When former President George W. Bush outlined his national strategy for homeland security, the pitch was simple: America was under attack by a “terrorist threat,” and the country needed to protect itself from an enemy that “takes many forms, has many places to hide, and is often invisible.”
It was in direct response to the 9/11 attack, and yet, the specifics of that terrorist threat were surprisingly vague. The imprecision could be read as paranoia. Or, more insidiously, you could see it as a way to broaden the definition of enemy to include any and all foreigners. Suddenly, immigrants were a threat to the “homeland.” And anyone else who would voice a dissenting opinion was a danger to national security. Rereading the strategic initiatives that underpin the Department of Homeland Security’s founding today, an irony in its logic becomes clear: the threat is there, and also, the threat is here.
And so, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was swiftly established as a new umbrella agency to oversee nearly two dozen existing ones. Domestically, the government’s great response to 9/11 would come to resemble a dramatic corporate reshuffling to keep Americans safe by updating an org chart. Whereas the US enforces its power abroad through military and economic strength, it enacts violence on its people domestically through a much more surreptitious form: bureaucracy.
Nearly 20 years later, the Department of Homeland Security is one of the largest agencies in the federal government. It employs over a quarter-million people. Through shifting regimes, the DHS reflects changing priorities for what it considers threats against the “homeland”: some real (climate change, the pandemic), others imagined (activists, voter fraud). Its 2022 budget is $52.2 billion — nearly three times what it was in 2002.
And still, the DHS is bewildering as an organizing body. Maybe Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) make sense under the same department. And the reorganization of Citizenship and Immigration Services under a “security” department perhaps reflects a shift in values more than a lack of forethought. But what about FEMA and the Coast Guard? The Secret Service, even? A big lumping together of disparate agencies, the result of which is increasingly cruel and bizarrely inefficient.
The lucrative private contracts handed out by DHS led to a boom in surveillance technology that is now deployed so widely that violations of privacy are just facts of everyday life. Immigration policy has become even more savage: families are separated, migrants locked in detention centers for months on end, and asylum routinely denied and seekers returned to countries where they are persecuted. Former President Donald Trump went as far as deploying DHS resources to disrupt Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, Oregon.
Just as 9/11 gave the US government cover to start two wars abroad, it became the justification to permanently undermine the civil rights of its people — an undermining of civil freedoms disguised as a big knee-jerk reaction.
The Verge’s “Homeland” project is a series of stories about surveillance, immigration, and technology that attempt to unmask the policies that have shaped the US in the 20 years since. For the next three months, we will be publishing investigative features, interviews, and profiles that will capture the breadth of DHS’s influence and power — and how that sprawl has diffused accountability and allowed the agency to operate in total opacity.
The great challenge of conceiving “Homeland” has not been identifying the myriad overreaches and abuses by the DHS but trying to understand the long trail of incentives and violations it has caused. Often, the reasons were unintentional. But repeatedly, the reporting comes to the same conclusion: that the Department of Homeland Security has been a 20-year boondoggle.
The Abdils decided Afghanistan was no longer safe after their 14-year-old son, Abdul-Azim, was kidnapped on his way home from school. For years, the Taliban abducted children for ransom or used them as leverage in negotiating with the Afghan police. As much as it pained them to abandon their son, Fazela and Hakeem Abdil had other children — two teenage daughters — to think about. They were faced with a difficult choice: stay in an increasingly dangerous Afghanistan or leave their home forever.
Up until then, things had been peaceful for the Abdils. “We had a well-arranged life. We had work, a house. Life was pretty comfortable,” Hakeem says. But conditions in Kabul had grown worse when many assumed they’d get better. In February 2020, the Trump administration negotiated a deal with the Taliban, promising to withdraw all troops within 14 months so long as it abstained from attacking US soldiers. The violence did not end and, in fact, became more pronounced.
So the Abdils made the painful decision to flee, knowing that they would be leaving Abdul-Azim behind.
If the decision to leave is complicated, it is followed by the equally convoluted, bureaucratic process of emigrating. Hurriedly, the Abdils fled to Tajikistan where they awaited visas into Ukraine. Then they began a process to enter the US. After working alongside the Americans for nearly a decade in logistics and transport, Fazela qualified for a Special Immigrant Visa, or SIV, granting her and her family permanent safety in the States. The SIV can be read two ways: as a reward for aiding American forces or an acknowledgment that helping the US can put an Afghan’s life in peril.
That process left them in nearly two years of limbo. But, last December, the Abdils finally arrived in California. From the airport, they were transported to a mosque near Union City, where they slept on floor mats for one night, shielded by a single curtain. Without any money to spend on Ubers or bus passes, the family walked an hour and 40 minutes to a local nonprofit, the Afghan Coalition, to begin the process of resettlement.
Kristjen Nielsen’s tenure as the head of the Department of Homeland Security was perhaps best known for the family separation policy at the border. The recordings of crying toddlers, the children wrapped in silver foil blankets, the detention conditions likened to “cages” — this was her legacy. Nielsen was reviled by almost everyone from the center and leftwards. Ironically, President Trump himself disliked her, in part, for not being tough enough on immigration, and would eventually force her out.
Nielsen would be the last legal Secretary of Homeland Security in the Trump administration. What would follow would be a chaotic parade involving governance-by-tweet, a thicket of laws and regulations, incorrectly amended paperwork, and a strangely hilarious internal legal memo referencing a @DHSgov tweet as though it held some kind of binding authority. Seven months later, Nielsen’s eventual successor, Chad Wolf, would take her place.
It was under Wolf’s direction that a motley crew of federal law enforcement — drawn from Border Patrol, ICE, the US Marshals, and Federal Protective Services — would occupy the city of Portland, Oregon, bathing its downtown district in a pea-souper of tear gas and snatching up its citizens for questioning in unmarked minivans. These brutal yet ineffective tactics were a response to the supposed “lawlessness” of the George Floyd protests in Portland. But Wolf’s own lawless occupation of the Secretary’s seat would go largely unchecked.
The way we move through an airport was radically changed by 9/11. The formation of the Transportation Security Administration under the Department of Homeland Security created much more rigorous and invasive security measures for travelers trying to catch their flight.
Nobody enjoys waiting in the airport security line. But you can make that wait a little bit shorter — and also keep your shoes on — if you pay for a program rolled out by the TSA called “PreCheck.” In a post-9/11 world, this is the great innovation of the department.
At least according to Dan McCoy. This is a guy who should know innovation, as the TSA’s chief innovation officer. In my interview with him, he called PreCheck “a hallmark government innovation program.”
But what do programs like PreCheck and the larger surveillance apparatus that theoretically keep us safe mean for the choices we make? What do we give up to get into the shorter security line, and how comfortable should we be with that?
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