Time for another entry in the continuing saga of the U.S. government being reassigned to work on President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
In the most recent development, hundreds of Department of Homeland Security employees in jobs unrelated to immigration have been ordered to transfer to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol, and the Federal Protective Service.
You might not be as familiar with the last one, which protects federal buildings. That might sound a bit sleepier than working for ICE or CBP, but not these days.
Earlier this week, FPS personnel received a memo from DHS senior officials declaring that “the limits to FPS’s authority off federal property are the edges of the constitution on one side and necessity on the other.”
Huh, what now?
In case that permission slip wasn’t crystal clear, the memo took it one step further.
“There is simply no legal barrier to FPS taking action off federal property where a reasonable nexus to protecting that property exists,” it said.
So under the guise of protecting federal property, FPS personnel can go off of that property and hurt people anyway, with no limits to their authority. Great.
Who are we even putting in these jobs where the sole qualification seems to be how much violence you’re willing to commit on behalf of the state? Well, people who did not join the government for that reason.
Employees at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Transportation Security Administration, and the Coast Guard have received reassignment notices. They have one week to accept the reassignment or face termination. Upon acceptance, they’ll have 60 days to relocate.
CISA comes in for particular ire here, because how dare they not acknowledge Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election? Former CISA Director Chris Krebs is a peak fixation of Trump’s, who stripped Krebs of his security clearances and ordered a review of the last six years of his work to prove that he somehow was using the federal government to censor people.
Slashing cybersecurity personnel is certainly a choice when the government is facing a massive attack on its firewalls.
Here’s DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin with a typically fact-free statement: “Any notion that DHS is unprepared to handle threats to our nation because of these realignments is ludicrous, especially given the abject failure at the hands of CISA in the last administration.”
To be fair, the Trump administration also eliminated funding for CISA’s work on supporting state and local officials in election security efforts, so why not pour that money into Trump’s endless assault on immigrants?
DHS employees will join the reassigned FBI agents who have been diverted from working on actual threats to help support the lawless violence of this administration.
And who wouldn’t want to get a piece of that, right?
