DHS Was Built to Come After People Like Me. Now, They Are After All of Us.

This story is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. 

After 9/11, fear changed the U.S. That fear was exploited by our government, fostering a culture of complacency and turning Americans against one another in pursuit of “securing the homeland.” As a first-generation Iraqi American, I understand that on a deeply personal level.

On September 11, 2001, I was a senior in high school. What happened that day set off a chain of events that uprooted my sense of belonging in this country. Quickly, our society incubated an ugly and pervasive reward system for stoking fear of the “other.” As Muslims and people of color were targeted indiscriminately under the Patriot Act, I was forced to reckon with the reality that we had become the enemy. Even if you were born long after 9/11, it’s hard to miss the ways that Islamophobia and xenophobia have shaped national policymaking.

In the weeks after that fateful day, we ceded ground on the constitutional rights that protected all of us. That oft-exploited fear and mistrust of those of us who have been broadly cast as “foreigners” — even when we were born in America or are naturalized citizens — led us exactly to where we are today, with state-sanctioned violence being perpetrated en masse against immigrants and citizens alike. The violence being wielded against our neighbors and in our streets is born out of a lasting vestige of our nation’s post-9/11 pandemonium: the Department of Homeland Security.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was established in 2003 as the parent agency for what we now know as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and Transportation and Security Administration (TSA). In consolidating nearly two dozen federal agencies, DHS was given few guardrails and a naive mandate: exploit every tool available to prevent attacks on our homeland and secure U.S. borders, regardless of rights long enshrined by law. 

In the two decades since, the DHS budget has grown exponentially with bipartisan support, but its guardrails have not. With unchecked power, the agency we were told was our protector became the perpetrator of our pain. 

As calls to “Abolish ICE” are growing across the country — with 46% of U.S. adults believing we should — I am compelled to ask that we reframe the demand to focus on the lawless entity poisoning our democracy. Rather than stopping with just ICE, we should dismantle DHS. The debates surrounding DHS in Congress continue to focus narrowly on reforms that will never rehabilitate what has long been rotten. We must not allow our collective amnesia to be exploited by politicians across the political spectrum, leveraging our fear of the “other” to peddle false lies about our immigrant neighbors who are being systematically targeted, detained, and deported, while all of our constitutional protections are hacked away. 

DHS is using our tax dollars to murder innocent civilians in our streets, abduct and detain 5-year-olds and their parents, and militarize our cities, all while enriching private prison contractors and turning families into enemies of the state.

DHS and its agencies, including ICE, have been shielded from scrutiny and unchecked by oversight by design, but its expansive power lies within its steadily ballooning budget. ICE’s baseline annual budget alone is 67% higher than it was a decade ago, and the One Big Beautiful Act allocated an additional $75 billion in supplementary funding for the agency. And yet, at a time when Americans are struggling to afford their groceries and healthcare, DHS is demanding even more to help build immigration prisons around the country. If they build them, we can be certain that they will fill them — with kids from our classrooms, coworkers, neighbors, friends, and family members. That is a certainty that transcends partisan divides.

As the Trump administration ramps up enforcement, the nation’s largest private prison corporations CoreCivic and GEO Group are citing record gains and celebrating “unprecedented growth opportunities” afforded by this administration’s reckless criminalization of immigrants. The more prison beds filled by DHS, the more these corporations will earn, with the blessing of an ostensibly negligent Congress. 

Until recently, DHS operated in the shadows with impunity. There have been countless reports of their human rights abuses, ranging from rampant racial profiling to the forced sterilization of immigrants in detention. The Trump era has escalated these tactics and made them more visible to the American public, but immigrant communities and advocates have long been sounding the alarm. 

That alarm has grown louder and more urgent since DHS tipped its hand last month in Minneapolis, laying bare to the American public the constitutional violations on which it relies to pursue its mission. Those violations were amplified, aimed at U.S. citizens, and televised, and yet we are being asked to forget what we saw with our own eyes — and to sit idle as even more of our tax dollars are funneled to DHS.

We must not forget, and we must not relent — because this is not the first time DHS has tried to rewrite history. In 2018, family separation shocked the American public and mobilized countless citizens into action. The architects of that policy were Trump’s Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller and Border Czar Tom Homan. The same Stephen Miller who is now calling on ICE officials to meet a 3,000 daily immigration-arrest quota. The same Tom Homan who is promising to de-escalate the situation in Minneapolis but doing little to temper tensions. DHS, under Homan’s aegis, wants to restore its image without taking any accountability — reminiscent of 2020, when its agents unleashed excessive force against protestors organizing in the wake of the death of George Floyd.

We must not forgo the truth in favor of DHS’ narrative built on lies. For more than 20 years, DHS has existed as an expensive and murderous experiment that has failed to prove its benefit to our country. I am certain that its existence will represent a shameful stain on our history long after it is finally shuttered. We are not powerless in challenging its existence, but our nation’s leaders need to muster the same type of courage that immigrants and everyday Americans have shown in their resistance to this violent machine. 

As of yet, Congress lacks the will and determination to adopt basic accountability measures like judicial warrant requirements for federal agents unleashing horrors in our homes and on our streets. Despite such cowardice, we must demand more in pursuit of our individual and collective safety. 

If we are ever to hold government actors accountable again, I ask you to join me in calling upon our leaders to go further than Abolish ICE and attack the heart of the problem: Dismantle the Department of Homeland Security.