Perry: Abolish ICE? How about DHS altogether.

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A few days after Congress passed the Homeland Security Act in 2002, I met my buddy Kurt to play racquetball at the old rec center at the University of Minnesota. We were yelling about politics as we took out our frustration on the court, and one of us said, “Homeland Security! That’s what’s they’d call it in a dystopian movie!”

We imagined masked thugs parading the streets, kidnapping anyone they wanted to, going door-to-door looking for political enemies, establishing checkpoints where we’d have to show our papers, and otherwise undermining the core freedoms established in the Constitution. November 2002 wasn’t that long ago. “Lose Yourself” by Eminem was the No. 1 song. The latest James Bond flick had just passed the second Harry Potter movie in the rankings.

None of this is ancient history, inevitable or unchangeable.

As the federal occupation of Minnesota stretches onward, part of my process to maintain hope is to try to imagine what comes next, what a better future might realistically look like. And as a historian, I always look back not only to generally understand how things change over time, but specifically to the context in which something like DHS was created. It wasn’t ancient history, but 2001-2002 is still history, and we can understand what happened in that moment so that — and this is the key bit — we can make different choices today.

There seem to be two main lines of proposals unfolding among critics. I characterize them as “better training and body cameras for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in order to create accountability” versus “Abolish ICE.” The former is obviously inadequate, especially given that we already have plenty of videos of the lethal encounters in addition to the fact that one of the agents in question was a veteran federal officer with over 10 years of experience.

The answer, for me, is not to focus on ICE at all, but to understand the whole. DHS was created in a very specific moment in history not that long ago, so we have models for how to structure federal immigration oversight that don’t rely on an unaccountable masked secret police force running rampant in our streets.

In the aftermath of 9/11, an overwhelming bipartisan consensus formed around the need to rebuild the security state, folding all or parts of 22 different departments and agencies into a single bureaucratic entity. The goal was to link border security, transportation security, immigration enforcement, immigration documentation and emergency response all into a single department, ensuring easy flow of information.

It’s not clear that the existence of such a department would have stopped 9/11, but backers agreed that it would lower the risk of future attacks. The Homeland Security Act passed 90-9 in the Senate, with Minnesota senators Mark Dayton (DFL) and Dean Barkley (an independent who replaced Paul Wellstone after the senator’s death) voting in favor. The House passed it 295-132 (among Minnesota members of Congress, two Republicans and three Democrats voted for it, and three Democrats voted against it).

But not everyone was in favor at the outset, with left-wing groups — and guys playing racquetball at the U — predicting that DHS would not keep us safer from foreign enemies and would fundamentally erode our freedoms. Criticism has only intensified in recent years. The American Civil Liberties Union pushed against DHS in 2002 and in 2020, calling for spinning off the various elements into smaller agencies with “clearer missions and more limited functions.” In 2011, the CATO Institute called for abolishing DHS, echoing a proposal from 2014 that argued that far from being lean and efficient, it was bloated and inefficient. In 2020, the Atlantic Council think tank proposed a new apolitical DHS that would focus on the biggest non-military threats to the U.S. — at the time, especially COVID-19 and climate change. Many writers, including in places like the New Republic, Vox, the Guardian, CNN (by me), Reason and the Atlantic, have all pushed for abolishing DHS.

But I’m not aware of serious attempts in recent years to imagine a post-DHS federal government even from the Democratic left or the remaining libertarians in Congress. Instead, Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., has proposed legislation that would limit funding for imprisoning and monitoring immigrants. And Rep. Shri Thanedar, D-Mich., has filed the “Abolish ICE” act that zeros out the budget and closes the agency. I think we can do more.

One model for a post-DHS government, though there might be others, would be to separate agencies by their core mission. So move all enforcement-related functions to enforcement agencies (like Department of Justice). Move all bureaucratic functions to bureaucratic agencies (Department of Transportation or Commerce). Free FEMA to once again act independently, free from politics.

These are imperfect solutions in an imperfect world. Simply changing structures won’t hold those killing and terrorizing Minnesota accountable; that’s a separate issue and a vital one. But we need a new structure for how we manage borders, shipping, emergencies and more, whenever a new government takes over. We don’t have to be bound by the specifics of November 2002. We can’t be.

We’ve been through a debate like this before in Minnesota. The “defund the police” mantra sparked widespread arguments and ultimately resulted in more funding for the police (and a weird belief that the slogan hurt Democrats despite epic nationwide victories in the 2020 elections). I do think we need to fundamentally change American policing, but I also understand that none of us can remember a world before modern policing. With DHS, that’s just not true.