The Department of Homeland Security Is Broken and Dangerous

The Department of Homeland Security was originally tasked with guarding the borders and preventing similar future assaults from abroad. Since then, the agency's focus has shifted to enemies closer to home in the form of Americans the government has tagged as potential threats.

"What we, in the Department of Homeland Security, have assessed it that the greatest terrorism-related threat that we face in the homeland is a threat of domestic violent extremism: individuals drawn to violence because of ideologies of hate or false narratives propagated on social media and other online platforms," Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told.

"The department has aggressively targeted Muslims, communities of color, and social justice movements in the name of security," Faiza Patel, Rachel Levinson-Waldman, and Harsha Panduranga warn in a Brennan Center for Justice report on the Department of Homeland Security.

"Infringing upon constitutionally-given freedoms in the name of national security is not limited to the Muslim Americans in the present day; rather, practices including the use of confidential informants, undercover operations, and entrapment are part of the history of surveillance operations conducted by U.S. law enforcement," Oxford University's Sara Kamali pointed out in a 2017 article.

Even the people specifically assigned to keep an eye on DHS seem more concerned with shielding the department from consequences for bad behavior than with tempering its malignancy.

"The Department of Homeland Security's inspector general and his top aides directed staff members to remove damaging findings from investigative reports on domestic violence and sexual misconduct by officers in the department's law enforcement agencies," Chris Cameron of The New York Times.

To repeat the Brennan Center's warning, DHS suffers from "a dangerous combination of broad authorities, weak safeguards, and insufficient oversight," and it's not at all obvious how to fix what's so profoundly broken.

https://reason.com/2022/04/25/the-department-of-homeland-security-is-broken-and-dangerous/