When the Orwellian-named Department of Homeland Security was formed in November 2002, it combined a number of agencies which had previously been assigned to other parts of the administration into a single Cabinet-level department. For example, the U.S. Customs Service had been part of the Treasury Department; Immigration & Naturalization under Justice; the Transportation Security Administration under Transportation; and so forth (full list).
And to be fair, there were plenty of instances where some sort of reorganization was probably long overdue. It’s not easy for a naïve outside observer like me to see what was the point (other than maybe interagency turf wars) of having the National Biological Warfare Defense Analysis Center under Defense, and Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Countermeasures under Energy; or to put the Federal Computer Incident Response Center under the aegis of the General Services Administration, the National Communications System under Defense, and the National Infrastructure Protection Center under Justice.
But in retrospect, it should have been obvious that combining all these security and enforcement agencies into a single department, largely insulated from the more open and public-oriented “service” agencies of the departments in which they had formerly been incorporated, was creating an incubator of toxic culture. Paranoia, obscurantism, us-vs.-them attitudes toward the citizens, and a general belief that “we’re the Good Guys, so whatever we do is a Good Thing” have been running rampant in DHS, and in ICE in particular. There were some who didn’t have to wait for a retrospective view to see it: Russ Feingold, Ron Wyden, and Ted Kennedy come to mind, and no doubt others now lost in what remains of my septuagenarian memory, as well as such organizations as EFF, the ACLU, and EPIC. But with memories of 9/11 still fresh, and Republicans in control of both House and Senate, opposition to anything labelled, however disingenuously, as an antiterrorist measure was equated with opposition to patriotism, and hooted down with great hooting.
The newly-formed Immigration & Customs Enforcement service was perhaps especially susceptible to these malign influences, because it had been formed by combining two former agencies (the U.S. Customs Service and the Immigration & Naturalization Service), which had each had their own “service” and “enforcement” sections, and assigning the “service” functions to U.S. Customs & Border Protection and the “enforcement” functions to ICE. At any rate, it has certainly become the most flagrant case of an agency running amok and making its own secretive rules. The recent allegations of medical and surgical abuse at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia are only the most recent and appalling indications of an agency doing as it pleased and concealing its activities from oversight; and even if those should prove unfounded there are surely enough credible allegations of torture, kidnapping, sexual assault, child abuse, illegal deportations, and other crimes to justify the agency’s being prosecuted as a criminal organization under the RICO Act.
There is no way a pervasive toxic institutional culture like that can be reformed by simply disciplining a few of the worst offenders and reassigning others to different desks. That won’t fix the basic problem of having all those security and enforcement agencies working together behind a wall of secrecy that also isolates them from the more “normal” parts of the administration. DHS needs to be split up, and its parts redistributed among other agencies which can provide the healthy leaven of a culture of service to the American public. That doesn’t necessarily mean a return to the pre-9/11 alignment: as I said, there were some hard-to-explain anomalies in that, though I suppose that wouldn’t be a bad starting point for further adjustments.
But there should be no automatic transfer of DHS employees to other departments except as union contracts may require (I suspect that may be a huge exception, but it can’t be helped). That would simply be distributing the bad apples among a lot of new barrels and spreading the rot around. In staffing the new agencies, previous experience with DHS, and especially ICE, should not be considered an asset: rather, it should put the applicant under grave suspicion of having imbibed that lawless departmental culture, and warrant more detailed investigation if not outright rejection.