From its inception, DHS was a corruption of fundamental American values.

[pat_k]

I've been noticing posts and commentary describing how Noem–Lewandowski have corrupted DHS. While the horror show remaking of DHS under the felon's regime is appalling, one thing that is rarely noted is that DHS was a corruption of fundamental American values from its inception.

By conflating national security and immigration enforcement, the Homeland Security Act of 2002 consolidated and weaponized 22 agencies.

The title "Homeland" itself was an intentional embrace of ethnic nationalism and white supremacy. It framed the United States not as a nation founded on universal ideals, but as a white homeland.

Placing INS immigration functions within a national security agency inherently reframed immigrants as security threats, rather than as people.

The redefined INS functions were institutionalized with the creation of ICE and CBP -- agencies that were bloated by massive increases in funding that was driven, not by a documented need, but by a Nationalist perspective and anti-immigrant paranoia fueled by demagogues stoking 911 fears. The result was a dramatic expansion of detention facilities and increasingly aggressive, militarized tactics.

As we redeem our national soul and work to remake our government, immigration functions must be moved back to a civil/legal agency like the pre-2003 INS, with a corresponding shift from aggressive, militarized policing to administrative law and protection of civil rights. In addition, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service must be restored to it's mission as a service agency, not the corrupt enforcement agency focused on blocking and denying applicants that it has become.

And, however we reorganize and reform the other functions of DHS, we MUST drop the vile Homeland name. This nation needs a government that strives to promote the safety, security, and well-being of the diverse populous while protecting the civil rights of everyone living within our borders. DHS, as it currently exists, undermines those goals.

[SheltieLover]

1. I recall when it was created & there were many who opposed it.

Abolish it!

[Mme. Defarge]

2. Including moi!

[SheltieLover]

4. Me too...

Dubya's knee jerk reaction to 911.

[niyad]

20. If I remember correctly, the wet dream was actually pnac's. We knew they

had the so-called "patriot act", already written and waiting.

[SheltieLover]

22. Yes.

[pat_k]

28. Way back when I saved a report on PNAC

It's entitled The Rise and Demise of the 'New American Century' (2006)

If anyone is interested in an extensive report on neocons, I found a link to that old report:

https://sites.ualberta.ca/~raitken/documents/0606riseanddemise.pdf

It's now on my re-read list. As I recall, it provided some great insights that currently escape me (wish my brain wasn't such a sieve)

From the intro:

The IRC is publishing this special report on the Project for the New American Century, along with an accompanying report on the Committee on the Present Danger, as part of an effort to stimulate more reflection on the dangers of the ideology and political projects of the neoconservatives and their allies.

IRC (International Relations Center) was founded in 1979 by Tom Barry. IRC morphed into other things around 2007 when Barry joined the Center for International Policy.

I don't know what Mr. Barry is up to these days, but he also wrote an excellent 2009 article on our destructive immigration policies and the exponential growth of immigration prisons: A Death in Texas: Where profits, poverty, and immigration converge.

Things were already intolerable then. I still have trouble fathoming the magnitude of the hell we are descending into.

[niyad]

32. Would you consider posting this as its own OP, for wider

visibility for this important topic.

Thanks in advance.

[MustLoveBeagles]

14. I was one

It gave me the creeps

[SheltieLover]

15. Me too, Beagles!

[TimeToGo]

16. Yep

[llmart]

17. I was suspicious right from the start when they used the term "Homeland".

It reeked of fascism.

[SheltieLover]

23. Same here.

[Jack Valentino]

35. My elderly father, who was raised as a farm Republican, was absolutely INCENSED by

the passage of the 'Patriot Act' and all that ensued from it!
(possibly partly arising from 'traditional' GOP antifascist sentiments of the past--
he was just barely too young to have fought in WW2, but his 2 elder brothers served)

And out of the 'AM Radio habit', he was a listener of Rush Limbaugh and all their ilk,
but far from converting him to their propaganda, he detested them!---

He was preaching against the Patriot Act at a time when
I had disengaged politically, and I was proud of him!
Later he went on to be a strong and involved supporter of John Kerry in 2004---
he was out delivering yard signs and probably doing some canvassing
and I don't know what else--- more than I did, I'm sad to say---
and also strongly supported Barack Obama, although I don't recall
if he did any work in that campaign....

This was a guy who voted for Nixon in 1960, and was a GOP precinct delegate
(because of that, he continued to receive GOP mail for about the next 40 years---)

but he was ALSO a UNION member, oddly enough as an insurance salesman,
but that eventually came to tell--- his vote for Nixon in 1960
was the last time he voted for a Republican for President!

