An agency that was created to protect Americans after 9/11 has put us under siege. It cannot continue to exist. Period.
On Thursday evening in the Marble Hill section of New York, a five-year-old boy sat in the back seat of his father’s car, while a federal agent dressed up like a construction worker fired seven rounds into it. One of those rounds struck the father in the neck, just below his left ear. A neighbor who watched from his building threw himself to the floor because the shots were coming his way.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says the man has a criminal record and gang ties. Maybe. Maybe not. Americans don’t really believe anything DHS says anymore, not after the Department insisted that Americans its agents had killed in cold blood were “terrorists,” even though recorded video showed anyone with an eyeball that those were peaceful protesters who’d been murdered by their government. (To say nothing of that fact that public communications in general out of DHS have become meme-fueled, shit-posting, lie-spewing nonsense.)
I spent most of my career building DHS. That’s basically been my life. I worked for Secretary Michael Chertoff in the department’s early years under President Bush, when we were still figuring out how to make two dozen agencies function as one. I spent years on the House Appropriations Committee deciding how much money DHS would get, and then on the House Homeland Security Committee deciding how it should evolve. I went back to the department in the first Trump administration and ended up as its Chief of Staff. I’ve defended that department, funded it, reorganized it and, on more than one occasion, apologized for its unacceptable transgressions.
So believe me when I say that its most notorious agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, should be abolished.
There are plenty of nuanced policy arguments for that position, and I’ll make them another day. Today, I want to set them aside, because there’s a more basic problem. A federal law enforcement agency is funded by the taxpayers and exists to serve and protect the people. When the people no longer trust it, it cannot do that job. Full stop. It doesn’t matter how the org chart looks or how many training hours get added or how much “reform” is undertaken.
You cannot fix an agency that the people themselves see as a hostile secret police. There’s no going back.
The numbers aren’t good. A majority of Americans now say they have little or no confidence in ICE, and most now support abolishing the agency outright, a figure that was closer to a quarter just over a year ago. That’s how fast times have changed. People didn’t arrive at this view because of a slogan, “Abolish ICE!” They arrived at it by watching the agency shoot people in the streets, from Minneapolis to Manhattan, over and over.
The writing was on the wall in the first Trump administration. During my time at DHS, the White House repeatedly wanted ICE to do things our lawyers said were plainly illegal. What stopped those orders from being carried out was not a statute or some kind of institutional safeguard built into the agency. It was basically just a thin layer of people willing to say “no.” And not all of them were particularly courageous. You just had enough people who didn’t want to go to prison for the president and, at the very least, who didn’t want to get dragged into depositions and courtrooms after leaving office. Apparently, that’s no longer the minimum standard.
I knew then that if Donald Trump ever returned to power, the thin protective layer of people with even a half-formed conscience would be scraped away. An institution whose only check is a few worried bureaucrats cannot withstand corruption. With them gone, it would only be a matter of time before the agency was turned into the type of personal police force the president so obviously craved. All it would need is the wrong sort of people to take control. And the wrong people are most definitely in charge now.
Some will say the answer is “reform.” Believe me, I’ve been part of DHS reforms, and I can tell you how long rebuilding public trust takes once a law enforcement agency loses it. And it ain’t a year or two. It takes a generation. After all of this is over, voters won’t have the patience to watch what they felt was the American Gestapo get a two-coat paint job. That won’t suffice. Whatever agency is responsible for enforcing the nation’s immigration laws next will need to be a wholly new agency, built from the ground up, with the public’s trust designed into it, rather than bolted on after all the damage is done.
Again, I helped build the department that houses ICE, and I still believe in the mission of keeping this country safe. But a five-year-old in Marble Hill is going to remember Thursday for the rest of his life, and so should we. The agency that put him in that bloodied back seat has forfeited its right to exist. And we remedy it by taking out the wrecking ball.
Your friend, in defiance,
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DEFIANCE DAILY
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