Homeland Security’s Authoritarian Role in Project 2025
The Subtext Is Make America White Again
In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Congress passed the Homeland Security Act of 2002, consolidating 22 executive branch organizations related to "homeland security" into a single Cabinet agency.
It was the largest government reorganization since the Department of Defense (1947) was created. It’s safe to say the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) hasn’t met expectations. Some agencies used the occasion to expand surveillance; others continued to function as if the new chain of command didn’t exist. Agencies that weren’t included in DHS duplicated its efforts.
Project 2025 calls for the Department of Homeland Security to be dismantled. I can’t say I disagree with that notion. I’m also cognizant that it will never happen. From day one a multitude of hidden agendas have been baked into DHS funding and operations, many of which came from horse trading in Congress for votes on earmarked projects.
Too big to fail isn’t an apt description; try hydra-headed monster bureaucracy. In order to have any chance of success in tackling the monster, a detailed scheme must be advanced; failure of any one part increases the probability that all will fail.
Here’s some language about initial responsibilities and actions:
During a transition period, a complete audit of agency policies, memoranda, and management directives issued during the Biden Administration should be completed, and rescission documents should be prepared for issuance within the first few days of the incoming Administration. Additionally, regulatory documents should be drafted to review or reverse all regulations promulgated during the Biden Administration.
Management Directives and policies should realign to ensure that the workforce, while adaptable and able to handle the bulk of the USCIS mission, is not allowed to be pulled o! mission work to focus on unlawful programs (DACA, mass parole for Afghans, Ukrainians, Venezuelans, etc.), which divert resources away from nuclear family and employment programs.
In other words, anything done during the past four years must be undone. And things that will be done in the future include those suggested by extremist anti-immigrant groups.
Here’s a quote from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s reading of this P2025 section:
Cuccinelli — who infamously rewrote the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty in 2019 to argue for limiting immigration — also asserts in the Mandate for Leadership that “victimization should not be a basis for an immigration benefit,” and he argues against a visa program for victims of human trafficking.
Notably, the anti-immigrant hate groups Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which have promoted replacement-style conspiracies, contributed to Project 2025. Those similarities are evident in Cuccinelli’s chapter when he argues for the use of “Blackie’s Warrants” by ICE. The term is derived from the case Blackie’s House of Beef v. Castillo (1981) and refers to dragnet-style searches for undocumented immigrants at American businesses.
The ACLU describes raids conducted under the auspices of a Blackie’s Warrant: “The raid is conducted by barring the exits, and questioning everybody, or discriminatorily questioning those who ‘look foreign’ or speak with a foreign accent.” In addition to targeting immigrant communities, the warrants are also criticized as a means to suppress union organizing. In 2016, CIS published a blog post arguing for “reinstituting the use of Blackie’s Warrants.”
A basic premise throughout this planning document involves rooting out the left’s wokeness and weaponization against Americans whom the left perceives as its political opponents. What this means in practical terms is the fear of straight white men of being replaced or swept aside.
P2025 would send non-law enforcement functions to other federal agencies. The leftovers would result in one cabinet level entity charged with halting the expansion of immigration and asylum programs; and arresting, detaining, and expelling large numbers of undocumented aliens and recent arrivals who have not secured citizenship.
This isn’t just theory on the part of section author Cuccinelli, a 180 day action plan is included in the document.
Incoming employees would be vetted by the Office of Presidential Personnel, with dedication to carrying out the President’s agenda being of primary importance. Upper level career employees would be replaced with loyalists, either through reassignments or attrition.
Loyalist nominees requiring congressional approval would be given those positions with “acting” or interim titles, and would have the authority to finalize agency actions, including regulations.
This will allow nutcases with no chance of getting through congressional scrutiny at least seven months of essentially unfettered power. It amounts to a brazen attempt to side-stepping oversight.
As is true with virtually every part of Project 2025 there is a provision for bringing back employees whose conduct made them into conservative heroes, like the horseback mounted personnel “falsely accused by Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas” of whipping migrants.
The Department of Defense will be asked to waste time and money to build more wall along the Mexico border. Things get fuzzy when it comes to surveillance of commercial cross-border trucking, installation of a large number of scanning devices for trailers should be a priority for an administration that says it wants to fight fentanyl.
Agencies involved in any aspect of immigration, according to the plan, would be given expanded authority, more (20,000 for CBP) employees, and access to so-called Blackies Warrants (unannounced workplace raids).
The nativist wish list is expansive, including making H1-B visas into an “elite program”, removing “credible fear” and fear of gang violence as grounds for asylum, ending funding for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to process and transport immigrants, and authority for ICE to arrest, detain, and remove “immigration violators” anywhere, including “sensitive zones,” including the current 100 miles from the border limit.
The dismemberment of DHS section (my shorthand name) includes transferring FEMA grants to the states, privatizing (or eliminating) the National Flood Insurance Program, limiting assistance for states and localities election integrity programs to technical hygiene advice and prohibiting any actions during election periods.
The Transportation Safety Agency would be chopped up and sold to private enterprise. (To be truthful, that’s already happening.) Secret Service operations involving protective services would be sent to the Department of Justice; its financial investigations would go to the Treasury Department.
