If you’ve been watching reportage and viral videos of immigration raids over the last six months, you’ll remember that often there will be law enforcement officers or agents with uniforms that simply say “DHS Police.” Not Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Patrol, just “DHS Police.” As far as I know, there is no such agency under DHS. DHS employs some 80,000 law enforcement officers spread across nine agencies and offices. So I think that the uniforms just provide a general designation that these are law enforcement officers from within the Department of Homeland Security. That’s a vast amount of coercive power concentrated in this one department, notwithstanding the fact that most of these offices and agencies exist for fairly narrow areas of enforcement, administering points of entry into the U.S., inspecting persons and luggage getting on to commercial passenger jets, protecting federal officials and federal installations.
But what was clear from DHS’s creation was that that power could all be directed and concentrated toward some corrupt or illegitimate purpose. And that, among many other things, is what we’ve seen over the last year.
Yesterday I was talking to a friend about the shooting in Minnesota, hearing more things that make me think that this is a watershed moment. The conversation quickly moved to the need to abolish not just ICE but the whole of the Department of Homeland Security. This may seem somehow rash and unthinkable for Americans who can’t recall a world without DHS, even those who may be disgusted by the department’s excesses. You wouldn’t abolish the Pentagon or the Department of Justice. But DHS is a new and misguided creation. It dates only to 2002 and was born out of the response to 9/11, particularly the idea that the various agencies charged with defending the mainland United States didn’t sufficiently coordinate or communicate with each other — particularly in the intelligence sphere. But the creation of DHS actually did very little on the intelligence front, beyond making structural changes within the Intelligence Community. All of the agencies which are now congregated together within DHS were at DOJ, Treasury, the Pentagon and a few other Departments and agencies, and it all worked just fine the way it was. The new system doesn’t work just fine. It creates a vast surplus of policing power that can be and increasingly is directed toward illegitimate ends. It’s the engine through which Donald Trump has sought to treat blue states and blue cities as conquered territory to be casually brutalized as one part public theater and one part intimidation.
You might think, Josh, shouldn’t the Trump opposition focus on rather basic things like putting in a good showing during the 2026 midterms before getting into governmental reforms that can’t happen before 2029 at the earliest? Sure. But the order of events is not so simple or narrowly chronological. In the midst of a crisis as great as the second Trump presidency, it’s not enough to be resisting corrupt and illegitimate actions in the courts or winning elections, though those are of course essential. It’s critical to be thinking concretely about the totality of what you are trying to resist and what will be necessary to put matters right once you regain political power. That creates a forward momentum in time, a point of leverage into the future which can draw that future closer and become a source of motivation for things that require doing in the present.
The Department of Homeland Security is one of those changes of government, a reaction to 9/11 interwoven with the militarization of American society caused by the Iraq War, that got us to this bad point. We should undo it, take the different agencies and distribute them back to where they were back in 2002. The origins of the whole thing are complicated and strange. It’s a concept that was first pushed by Democrats in late 2001 and 2002 as a sort of managerial and technocratic streamlining of government that had the fringe benefit of giving beleaguered Democrats something to say on the subject of combating terrorism. The language of “homeland” security, an imported word which was mostly unknown in American civic discourse before the late 1990s, was always a grim sign of what was to come. It was a bad idea. Time to undo it.