DHS is a Menace

On its website, the Department of Homeland Security has this jaw-dropping item in its list of so-called principles:

DHS will continue to implement safeguards for privacy, transparency, civil rights, and civil liberties when developing and adopting policies and throughout the performance of its mission to ensure that homeland security programs uphold privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties.

Where to begin? The only thing DHS is safeguarding these days is the massive egos of Stephen Miller and Donald Trump and the noxious brand of White nationalism that justifies the reign of brutality and terror utterly at odds with American values. (Just a small point, but notice that while DHS claims to “safeguard” transparency, transparency is absent from the list of things it promises to “uphold.” One suspects someone has been cutting and pasting words with no understanding or commitment to the ideas they reflect.)

ICE’s violence and brutality continues, likely in defiance of at least one TRO. The Los Angeles Times reports:

A man driving a Penske truck pulled up to day laborers at the Home Depot and told them he was looking for workers, recalled one day laborer.

The workers gathered around, just as more than half a dozen Border Patrol agents jumped out the back. Many of the people scattered, but 16 were arrested in the operation.

After weeks of relative quiet, the immigration raid on a Home Depot in Westlake early Wednesday morning revived fears of widespread sweeps in Los Angeles

A man driving a Penske truck pulled up to day laborers at the Home Depot and told them he was looking for workers, recalled one day laborer.

The workers gathered around, just as more than half a dozen Border Patrol agents jumped out the back. Many of the people scattered, but 16 were arrested in the operation.

After weeks of relative quiet, the immigration raid on a Home Depot in Westlake early Wednesday morning revived fears of widespread sweeps in Los Angeles

The government is supposed to abide by a TRO that prohibits ICE from racially profiling people or deploying “roving patrols to target immigrants.” (“In her temporary restraining order, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong had ruled that using a person’s race, language, job or location as a probable cause to detain them violated the 4th Amendment.”)

This sounds like what one might expect in the former Soviet Union. It sure is not an example of “safeguarding” civil liberties, civil rights or transparency.

“Many immigrant advocates say the transfers amount to denying a Constitutional right to due process, as they often place detainees far from their families and legal counsel, sometimes where they cannot access mandatory court hearings or even be located,” The Journal reports. It is not hard to figure out what is afoot: ICE shuttles detainees to places where access to counsel is difficult if not impossible, the courts are less hospitable, and detainees are far from loved ones.

The deeper one goes into ICE’s operations, the more horrified one becomes. A recent report on the mistreatment of pregnant detainees should shock the conscience of all Americans. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) released a report:

Since January 20, 2025, Senator Ossoff’s investigation has received or identified 510 credible reports of human rights abuse against individuals held in Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Bureau of Prisons (BOP), and Health and Human Services (HHS) facilities, county jails, and federal buildings across 25 U.S. states and Puerto Rico, at U.S. military bases (including Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti), and on chartered deportation flights. Among these reports are 41 credible reports of physical and sexual abuse of individuals in U.S. immigration detention, 14 credible reports of mistreatment of pregnant women, and 18 credible reports of mistreatment of children.

The list of victims of random, chaotic, and irrational bodysnatching who pose zero threat to the public and in fact are engaged in First Amendment protected or beneficial activities continues to grow.

Taken as a whole, the DHS appears to have morphed into a brutal, lawless gang of street thugs reminiscent of dictatorial shock troops in other autocratic regimes. Run by an unqualified and publicity-seeking secretary, egged on by the infamously anti-immigrant scare-mongers Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, and designed to impress a racist president who ran on the fear immigrants were “poisoning our blood,” DHS has become a disgrace, a human rights nightmare, and a legal scofflaw.

It is hard to see how DHS could be repaired. Perhaps it is best to shut it down and start all over. That is the only way to safeguard privacy, transparency, civil liberties, and civil rights.