DHS Dumps Intel Office Because Actual Intel Keeps Contradicting Trump’s Bigoted Narrative

Legal Issues

from the expelling-wrongthink-to-own-the-libs dept

The Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act to expedite its ejection of anyone not white enough to be considered worthy of citizenship. ICE raids occur daily, performed by masked officers who look more like cartel thugs than US law enforcement officers.

The excuse for evoking a law last used to dump anyone looking vaguely Asian into US internment camps during World War II is this: the Venezuelan government is supposedly encouraging and financially supporting the export of Tren de Aragua gang members to the US for the apparent purpose of… well, no one really knows.

The Trump administration won’t speculate on the alleged goals of this (completely fake) foreign government operation. But it’s more than willing to speculate that literally anyone with tattoos who happens to be more brown than white is probably a gang member. If they’re not MS-13, they’re Tren de Aragua. Either way, they’re getting sent to foreign torture camps and/or war-torn nations the US government doesn’t feel threaten Israel enough to get directly involved.

While the courts have stepped in now and then to prevent this abuse of the Alien Enemies Act by the administration, the greater threat to its AEA-related hallucinations have been intelligence assessments generated by its own intelligence agencies. Every report to date has failed to find any evidence at all linking Tren de Aragua (TdA) to the Venezuelan government.

The administration views these assessments as failures, not because they’re wrong, but because they don’t agree with the narrative being pushed by Trump and DHS head Kristi Noem. And when that happens, people who actually know what they’re doing get fired and replaced with yes men or — especially with DOGE in the mix — don’t get replaced at all.

That’s a big problem, especially for an agency literally named the “Department of HOMELAND SECURITY.” If you’re going to ignore Intel because it doesn’t fit the narrative, you’re actually making the homeland way less secure, as plenty of otherwise pro-Trump entities are making clear now that Kristi Noem has decided to ditch a DHS component that isn’t willing to say what she or Trump wants to hear.

Four major law enforcement groups are sounding the alarm in a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem about potential cuts to the intelligence-gathering arm of her agency.

The Association of State Criminal Investigative Agencies (ASCIA), Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA), Major County Sheriffs of America (MCSA) and National Fusion Center Association (NFCA) warn that any potential changes to the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) current structure could have a negative ripple effect on state and local law enforcement.

This doesn’t sound great! Most cops and cop shops will vote conservative because the right wing never has anything bad to say about cops and is far more willing to help increase law enforcement budgets by consistently claiming it’s never been more dangerous to be an American or an American cop, no matter what crimes stats might actually say.

Occasionally though, cops do want to do their jobs. And this removal of I&A just because it won’t tell Trump what he wants to hear undercuts their ability to assess and defuse actual threats to national security. More cynically, shutting down this intelligence gathering wing of the DHS makes it a bit more difficult to treat anyone remotely “swarthy” as a potential criminal and makes it much harder to treat anti-police violence protesters as threats to the nation.

These concerns are not addressed at all by the DHS’s statement:

“DHS component leads have identified redundant positions and non-critical programs within the Office of Intelligence and Analysis. The Department is actively working to identify other wasteful positions and programs that do not align with DHS’s mission to prioritize American safety and enforce our laws,” the spokesperson said.

This is, of course, just another lie. The real reason DHS’s I&A arm is being severed is because it contributes to reports that undermine administration narratives, like the TdA hallucination that currently serves as the sandy bedrock of Trump’s Alien Enemies Act revival.

This government is so transparently self-interested it should generate revulsion in any true American. Unfortunately, we don’t have as many of those in the United States as we may have previously thought, especially now that the government is removing thousands of people who love America more than those simply lucky enough to be born here in white skin. Too many of those people desire to be tread upon, having converted their Gadsden flags back into doormats now that Trump is back in office.

Filed Under: bullshit, dhs, ice, intelligence and analysis, kristi noem, law enforcement, mass deportations, national security