Here’s one detail that’s an example of be careful of what you wish for:
“USSS should keep visitor logs for all facilities where the President works or resides. The Biden Administration has evaded such transparency with President Biden spending a historic amount of time for a President at his Delaware residence. This has left the American people in the dark as to who is influencing the highest levels of their own government.”
On April 14, 2017, the Trump White House announced it would no longer disclose the routine visitor logs maintained by the Secret Service, claiming there were national security and privacy risks.
Oh, the things we would know about events like the Capitol insurrection if there were only visitor logs to be had.
“Irregular warfare” will be utilized in the creation of a domestic surveillance apparatus targeting individuals or groups at odds with the president’s determination of what constitutes “the national interest.”
Cuccinelli would be in sync with other P2025 agency plans by reducing the scope and function of the Office of Civil Rights and the Privacy Office to a single officer with a severely limited scope of work.
There’s more details to be had in this section, but the important thing to remember is its championing of authoritarian rule under a president with expanded powers, backed by a corps of activist lawyers.
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Tomorrow: Things for Diplomats and Spies in Project 2025.
Previously:
(Intro) Digging Deep into Project 2025 - (a multi-part Series)
Going Deep into Project 2025 - Partisan Priorities for Civil Servants
Project 2025: Christian Soldiers Marching Off to Land Wars
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Tuesday’s Other News to Think About
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Heavy metal (is there lead in our tampons?) via Reclaiming
The negative health effects of heavy metals are well-documented, including damaging the cardiovascular, nervous, and endocrine systems, damaging the liver, kidneys, and brain, increasing the risk of dementia and cancer, and harming maternal health and fetal development. Yes, this is definitely an alarming news development. Tampons are used by about 52% to 86% of menstruating people in the US.
But as Dr. Gunter notes, “scaring women about their bodies is profitable and allows influencers to hide behind a veneer of caring.” On Instagram and TikTok, it seemed that everyone BUT the experts were telling me how to feel about this development. And let’s remember why - the algorithm! True facts are never actually as exciting as misleading videos. The socio-political temperature in this country is BOILING - so we are seeing this phenomenon everywhere in social media right now. Scaring us makes influencers money. This is why I wrote last week for A Little Bit Election that I continue to be hopeful rather than scared of the next few months.
Here’s an excerpt that I found reassuring from Dr. Gunter’s latest piece about the fallout from this study:
Regarding the data at hand, very few of us deal in parts per billion or nanograms, so the minuscule amounts of arsenic, cadmium, and lead found in tampons don't seem as intuitively reassuring as they actually are. Another issue is people often struggle to interpret risk (most of us are fear-motivated, something social media algorithms manipulate only too well), so only some of us are comforted by learning that all tampons tested had less lead than what is allowed in one 500 ml bottle of water. Never mind that while the method used to extract the metals is a valid way to tell us what is physically in a tampon, it can’t tell us what we really need to know–can these metals come out of a tampon that is in a vagina? This is because vaginas aren’t filled with nitric acid, and they can’t bake something at 180o C for over 60 minutes.
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San Diego’s surveillance watchdog hobbled as mayor leaves vacancies unfilled by Scott Rudd at KPBS
Membership on San Diego's Privacy Advisory Board — the civilian oversight panel that monitors the city's use of surveillance technology — has dwindled to the point where meetings can't be held because it lacks a quorum.
As a result, the city's use of certain surveillance equipment is not facing independent scrutiny. Privacy advocates who spoke to KPBS blame Mayor Todd Gloria, and one former member of the board went as far as to say his administration is purposely delaying appointments to the nine-member body to stifle oversight.
The disintegration of the board comes at a pivotal moment. Last week, the San Diego Police Department announced two controversial changes to its so-called “smart streetlights” program, which embeds cameras and license plate readers in neighborhoods to aid criminal investigations.
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Money for nothing: is universal basic income about to transform society? Via The Guardian
The concept of a guaranteed basic income might seem novel or neoteric, but it dates back to 1795, when the American founding father Thomas Paine suggested a “national fund” should pay every adult “rich or poor” a “ground rent” of £10 a year until the age of 50. Earth is “the common property of the human race”, he argued, so everyone has been collectively dispossessed by “the introduction of the system of landed property” and was entitled to compensation.
Today, as artificial intelligence (AI) learns from the collective intellectual and creative output of humans and uses this to dispossess workers of their livelihoods, the idea of universal basic income (UBI) as a possible solution is gaining traction. “We are seeing the most disruptive force in history,” Tesla founder and X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk said last year, before speculating: “There will come a point where no job is needed – you can have a job if you want one for personal satisfaction – but AI will do everything.”
The counter argument is that although AI could replace a range of jobs, it will also create new roles (including oversight of AI decision making – known as “human in the loop”). Yet for many workers, the advance of AI continues to be alarming. In March, after analysing 22,000 tasks in the UK economy, covering every type of job, a model created by the Institute for Public Policy Research predicted that 59% of tasks currently done by humans – particularly women and young people – could be affected by AI in the next three to five years. In the worst-case scenario, this would trigger a “jobs apocalypse” where eight million people lose their jobs in the UK alone.