When I became enamored with Ted Kennedy for the 1980 Dem nomination,
he joined with me--- and we both shook hands with Sen. Kennedy
at a rather private reception at the Lansing airport in April 1980,
just prior to the 1980 Michigan Democratic presidential caucuses,
which Kennedy won by an eyelash! (71-70 delegates, as I recall)

Somewhere I have photos of both of us, shaking hands with him---
I should track those down and scan them!

I really miss Ted today---- I'm sure he would have a MOUTHFUL to say about Trump 2.0!

[SheltieLover]

36. Your dad sounds like a great patriot!

Clearly not a cult member!

Thx for sharing!

[Jack Valentino]

38. I forgot to say my 'late' father.... he died in 2020, at the age of 91...

Non-covid. I miss him still!

[SheltieLover]

40. So sorry for your loss.

Tbh, tsf regeime makes me glad my dad is dead. Seeing a ruskie asset deliberately destroying our country would have broken his heart.

[Jack Valentino]

41. I particularly miss him when working on my garden, which is something we did together

for the last ten years of his life--- and for the first ten or so years of MY life----


Also I really missed him to talk about the house I live in now,
which he paid for, after he died.....


Thanks.

[FakeNoose]

3. The fear of immigrants coming here goes hand-in-hand with racism

... and I suppose the opposite is also true. I have many friends who are immigrants to the US, and I've never been called a racist as far as I know. I live in a neighborhood of Pittsburgh that is 50% black and 50% white.

I totally agree with your comments about the Department of "Homeland Security." It has been a dog whistle from the get-go.

[The Roux Comes First]

5. I Wholly Agree - It Was a Corrupt Idea and Violation of the American Credo from the Get-go

Courtesy of the previous gang of would-be "Absolute Executive" authoritarian bully-boys. Like Cheney, Rumsfeld and that spoiled, petulant bench-warmer Shrub.

That does not excuse the current further corruption of a sordid original concept.

[pat_k]

26. Absolutely! (does not excuse the current further corruption)

It is crucial to spread the word about the true extent to which they have put our national and personal security at risk with their intentionally destructive and criminal acts, incompetence, and intolerable corruption of the levers of power to advance their hateful and Un-American agenda.

I guess my concern is that exclusive focus on the damage being done by the regime's wrecking balls carries with it an implicit message that our task is to simply "stop them" or "restore" what was. To avoid that, I think it is important to balance our outrage at what they are doing with clear-eyed examples of where the pre-existing structure was already failing us.

It is a balancing act. In identifying wrong turns that predate the current nightmare -- wrong turns we need to deal with as we forge a better future -- we must not fall into the "it was all shit before" trap that just saps hope and immobilizes

[MacKasey]

6. I always hated that name Homeland

It was too close to the fatherland and the motherland

During world war II it was the Homefront

[Sanity Claws]

7. When I first heard homeland under the Bush administration,

I thought of Heimat, the German word for homeland that the Nazis used a lot. So much of what the Republicans have done was inspired by the Nazis.

[1WorldHope]

8. I think when we redeem our national soul

Immigration needs to be run by native American tribes.

[pat_k]

33. Now, that's an idea!

[1WorldHope]

37. Whose time has come! 🙂

[dalton99a]

9. Nazis favored the word ''heimat''

Nazis favored the word ''heimat,'' or ''homeland,'' and homeland defense forces were known as Heimwehr or Heimatschutz in Austria and Germany from the late 1920's.

For several decades after World War II, Germans rarely used patriotic words like ''heimat'' and ''vaterland,'' Hans Dieter Lucas, a spokesman at the German Embassy here, said.

''People then were reluctant to say 'heimat' or to be proud to be a native of Germany, but that is over,'' Mr. Lucas said. ''The term was misused by the Nazis -- the notion derives from 19th-century Romanticism, to mean your roots, the region where you grew up, your identity, where you belong, and that is how we use 'heimat' today.''

For the United States, the political origins of homeland security go back to the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review mandated by Congress. While no one can remember who came up with the phrase, it shows up as part of a recommendation to put an ''increased emphasis on homeland defense.''

''In the discussions we had about antiterrorism in the building, we used the term 'homeland security' or 'defense,' '' said Kenneth H. Bacon, the former Pentagon spokesman. ''It does sort of have Germanic implications to it, and from that standpoint, it may carry unfortunate baggage, but I think it's descriptive.''

