Why homeland security is bad

These reports confirm stories we've been hearing for over a year now, with prisoners dying , children missing, torturous conditions including sleep deprivation, freezing-cold conditions, children kept in vans for over 37 hours, and the separation of families and secret detention facilities for children.

Meanwhile, in communities around the country, we've heard story after story of gross overreach by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, an unaccountable deportation police force that barges into hospitals and churches at will. There is a rottenness at the heart of the Border Patrol. This week, as the Congressional Democrats were touring a Texas border facility run by Customs and Border Protection, ProPublica broke a story that described a secret Facebook group of some 9, current and former Border Patrol agents.

Here, members "joked about the deaths of migrants, discussed throwing burritos at Latino members of Congress visiting a detention facility in Texas on Monday and posted a vulgar illustration depicting Rep.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez engaged in oral sex with a detained migrant. Examining these abuses shines a light on the folly of slamming immigration enforcement agencies such as ICE and CBP into a single department with agencies in charge of emergency management FEMA , transportation TSA , and energy Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency , all bound together by a counterterrorism mission statement.

As security expert Bruce Schneier often says , in the aftermath of terrorism, politicians feel desperate, rationalizing: "Something must be done. This is something.

Therefore, we must do it. Border patrol agent warns of derogatory culture at CBP I'm far from the first to call for breaking up DHS and returning its components to other departments where they belong, back to pre-existing agencies like Transportation, Justice, and Energy.

In , not long after FEMA failed New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, Yale sociologist Charles Perrow offered some "dreary conclusions" in Homeland Security Affairs, writing that DHS is not particularly adept at fulfilling its core mission of streamlining intelligence sharing among federal agencies while diverting funds from supporting first responders in the wake of natural disasters.

In , David Rittgers, a legal policy analyst for the libertarian Cato Institute, made his case that "the Department of Homeland Security should be abolished and its components reorganized into more practical groupings. And Congress keeps pouring more and more money in. The funding for D.

Earlier this year, the U. Supreme Court ruled that the patrolman was immune from prosecution, in part because the cross-border shooting posed complicated questions of international diplomacy. Last year, another Border Patrol agent shot a twenty-year-old Guatemalan woman in the head on U.

According to a report by the Government Accountability Office, between and more than two thousand C. And a internal report from C. Attempts at even the most basic internal oversight were rebuffed, and Tomsheck eventually quit. The bunker mentality at D. A former lobbyist, Wolf worked at the Transportation Security Administration before becoming chief of staff to D.

Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen , in Trump fired her in April, , and her replacement, Kevin McAleenan, resigned six months later. S disputes this, on an unconvincing technicality. Chief among them is the Citizenship and Immigration Services, or U. Next month, some thirteen thousand U. Is there anything that can be done at this point to curb D. Last summer, there was a prolonged and public dispute among Democrats in the House and the Senate over an emergency funding bill to address a humanitarian crisis at the border.

After when they did find out, California and Wisconsin officials accused DHS of giving them flawed information about the Russian attacks on their systems, an allegation department officials denied. No agency within Homeland Security has received as much scorn as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and for good reason.

Marshals, and the Secret Service make combined. And the arrest of people without criminal records doubled after Trump reversed Obama-era guidelines that prioritized undocumented immigrants with convictions. Agents have carried out arrest operations at courthouses , hospitals , and schools where its targets were dropping off their children.

With astonishing cruelty, the agency targets undocumented immigrants with jobs, families, and deep roots in American society. S for 30 years and has no criminal record, on his front lawn while he was getting his kids ready for school. Lukasz Niec, a Polish-born doctor from Michigan who came to the U. The agency has also become nakedly political. After California passed a sanctuary-state law last October, ICE ramped up its enforcement in the state, apparently in retaliation for the move.

Customs and Border Protection has taken a disturbing turn since Trump took office. Last month, a nonprofit group released footage showing Border Patrol agents pouring out water jugs and destroying other humanitarian supplies left for migrants crossing the deadly desert between the U.

If these issues were found in only one part of DHS and its subsidiary agencies, there might be an option for reform.

But the problem is both cultural and systemic. The department will always be the hastily assembled product of a dark, paranoid moment in American history.