Abolish ICE? Nein nein, mein freund!

by David Benjamin

“People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” — Kristi Noem

MADISON, Wis.—Okay, so you’re watching a re-run of the peerless Jerry Orbach in “Law and Order,” or soaking up Mark Harmon’s neo-Joe Friday shtick in “NCIS.” The trusty good guys have just collared a murder-terrorist or a terrorist-murderer and are loading the skell into a Black Maria when suddenly four guys (three white, one black) in off-the-rack suits muscle into the scene and flash their badges. Exerting an air of stony authority that would faze Vlad Putin in his KGB days, they proceed to poach the arrest and spirit the perp away without a jot of professional courtesy or a tittle of explanation. All they say to Briscoe and Green, or Gibbs, DiNozzo, McGee and Ziva, are two gelid words that brook no retort.

“Homeland Security.”

As the producers of “Law and Order” and “NCIS” imply with each such DHS abduction, the deep-state buttinskies who queer the good guy’s righteous collar are superfluous. The bad guy’s already in custody. Nobody needs these kidnappers. Nobody would miss them if they suddenly disappeared. As these TV shows make vividly clear, the nosy parkers of DHS serve only to justify their existence by horning in on other officers who know—and do—the “job’ better than they.

Think about it. The most recent Secretaries of Homeland Security are Kristi Noem and Markwayne Mullin, neither of whom entered the Cabinet with five minutes of experience in law enforcement. Mullin started his career in a noble profession. He was a plumber. From there, sadly, he went down the drain, attempting a career as a cage fighter, then failing as a radio host, finally hitting rock-bottom as a right-wing politician. Noem, for her part, experienced two pinnacles in her career before serving incompetently at Homeland Security. She was the 1990 South Dakota Snow Queen and later—to validate her bad-cop chops—she blew her dog’s brains out for being disobedient.

Since being born from George W. Bush’s post-9/11 panic attack—somewhat like Athena sprouting full-grown from the head of Zeus—DHS has had seven other secretaries. Can you name one?

Speaking of poaching …

The invention of a department whose title includes the disturbingly Teutonic word, “homeland” (uber alles, anyone?), DHS confiscated a hodgepodge of federal functions that were grooving along nicely in their previous Cabinet cubbyholes. It absorbed and mismanaged—and now contrives to destroy—one of Washington’s most benevolent agencies, the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA). Today, if you’re in a “blue state” with tornadoes, floods, fires or old people dying in a heat wave, well, tough titty, Pinko! Start up a Go Fund Me.

From the Dept. of Transportation, DHS transported the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard. It swiped from the Energy Dept. the Nuclear Incident Response Team, the Energy Security and Assurance Program, and the Environmental Measurements Laboratory. DHS took over Biological Warfare Defense Analysis and the National Communications System from the Dept. of Defense—er, War. It even raided the Agriculture Dept. so it could run the scary-sounding National Biological Warfare Defense Analysis Center.

Most noticeably, Dubya’s DHS moved Immigration and Naturalization (INS) from the Justice Dept. and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection team from the Treasury Dept., which also used to be the home of the Secret Service.
Republicans justified creating DHS and appropriating agencies that had been housed effectively in existing departments because, they claimed, that this was a great way to shrink a bloated federal bureaucracy. Trouble was, DHS gave birth to thirteen entirely new offices that had never before existed and which—if anyone really needed them—probably belonged elsewhere in the government.

For obvious instance, the gumshoes working in DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis—those guys who swipe arrests from Briscoe and Gibbs—are duplicating investigations already assigned to a) the FBI, b) the CIA, c) the DIA, d) NCIS, of course, e) DEA. f) ATF, g) plain old police departments and h) a half-dozen other investigative outfits with more talent, experience and discretion. When last we noticed the minions of HSI (their official acronym), they were decked out in bullet-proof vests, swarming through a parking lot in New Jersey and mauling a Congresswoman, Rep. LaMonica McIver (who’s been indicted, with all due irony, for mauling them).

For further example, DHS has a Weapons of Mass Destruction Office that belongs at the Defense Dept., a Health Security Office more suited to the Dept. of Health and Human Services (if we still have one), and a Science and Technology Directorate that would a better fit almost anywhere in D.C.—DOD, EPA, HHS, NIH, or even with Howie Lutnick at the Dept. of Comedy—er, Commerce).

Speaking of bloat, the DHS Secretary’s office employs nineteen undersecretaries, each with a staff, whose numbers and names none of us knows. By comparison. there are eight undersecretaries in the State Dept. and eleven “commands” at the DOD.

George W’s greatest offense in foisting “homeland security” on America was taking an already dysfunctional agency, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and multiplying its arbitrary and ass-backwards efforts by three, adding the hooligans of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the sadists of Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). Voters didn’t much notice the depredations of these new wings of American xenophobia until we elected a sadistic hooligan as president—who handed out truncheons and set his thug brigade loose on immigrants and refugees like wolves onto an ice flow strewn with baby seals.

“Progressive” pols and “leftist” protesters waving signs have chronicled the abductions, shootings, beatings, murders and sundry atrocities committed by ICE storm troopers. They have advocated for its abolition. Defenders of the “border” against non-South African “invaders” from the polyglot “third world” respond that rare “excesses” perpetrated by ICE’s “bad apples” ought to be curbed. But to eliminate this crucial bastion against the poisoning of American blood is going “too far.” Reform ICE, they say, but don’t kill it.

They’re right. We shouldn’t kill ICE. We should kill the whole furshlugginer Department of Homeland Security, if only because it’s not America. It’s Germany from ninety years ago. We don’t need another battalion of Men in Black rounding up offenders whom somebody better qualified is already rounding up. We don’t need three separate federal street gangs, with black vans, no license plates, automatic weapons and itchy trigger fingers rousting little brown boys and girls from kindergarten and locking them up in concentration camps. We don’t need a twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth intelligence agency tapping America’s phones, staking out immigration courts and shadowing black voters at polling places. We don’t need Fox News talking heads making decisions about which Muslims have WMDs and whether we should launch nuclear missiles at ’em.

It’s simple, really. We don’t need DHS. Close it down, next Monday. Empty the building. Send all its useful components—and their people—back to where they belong. And the rest of its activities—the redundant, the preposterous, the cruel, unusual and violent?

Easy. Take DHS firmly by its current head. Hold it under, in the Reflecting Pool (an ironic gesture), ’til bubbles appear in the algae bloom.

Then, okay. You can let him up. Give him a towel and let him go. Tell him, “Auf Wiedersehen.”