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/31/us/washington-talk-prickly-roots-of-homeland-security.html

[pat_k]

30. We are a Nation, not some ethnic Homeland.

"''People then were reluctant to say 'heimat' or to be proud to be a native of Germany, "

The term Homeland is indeed directly tied to the notion of being a "native" of a place -- the Homeland.

So "homeland defense" in America is defense, not of the citizenry, but of the native inhabitants?

When the white men in power who advocated for "Homeland" in the name of their new agency envisioned the faces of the "natives" their "homeland defense" would protect, I can guarantee they weren't seeing Native American faces. They were seeing White people.

As far as I'm concerned, anyone who thinks "increased emphasis on homeland defense'' sounds better or more descriptive than "increased emphasis on our nation's defense" has bought into the notion/image that the United States is a White Christian nation.

[BidenRocks]

10. So say we all.

Back then, So said we all.

DUers saw this coming immediately!

[JHB]

11. Yes, the entire reorganization that led to DHS (and that un-American name) needs to be undone.

The whole thing was part of using 9/11 as an excuse to ram through RW policies, both this and the PATRIOT Act.

The big argument for consolidating these agencies under one department was the lack of inter-agency communication before the attacks. However, the agencies mainly involved there (the CIA and FBI) were the ones that weren't included, so the whole rationale falls apart.

And, y'know, maybe that lack of communication was just the Bushies being inept. The Clinton Admin got them talking enough to thwart the Millennium Bombing Plot.

[BaronChocula]

12. republicans are an organizational mess

W inherited a FEMA that had received high grades and then weakened it in a panicky merger of agencies in the name of better coordination. And then came Hurricane Katrina. Michael Brown, a former commissioner of a Arabian horse registry association (who resigned following a slew of ethics scandals - yeah, horses) had been named the head of FEMA. Brown was scapegoated for the failed response While his boss, DHS secretary Michael Chertoff avoided the same fate.Brown was assumed to be incompetent and he probably was, but we never got to see the depth of his incompetence because Chertoff gave him no independence or tools with which to do his job.

All that talk about coordinating responses blew up in republican faces with their first test big test post-9/11.

[paleotn]

13. Using the word "homeland" has always given me the willies. It's creepy.

And more than a little authoritarian. Perhaps that's what Dubya's minions intended.

[pat_k]

34. I have no doubt that it was intended.

The term "homeland" is directly tied to the notion of being a "native" of a place -- your homeland.

The only natives to this land are the Native Americans. Everybody else who arrived here came from elsewhere, whether in this generation or generations past.

But you can bet that when the white men in power who advocated for "Homeland" in the name of their new agency envisioned the faces of the "natives" the Department of Homeland Security would protect, I can guarantee they weren't seeing Native American faces. They were seeing White people. And that image is deeply connected to the bullshit notion that the United States is a White Christian Nation.

[Jack Valentino]

39. INDEED! For anybody 'white', this is NOT their 'homeland'!

We are a country full of the descendants of white "illegal immigrants"!


.... and for many Native Americans, the broken treaty of 1868 ought to be enforced---
perhaps by the United Nations !


(yeah, that might be painful for some white inhabitants of some western states--
but I suspect that fewer of them would DIE, compared to 'the trail of tears'! )


(( and I say all that speaking as ANOTHER white guy,
who has descended from white 'illegal immigrants'
who were never invited here by the natives!! ))

[malaise]

18. Bush legacy

Hence his silence

[dlk]

19. It was a harmful idea from the start

As we are now unavoidably seeing.

[Deep State Witch]

21. A Lot of Us

In the Federal Government thought it was bullshit. Like many things during the Shrub administration, it was an overreaction to 9/11. Of course, probably some Heritage Society goons thought of combining several disparate small agencies into one mega-agency was an awesome idea. More chances to get some of that sweet, sweet contracting money. And now we have it being the American version of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or Gestapo, or (insert secret government police here.)

[quakerboy]

24. end this travesty.

[phylny]

25. I remember in the GW Bush days when the government formed DHS and they began infringing

upon our rights. My aunt, who has since passed away, said she didn't mind the changes because she had nothing to hide. Ugh. I knew it would only get worse.

[Tim S]

27. Referring to the country as "Homeland" should have set off klaxon horns during W's administration

[pat_k]

31. For many it did -- but tragically not enough.

I recall many talking heads rationalizing the harmlessness of "Homeland" in the title of the new agency.

And they felt compelled to rationalize it because so many people found it DEEPLY WRONG.

[leftstreet]

29. DURec

[Iggo]

42. DHS is some nazi bullshit. Always has been.