We’re sure beginning to look like one
After 9/11 when it was discovered that the plot to take down the World Trade Center had been suspected by various players in the country’s national security establishment but they never shared the information with one another, it was decided that the system needed to be reformed to prevent such a thing from ever happening again. They established the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to coordinate all the intelligence agencies and they created a brand new department to take charge of domestic security. Many of us knew that nothing good was going to come of that when they decided on the Orwellian title “Department of Homeland Security.”
Americans had never used that word “homeland” before and for good reason. It evoked the “blood and soil” rhetoric of the third reich which referred to Germany as “the fatherland.” (And yes, it was also reminiscent the term “motherland” a term used by the Soviet Union in WWII.) The United States, being an immigrant country, didn’t see itself that way, instead basing its national identity and patriotic unity around the ideals of the constitution. But after the attacks, “the homeland” seemed more vulnerable and the people in charge grabbed the opportunity to expand the the reach of the federal security apparatus and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency was created to work alongside the already substantial forces of the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP)under our new “Homeland” security department.
This was in addition to the already very significant police powers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives which continued to work under the Department of Justice. All of this meant that the federal police powers had become a massively powerful arm of the U.S. government. Well, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
This was not supposed to be the case. In America’s federalist system, most policing was to be done by state and local authorities under their own laws and judicial systems. The feds had specific jurisdictions related to interstate crimes, the border etc. That division of labor has always been considered one of our system’s protections against autocracy. Unfortunately, just as so many of our other vaunted checks and balances — the three branches, state sovereignty, local control — that’s proving to be anything but a bulwark protecting our individual liberties guaranteed by the constitution. It turns out those guarantees are only as solid as the good faith of those in power and that’s a very bad bet right now.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court once again used its “shadow docket” to lift an injunction that had been preventing Trump from carrying out plans to wreck the federal government. This one stemmed from a case brought by a coalition that includes labor unions, non-profit organizations, and cities and counties in California, Illinois, Maryland, Texas, and Washington, that had halted his mass firing of federal employees, stating that it was very likely that he would eventually win the case anyway. The reduction in force will come across 21 different agencies which will hit virtually every department that serves the American people. It’s going to be a bloodbath — and that’s on top of the bloodbath that’s already taken place.
It won’t, however, hit those police agencies. In fact, the Homeland Security Department is getting a massive infusion of new money in the new GOP budget bill, to pay for 10,000 new hires, retention bonuses, detention camps, military equipment, you name it. It’s been allocated around $170 billion, including about $75 billion for ICE alone through 2029. Its funding is now larger than the FBI, DEA, ATF, Bureau of Prisons, and US Marshals Service combined and it’s detention funding outstrips the budget for the entire federal prison system. The Border Patrol is getting a nice $7.8 billion bump to hire 3,000 new agents as well.
All in all, it makes ICE and CPB the largest police force in our nation’s history. Now that the mass firings of every other agency has been given the green light, this makes the federal workforce little more than cops and soldiers.Does that make the U.S. a police state?
If there’s one thing we know about bureaucracies, if you build it they will use it. Setting aside the predictable graft and corruption that will inevitably result from such a fast, unaccountable tsunami of money, we know that it is going to be impossible to hire such a large number of qualified, well-vetted employees because we’ve actually been here before. After 9/11 there was a huge hiring surge for the CBP.
Journalist Garrett Graff reported on this at the time and writes that it was a monumental trainwreck:
As I totaled up in 2014, “there were 2,170 misconduct arrests of CBP officers and agents—ranging from corruption to domestic violence from 2005 through 2012—meaning that one CBP officer or agent was arrested every single day for seven years.” Even by 2017, a decade after the hiring surge, CBP was still seeing an agent or officer arrested every 36 hours. “The Border Patrol was never big on the huge hiring,” one former training officer told me. “We weren’t prepared. That’s never worked out for anyone.”
Unfortunately, today that would be a feature not a bug. Stephen Miller and the heads of these agencies don’t have many scruples when it comes to this policy.
This week we saw what a casual observer might have thought were military maneuvers in the middle of America’s second largest city. ICE, CBP, FBI and National Guard troops rolled through Los Angeles in military vehicles, dressed in full battle gear to take over downtown’s MacArthur Park. As it happened there were virtually no people in the park except some kids who had been attending a summer day camp and were hustled away when the troops arrived. So the agents on foot and horseback just marched from one end of the park to the other apparently just to announce their presence with authority. “Bizarre,” doesn’t begin to describe it.
According to military documents obtained by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, this operation was supposedly designed to shut down the distribution of fake IDs and “show their presence.” He posted documents that reveal the CBP and ICE to be living in some kind of delusional fantasy in which they’re fighting MS-13 and the drug cartels in the streets of L.A. They’re even apparently talking about making the park into a “forward command base” in the park. The sector commander of the CBP Gregory Bovino told Fox News, “better get used to us now, cause this is going to be normal very soon. We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.”
It’s easy to toss this off as some kind of cos-play by wannabe soldiers and it is to some extent. The reality is that they are mostly rousting peaceful working people trying to live their lives. But this group is about to start swallowing a firehose full of money and other resources and if you think this can’t add up to something much more sinister than a “show of force” I don’t think you’re paying attention. The Homeland Security police forces have been given a green light to roll through the streets of America’s cities and towns like a conquering army. It may not yet fit the technical definition of a police state but it’s sure beginning to look like one.
Salon