaking havoc in Oregon, the unit then assisted in a raid against a humanitarian organization whose mission it is to prevent the agonizing deaths of migrants in the deserts of the U.S/Mexico border.
“Nearly 20 years of abuse, waste and corruption demonstrate the failure of the DHS experiment,” Romero writes. “Joining 22 agencies with conflicting missions—including border security, disaster relief and immigration enforcement, among others. Many insiders knew DHS to be an ineffective superagency, but President Trump has converted DHS into our government’s most notable badge of shame,” including carrying out one of the most inhumane and cruel policies in modern U.S. history, the forcible separation of families at the border.
“Years of chaos and impunity make a clear case for the dismantling of DHS,” Romero writes, arguing that “[d]ismantling DHS, breaking it apart into various federal agencies, and shrinking its allocation of federal dollars will allow for more effective oversight, accountability and public transparency. The spun-off agencies will have clearer missions and more limited functions. A behemoth of a federal agency too easily hides its problems and failings. Congressional oversight can be more readily divided among various congressional committees.”
In just one recent example of the department’s defiance of congressional authority, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) is blocking legislators from key findings regarding its investigation into a racist, sexist, and violent Facebook group that counted current border agents among its members, and has refused to tell Congressional investigators even the names of the few agents who were actually fired for their participation.
“More than a year after the existence of the group was reported,” Texas Rep. Veronica Escobar said according to ProPublica, “CBP continues to obstruct a congressional investigation into the results of the agency’s findings, blatantly shielding agents that have dehumanized immigrants and fostered a culture of cruelty and violence.” She was among the legislators personally targeted by the group with sexist and violent expletives, but she and others have no access to the full investigation because DHS feels emboldened enough to say, too bad—that’s none of your fucking business and you’ll deal with it.
There should be no going back to the way things were, because what that says is that DHS was fine and tolerable until it started going beyond certain communities. We can do better. We must do better.
“Donald Trump should not be allowed to provide a precedent for future presidents with authoritarian tendencies to repeat the injustices we are enduring,” Romero writes. “Dismantling DHS into its component parts would restore greater balance to our system of checks and balances. And rather than tolerating misinterpretation of ‘homeland security,’ we need our government to advance a ‘more perfect union.’”
