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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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.