Abolish ICE? DHS Too. It’s Time

If you’ve watched news reports and viral videos of police raids over the past six months, you’ll remember that there will often be law enforcement officers or officers wearing 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 approximately 80,000 law enforcement officers in nine agencies and offices. So I think the uniforms just provide a general designation that these are law enforcement officers of the Department of Homeland Security. This represents a large amount of coercive power concentrated in this single department, despite the fact that most of these offices and agencies exist for fairly narrow scopes of enforcement, administering ports of entry into the United States, inspecting people and baggage aboard commercial aircraft, protecting federal officials and federal facilities.

But what was clear from the creation of DHS was that all of that power could be directed and focused toward a corrupt or illegitimate goal. And that, among other things, is what we’ve seen over the past year.