DHS is a Menace

A human rights abomination unfolds

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

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.”)

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass suspects that the government is flouting the TRO. She will conduct an investigation to determine if the government has defied a court order. In any event, DHS obviously does not defend anyone’s civil rights or liberties.

Just as horrifying are the post-raid conditions and ordeal that ICE inflicts on detainees. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Frequent transfers between detention centers, across the country or to multiple locations in a few days, have become commonplace in the second Trump administration, according to more than a dozen immigration lawyers across the country. They describe a trend where their clients are disappearing into an opaque and labyrinthine system that is obstructing their ability to defend themselves in court.

While some immigrant advocacy groups complained of increasing detainee transfers under the Biden administration, the transfers now are accelerated, and a departure from a longstanding ICE policy to limit long-distance moves.

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.

The case of Tae Heung “Will” Kim personifies DHS’s mindless, destructive operation which sweeps up not the “worst of the worst” but the “best of the best.”

The Los Angeles Times reported:

A Texas Lyme-disease researcher who came to the U.S. from South Korea at age 5 and is a longtime legal permanent resident was detained at San Francisco International Airport for a week, according to his lawyer.

Tae Heung “Will” Kim, 40, was returning from his brother’s wedding in South Korea on July 21 when he was pulled out of secondary screening for unknown reasons, said Eric Lee, an attorney who says he’s been unable to talk with his client.

He also suffers from asthma, raising real concerns about his physical well-being.

While he has a misdemeanor marijuana conviction 14 years ago, this should not have triggered this sort of over-the-top skullduggery, Kim’s lawyer explained. Indeed, Kim has contributed far more to America than the vicious Trump lackeys who have cooked up this Kafkaesque system. “Kim has a green card and has spent most of his life in the U.S. After helping out in his family’s doll-manufacturing business after the death of his father, he recently entered a doctoral program at Texas A&M and is helping to research a vaccine for Lyme disease.” THIS is the person they choose to snatch, lock up and hold incommunicado?

The disgusting conditions detainees face when inside detention centers should appall Americans. From the Florida everglades to the infamous Angola prison in Mississippi, Trump is creating a gulag system on American soil. Reports of deaths, serious gaps in medical treatment, unsanitary conditions, rotted and insufficient food, and overcrowding put us in the company of dictatorial regimes that consistently abuse human rights.

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.