Rep. Delia Ramirez is expected to introduce a bill to abolish the Department of Homeland Security and eliminate all immigrant detention in the United States on Tuesday, the Illinois Democrat shared exclusively with The Intercept.
The Reimagining Safety Act would repeal “duplicative and overreaching terrorism laws,” according to the bill summary and text, and curtail the widespread surveillance state that emerged in the wake of 9/11 terror attacks.
It comes the day after agents from Homeland Security Investigations searched the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., in what the Department of Justice has described as an opaque “federal criminal investigation.” HSI is a component of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the agency at the center of mounting concerns about the violent weaponization of DHS against immigrants and the Trump administration’s perceived political enemies.
The sweeping legislation faces long odds in Congress, but Ramirez argues that strictly limiting the government’s immigration enforcement apparatus is critical for public safety in the wake of yet another shooting by federal immigration agents.
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DHS formed in the wake of 9/11 because federal agencies could not get their shit together and collaborate. Whether by design or rapid evolution, it became less of a coordinating agency between disparate federal intelligence agencies and more of a mysterious extra-judicial entity with a military arm. Oh and TSA. Let’s not forget about humble ole’ TSA.
It does make sense to have someone who coordinates all the different federal police and intelligence forces in the country. The US has TSA, ATF, FBI, CIA, NSA, DEA, Secret Service, Federal Marshals, even the USPS has a police force.
Without some kind of coordination you have undercover agents of one service being wiretapped and followed by another service. Plus, you get the kinds of things that happened around 9/11 where each agency had a slice of the picture but they weren’t sharing info so nobody had the whole picture.
I think in a sensible country ATF would be the alcohol branch, tobacco branch and firearms branches of the federal police force. DEA would be the drug enforcement arm of that federal police force. It seems really strange to me that the FBI is basically the federal police force, but for some reason when it comes to firearms-related crime, that’s someone else’s department.
Also, in a sensible country, someone would be policing the police. I don’t actually think any country has properly figured that out though. In reality, it seems like an important role for the police is to enforce the status quo, and ensure that the people on top remain on top and the people on the bottom remain there. That allows police to place themselves slightly below the people on top, but importantly significantly above those on the bottom. Because of that, I don’t think the rich and powerful in any country really want a fully controlled police force, otherwise they can’t do the extra-judicial things that maintain the hierarchy.
We’ve sure tried to forget them, but even though they miss 95% of the bomb exercises they are put through, they insist that we dont move on from them.
Itd be faster and just as effective if we made a bonfire of our money at the airport and all just emptied our wallets into it as we passed by them.
The whole position and power of the DHS needs to be reviewed and reworked. In most other countries, this is handled by the equivalent Department of the Interior. The department doesn’t need to have it’s own unchecked military force to get the job done.
At this point, it’s going to be neigh on impossible to do away with the DHS. Few have any idea of just how much stuff has been crammed into that department. Everything from law enforcement down to FEMA and even the fire trucks and boots your local fire department use.
That monster is huge.
Huh, almost like that was the point – make it so sprawling people can’t comprehend getting rid of it. Too bad a lot of us remember a world before the DHS, and it wasn’t rampant street terrorism in the USA like they’d have you believe.
If the fire department was put in it then it can be taken out.
Or just disband certain departments of the DHS.
The slogan doesn’t have to exactly match the execution.
I do too. And I’m far older than most people here.
I have had to deal with the byzantine bureaucracy we had before and the mess we have now. As I said, killing DHS would be a difficult thing because of the short sighted politicians and the short sighted electorate. Y’all got what you wanted.
This is your reminder that KGB meant (in Russian) basically the same thing as Department of Homeland Security.
Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Russian: Комитет государственной безопасности), which translates to the Committee for State Security
I think a lot of Americans actually like the idea of a security state apparatus. They want a sky-daddy to protect them.
It certainly seems that way, as long as said apparatus ensures their team stays in power. The alternative, consistently and actively engaging in politics, was too much.
They used to sell a slow cooker whose catch phrase was “set it and forget it.” This also described prevailing attitudes about political engagement beyond elections.
The people who will fight this the hardest will be the long toothed democrats unfortunately
tusk tusk, er I mean “tisk tisk…”
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that turd of an agency was Orwellian in 02’
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Realistically what does the dhs even do? Wouldn’t it be more efficient to abolish them and give their authority and funding to the states?
Hands off the deep state lady
“Defund the police” was a major contributor to Trump winning again. That’s not a message a lot of the country reacts well to.
Same thing here. Win before you start saying shit like this.
ICE is under DHS. DHS is also doing a bunch of wildly unpopular political “investigations”. There are also a lot of concerns about surveillance in general, which DHS is definitely doing (like buying adtech data on everyone) It is not at all controversial to call for scrapping the whole department. Maybe the messaging needs refinement.
Defund the police was a popular slogan in 2020, the year that Trump lost. Also, 65% of Americans polled thought burning down the Minneapolis East Precinct was justified.
Also, DHS is much smaller & newer than the idea of police departments. America existed for a long time without DHS, so I don’t even think these are equivalent things at all.
Most of the country still thinks the Dems want to defund the police, and most don’t want it. They also aren’t going to be too well informed about how DHS fits into the country: it sounds like it’s protecting them, and taking it away is being “soft on crime” or “open borders”. That turns the conservatives out, too.
Oh yeah that’ll win the midterms
Of course the federal criminal investigation is opaque. They all are; if they were transparent, everyone involved would flee justice and destroy evidence. Ramirez is a rep and should know better.
Anyway, I’m all for the deconstruction of our layers of police state, this is something that progressive dems and classic conservatives can agree on (and everybody in between).
I like police, I’m just not into multiple different agencies doing the same work. It’s redundant and it costs billions, we don’t need US Border Patrol, ICE, and Department of Homeland Security. Just local and FBI is sufficient.
However, Omar is a thief, and she should be investigated thoroughly, she stinks of corruption and rot. She had no money in 2018 when she was elected, now 8 years later she’s a multi-millionaire. She’s knee deep in welfare fraud, with her friends already serving decades behind bars for stealing tens of millions of dollars from the welfare system.
She’s stealing from the most vulnerable of people, the very people that she should be helping.
… and when Democrats take the majority in a couple weeks, they should also root out and arrest every corrupt Republican that they can (instead of sitting on their ass like they did when Biden was in office). I’m fine with bOtH pArTiEs investigating the other. More of this.
Abolish the police state, don’t stop at DHS.
Gotta slowly reverse boil the frog - these are definitely great first steps and will hopefully warm the public up to demilitarizing, then defanging, then defunding/abolishing the police state.
Nope, unless they promise to immediately fix every problem they’re not worthy of supporting
/s
Sadly, a lot of people on the left think this way
You gotta distinguish between the authoritarian left and the normal left there. Only one of them thinks this way.
You /s but over at Hexbear they’re sth that Mamdani isn’t solo sailing to Gaza
Yeah, but those idiots aren’t wort worrying about. Hell, they may not even be real people and if they are I’d be willing to bet most of them aren’t American.
You forgot the part where you’re literally a fascist for even thinking that it would be better than no progress at all /s
OMG someone on lemmy who understands that things don’t happen over night. I had heard such people existed but I seriously doubted it. The majority I run into think it could all be gone by next election cycle if we all voted for some fringe candidate with no hope of election.
Yeah I really don’t want to just jump into a sudden backlash that undoes every gain
