Getting Rid of Trump’s Secret Police and Their Enablers
A relentless assault on democracy by the Trump administration continues unabated.
In the news today, NPR reveals that this year’s census count will be wrapped up a month early despite the acknowledgment (even by the President!) of a difficulty in surveying households due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Vanity Fair reports that a fully planned out federal program for national coronavirus testing was deep-sixed because at the time infection rates were surging in “blue” states less inclined to be supportive of the administration.
Presidential advisor Stephen Miller told the Fox News morning audience an almost unbelievable string of lies about voting by mail and wasn’t challenged.
And, way down on the list of today’s outrages, the Washington Post is alarmed because they discovered Homeland Security forces spying on journalists reporting on DHS activities in Portland and disseminating the information to other agencies…
The Department of Homeland Security has compiled “intelligence reports” about the work of American journalists covering protests in Portland, Ore., in what current and former officials called an alarming use of a government system meant to share information about suspected terrorists and violent actors.
Over the past week, the department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis has disseminated three Open Source Intelligence Reports to federal law enforcement agencies and others, summarizing tweets written by two journalists — a reporter for the New York Times and the editor in chief of the blog Lawfare — and noting they had published leaked, unclassified documents about DHS operations in Portland. The intelligence reports, obtained by The Washington Post, include written descriptions and images of the tweets and the number of times they had been liked or retweeted by others…
...A memo by the department’s top intelligence official, which was tweeted by the editor of Lawfare, says personnel relied on “FINTEL,” an acronym for financial intelligence, as well as finished intelligence “Baseball cards” of arrested protesters to try to understand their motivations and plans. Historically, military and intelligence officials have used such cards for biographical dossiers of suspected terrorists, including those targeted in lethal drone strikes.
...here’s a bit of non-breaking news for the Post and other outlets reporting on this surveillance: Targeting journalists, humanitarian aid workers and even lawyers has been standard operating procedure along the border for at least a couple of years now..
A quick visit to Google by an enterprising reporter would show actual leaked documentation about the practice by San Diego’s NBC7.
The source said the documents or screenshots show a SharePoint application that was used by agents from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S. Border Patrol, Homeland Security Investigations and some agents from the San Diego sector of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI).
The intelligence-gathering efforts were done under the umbrella of “Operation Secure Line,” the operation designated to monitor the migrant caravan, according to the source.
The documents list people who officials think should be targeted for screening at the border.
The individuals listed include ten journalists, seven of whom are U.S. citizens, a U.S. attorney, and 48 people from the U.S. and other countries, labeled as organizers, instigators or their roles “unknown.” The target list includes advocates from organizations like Border Angels and Pueblo Sin Fronteras.
Simply stated, the Customs and Border Patrol and its sister agencies have not only failed to properly do their jobs, they have become breeding grounds for an armed force that considers most of the rest of the population as adversaries.
When caught in the act of wrongdoing, agency leaders make pious declarations about the integrity of personnel and promise to correct the problems. It’s all an act.
Here are just a few random examples:
The secret Facebook group with nearly 10,000 active and retired agents where users mocked the deaths of migrants, along with posting sexist and racist jokes about Latino members of Congress, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York.
Funding for medical care for children detained along the border was mishandled, never reaching the facilities for which it was intended. Congressional investigators have discovered numerous deaths among minors that medical officials believe were preventable.
Border Patrol agents were responsible for vandalizing and dumping out 3,586 gallons of water left in the desert by humanitarian groups.
Following complaints about the BP activities, a leader of No More Deaths was arrested and charged with illegally harboring aliens. In November, a jury found Scott Warren innocent of those charges.
Lawsuits and congressional investigations reveal an unchecked record of brutality and neglect, including more than 200 incidents of alleged mistreatment of minors apprehended and detained by Customs and Border Protection
While the above examples focus on border enforcement practices, the reality is that the agency is disorganized and not even close to fulfilling its original premise of protecting the lives of Americans from various larger threats.
I really do understand the need for laws to be enforced. Citizens have a right to a safe and secure existence and the federal government does have a responsibility to protect us in situations beyond the purview of state and local governments.
Having said that, let me join the growing chorus of people saying the Department of Homeland Security needs to be disbanded. I’ll take it one step further and say that individuals in that agency who have abused their powers need to face prosecution.
Despite the Border Patrol’s role as Trump’s enforcers that has garnered national attention, the many components of the agency are incapable of functioning properly under the current arrangement.
https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1289010485954859009?s=20
While the concept dumping DHS may have started out being branded as a radical idea being pushed by the likes of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders, years of watching the agency fail have convinced other folks better known for being of the centrist persuasion.
Here’s Richard Clark, who served on the National Security Council for Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush:
No national institution has been more damaged than the Department of Homeland Security. The youngest of the federal departments, the DHS is among the largest by employee count, ranking just below the Defense Department and Veterans Affairs. It was created in 2003 by smashing together 17 agencies from five departments in an ill-conceived response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Its divisions and agencies are now largely leaderless, because the White House refuses to nominate senior managers to replace those who have left. Quick, who is the secretary of homeland security?
You get my point.
Trump has done far more damage to the DHS, however, than leaving it leaderless. He has branded it as the department that cages children, swoops innocent citizens off U.S. streets, sends warriors dressed for the apocalypse to deal with protests, hunts down hard-working people doing “essential jobs” to forcibly deport them, and harasses foreign students at leading universities. The DHS has become synonymous with unsympathetic government overreach, malevolence and dysfunction.
Retired California Senator Barbara Boxer took to the Washington Post to express regret about her role in enabling the creation of DHS:
Here are the three words that no elected official, serving or retired, wants to say: “I was wrong.”
Throughout my career, I was known for taking some very lonely votes. But I made a mistake in 2002 when I voted to create the Department of Homeland Security, which had been recommended by a number of members of Congress in the wake of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 the year before….
...Here’s where I went wrong: I never imagined that a president would use unconfirmed puppets like acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf and his deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, to terrorize our own citizens in our own country. Our goal then had been to protect our own people, not hurt them, not harm them, not hunt them down on the streets of Portland or any other city. There was no protection built into this bill to stop a power-hungry president from misusing a powerful federal police force, hidden in disparate agencies, controlled by one agency head — the thought never even occurred to me.
Law enforcement-type agencies have enormous political power, and it’s a given that they’ll aggressively protect the status quo.
Add to this the Trumpanization of the Border Patrol and a politically dangerous situation is easily imagined. Those folks have guns, an intelligence operations capability, and many of them truly believe they are the last thing standing between civilization and barbarism.
For now, a strategy of exposing and opposing their inappropriate deployments is needed to create more public awareness of just how bad the problem is. While a Big Campaign Promise of overhaul and reform may seem like a good idea, political circumstances dictate the need for a more low key approach until such time as a new administration and Congress are in place.
And if, God forbid, we don’t have new people at the helm of two major branches of government come 2021, I believe DHS and it’s agencies will become the face of an authoritarian regime.
Hey folks! Be sure to like/follow Words & Deeds on Facebook. If you’d like to have each post emailed to you check out the simple subscription form on the right side of the front page.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com