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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Hands off the deep state lady
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Many of us remember the creation of DHS and we said then, and many experts also said then, that the department was going to be bad for Americans. In fact, it has been just as bad as we expected.
Does anyone actually feel safe because of TSA compared with previous airport security? I sure don’t. We certainly got safety by having locked reinforced cockpit cabins. But the agents who are doing the scanners, they miss weapons all the time. And of course they don’t get paid well so if they wanted to smuggle weapons in I’m sure they could do so easily enough.
And that’s before we started talking about ICE.
Honestly, I’m more scared of TSA than anything they are supposedly preventing.
They do prevent a lot water bottles and belt buckles that would otherwise be a serious threat to the safety of good law-abiding citizens.
Security theatre is security theatre. However, prior to TSA airlines were responsible for security. They contracted that security out to the lowest bidder:
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/10/1035131619/911-travel-timeline-tsa
That being said, my argument is not that TSA is better. I’m not arguing at all. I’m just offering some additional information to highlight what came before TSA.
The duplicative nature of DHS isn’t incompetence, it’s deliberate deception. DHS was created to put down dissidents in America, not terrorists.
Precisely.
I see your dhs and raise you the police.
💯
It was created in my lifetime and it totally fucking sucks. If we have to cut things because of budgetary concerns, it’s a great candidate.
Yep, start rolling back all those patriot act police state bullshit.
End the Patriot Act.
A lot of us remember an America without it and the DHS. They are both 9/11 knee jerk reactions that have been nothing but bad for us, exactly like the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions. We would have been so much better off to just take the (L) after 9/11 but W kept trying for a (W).
Also the Espionage Act.
And Taft-Hartley
I think a live streamed execution of George W. Bush would be a good way to build back the patriotism after we destroy the Patriot Act. A legal execution of course after he is found guilty for his countless war crimes. Then we can do Clinton, Obama, Biden, and Trump.
a live streamed execution of George W. Bush
This is no better than live streaming Hasan Nidal’s execution. The US may be fucked, but it’s still better than that, currently.
Just ratify the Rome Statute like we should have, instead of backing out in 2002. Let the International Criminal Court try US government officials for their many international crimes.
Yes. The comment was meant to be tongue in cheek in reference to that. We don’t have to live stream it. I think it would be better to sell tickets. Do it in a major sports stadium.
DHS has always been a dystopian reminder of the ruination of America that began with the response to 9/11. I never agreed to give up any freedom for their security theater. They just did all that shit to us.
I think the pew research poll immediately after 9/11 shows you’re in the minority, unfortunately.
Back then I probably would have agreed with it, if I had a clue what it even was.
But I’ve changed a LOT since then and have actively hated the entire existence of DHS ever since.
You might not have. But Americans reelected Bush after all these awful post 9/11 policies. There was no appetite for an antiwar and anti surveillance state post 9/11. Americans aren’t all victims. They are just mostly sheep.
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
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.
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 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
No party is more progressive than Democrats when they know their bills have absolutely no hope in hell of passing.
I also advocate for incrementalism, but I do think that very progressive positions need to be staked out and anchored by certain members in Congress, to move the Overton window allowing more moderate Democrats to ‘make compromises’ and still land everyone in a better position.
For DHS/ICE, if Congress can’t herd enough cats to abolish them, they can hamstring anything they are permitted to do without a judge-signed warrant. They can also first cut the slush fund appropriated in 2025. If neither of those things work, they can change the purpose of DHS/ICE to go after employers who abuse undocumented workers or leverage restrictive visas against them, and help immigrants get visas instead of locking up and torturing them.
It’s easier to settle on the three improvement positions if the initial anchor is closer to the extreme.
It’s not the party, though. There are progressive members of the party, and when they introduce bills like this, the rest of the Democrats cough uncomfortably, and sidle away quietly, leaving the brave progressive to bear the full brunt of the right-wing outrage machine. (See, for example, the Green New Deal.)
Would it not make more sense to bring it early next year though? Then it goes from a 0% chance of being enacted to a .05% chance
Get the buzz going now to force the issue when they can, because you can’t move the overton window without speaking out about it.
