When the 9/11 Commission discovered that the plot to take down the World Trade Center had been suspected by various players in the country’s national security establishment but they had never shared the information with one another, it was decided that the system was in need of reform to prevent such a thing from ever happening again. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 created a cabinet-level Director of National Intelligence to serve oversee and coordinate the 18 intelligence agencies, and established a new cabinet department to take charge of domestic security. Many of us knew that nothing good was going to come of that when they decided on the Orwellian title Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
According to Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, Americans had never used the word “homeland” before — and for good reason. The term evoked the “blood and soil” rhetoric of the Third Reich, which referred to Germany as the “fatherland,” and in a gender flip, it was also reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s use of the “motherland” during World War II.
Being a nation of immigrants, the U.S. didn’t see itself in those lights. Instead, we based our national identity and patriotic unity around the ideals and guarantees of the Constitution.
Being a nation of immigrants, the U.S. didn’t see itself in those lights. Instead, we based our national identity and patriotic unity around the ideals and guarantees of the Constitution. But after the attacks of 9/11 — the first on the American mainland since the War of 1812 — the “homeland” seemed more vulnerable. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was established as an agency under DHS to work alongside the already-substantial forces of Custom and Border Patrol (CBP).
In creating these new roles, Congress and President George W. Bush greatly expanded the government’s domestic police powers, which — with the FBI, DEA and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) — were already significant. Turns out, we hadn’t seen nothing yet.
President Donald Trump‘s mass firing of government employees, intended to wreck the federal government, doesn’t hit DHS. In fact, under Trump’s One Big Boondoggle Act, which he signed into law on July 4, the department will receive a massive infusion of money. The $178 billion funding increase will pay for 10,000 new ICE agents, retention bonuses, immigration detention camps and military equipment, among other provisions. ICE’s funding is now larger than the FBI, DEA, ATF, Bureau of Prisons and U.S. Marshals Service combined, and its detention funding is greater than the budget for the entire federal prison system. The legislation makes ICE and CPB the largest domestic police force in our nation’s history.
If there’s one thing we have learned about federal bureaucracy, it’s that if you build it, they will use it. Setting aside the predictable graft and corruption that will inevitably result from such a fast, unaccountable tsunami of federal money, we know it will be nearly impossible to hire such a large number of qualified, well-vetted employees.
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We’ve actually been here before. After 9/11, there was a huge hiring surge for the CBP. As journalist Garrett M. Graff writes, it was a monumental train wreck:
As I totaled up in 2014, “there were 2,170 misconduct arrests of CBP officers and agents—ranging from corruption to domestic violence from 2005 through 2012—meaning that one CBP officer or agent was arrested every single day for seven years.” Even by 2017, a decade after the hiring surge, CBP was still seeing an agent or officer arrested every 36 hours. “The Border Patrol was never big on the huge hiring,” one former training officer told me. “We weren’t prepared. That’s never worked out for anyone.”
Unfortunately, today that would be a feature, not a bug. Along with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the heads of these agencies don’t have many scruples when it comes to this policy.
This week we saw what a casual observer might have thought were military maneuvers in the middle of America’s second-largest city. Dressed in full battle gear, ICE, CBP, FBI and National Guard troops rolled through Los Angeles in military vehicles to take over downtown’s MacArthur Park. As it happened, there was virtually no one in the park except some kids who had been attending a summer day-camp. When the troops arrived, they were hustled away. The agents who were on foot and horseback marched from one end of the park to the other, apparently just to announce their presence with authority and intimidation.
According to military documents obtained by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, this operation was supposedly designed to “show their presence” and shut down the distribution of fake IDs among undocumented immigrants. He posted documents revealing that ICE and CBP seem to be living in some kind of delusional fantasy in which they’re fighting MS-13 and the drug cartels in the streets of L.A. The agencies are even apparently talking about making the park into a “forward command base.” As U.S. Border Patrol El Centro Sector Chief Gregory Bovino told Fox News, “better get used to us now, cause this is going to be normal very soon. We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.”
It’s easy to toss this off as some kind of cosplay by wannabe soldiers, and to some extent, it is; in reality, they are mostly targeting peaceful working people who are trying to live their lives.
But DHS and its agencies are about to start swallowing a firehose full of money, and anyone who thinks this can’t eventually add up to something much more sinister than a “show of force” is naive. Homeland Security police forces have been given a green light to roll through the streets of America’s cities and towns like a conquering army. This may not yet fit the technical definition of a police state, but it’s sure beginning to look like one.
