“The federal surge, which took place after Trump signed an executive order declaring a crime emergency in the nation’s capital, brought with it a spike in immigration-related arrests. But despite the pretense of curbing and targeting violent crime, more than 80 percent of the 1,100 people arrested for immigration offenses had no prior criminal record. And according to United States District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Beryl A. Howell, many of these warrantless immigration arrests may have been unlawful.
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her determination that the DHS has, in fact, adopted an unlawful policy and practice of conducting warrantless immigration arrests without probable cause that runs counter to federal law and “well-settled constitutional principles,” and reveals an “abandonment of the probable cause standard.””
“In case after case, Homeland Security’s Public Affairs Office releases incorrect information about arrests carried out by federal immigration officers.
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ProPublica reported last week that it had found 170 U.S. citizens who had been detained by federal immigration officers since Trump’s mass deportation blitz began. Some of them were pepper-sprayed and assaulted, and others were held in detention for days before being released.
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After a video of a Chicago-area teenager being violently arrested went viral earlier this month, McLaughlin wrote on X that the video was “from a year ago” and that the agents involved weren’t ICE. Both claims were false.
McLaughlin also recently claimed that a 13-year-old boy detained by ICE in Massachusetts was in possession of a knife and gun. However, the town’s mayor confirmed during a press conference the next day that “no guns were found” during the boy’s arrest.”
“Trump assailed FEMA within days of entering office over its response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene last year in North Carolina. Since then, he has thrown the nation’s disaster agency — and state leaders — into turmoil by threatening to close the agency. He established a council comprised of Cabinet members to make recommendations about the future of FEMA.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who has echoed Trump’s rhetoric, oversaw the elimination of 10 percent of the agency’s workforce and of popular FEMA grant programs that allocated billions of dollars a year to communities for projects that could protect them against natural disasters. DHS oversees FEMA.
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Trump in recent months has said he intends to weaken FEMA and shift disaster response to states starting in 2026.”
“A conservative election researcher whose faulty findings on voter data were cited by President Donald Trump as he tried to overturn his 2020 election loss has been appointed to an election integrity role at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Pennsylvania activist Heather Honey is now serving as the deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in the department’s Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans
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The political appointment, first reported by Democracy Docket, shows how self-styled election investigators who have thrown themselves into election conspiracy theories since 2020 are now being celebrated by a presidential administration that indulges their false claims.
Her new role, which didn’t exist under President Joe Biden, also comes as Trump has used election integrity concerns as a pretext to try to give his administration power over how elections are run in the U.S.
The president has ordered sweeping changes to election processes and vowed to do away with mail ballots and voting machines to promote “honesty” in the 2026 midterms, despite a lack of constitutional authority to do so. Trump’s Department of Justice also has demanded complete state voter lists, raising concerns about voter privacy and questions about how the federal government plans to use the sensitive data.
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Since 2020, she also has led a variety of election research groups whose flawed analyses of election data have fueled right-wing attacks on voting procedures, including in battleground states Pennsylvania and Arizona.
In 2020, her election research misrepresented incomplete state voter data to falsely claim that Pennsylvania had more votes reported than voters. Trump echoed the falsehood during his speech to supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, saying Pennsylvania “had 205,000 more votes than you had voters.” Shortly after, his supporters violently attacked the U.S. Capitol in an effort to prevent Biden from becoming president.
In 2021, Honey was involved in the Arizona Senate’s partisan audit of election results in Maricopa County, she confirmed in a podcast interview with a GOP lawyer. That review in the state’s most populous county, which spent six months searching for evidence of fraud, was described by experts as riddled with errors, bias and flawed methodology. Still, it came up with a vote tally that would not have altered the outcome, finding that Biden actually won by more votes than the official results certified in 2020.
In 2022, Honey’s organization Verity Vote issued a report claiming that Pennsylvania had sent some 250,000 “unverified” mail ballots to voters who provided invalid identification or no identification at all.
Officials in Pennsylvania said the claim flagrantly misrepresented the way the state classified applications for mail-in and absentee ballots. The “not verified” designation did not mean the voter didn’t provide accurate identification information, nor did it mean their ID wasn’t later verified.
Former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer said he received dozens of public records requests related to elections from Honey during his time in office, which took up “scores of hours of staff time.” He said he was surprised to hear she had been elevated to a position of such “authority and responsibility.”
From what he saw, Richer said, she’s “not a serious auditor.”
Honey’s hiring at the Department of Homeland Security comes amid reports that Trump’s administration has met with several other election conspiracy theorists in recent months.”
Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security doesn’t know basic things about rights and abilities granted to Americans in the Constitution. She reaches for any bullshit she can to justify illegally expanding Trump’s power.
“American taxpayers pay to be spied upon. That’s one takeaway from new documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has been examining how federal agents spent millions to purchase massive troves of cellphone location data and dodge Fourth Amendment requirements.
As part of a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the ACLU obtained thousands of previously unreleased records showing how DHS agencies—including Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—are purchasing and accessing “huge volumes of people’s cell phone location information quietly extracted from smartphone apps.”
These agencies are “sidestepping our Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable government searches and seizures,” suggests the ACLU.
In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court held (in Carpenter v. United States) that under the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement must have a warrant before accessing a suspect’s phone location data from cellular service providers. But federal authorities have been getting around this by purchasing aggregated cellphone location data from data broker firms like Venntel and Babel Street. And they’re spending millions of taxpayer dollars doing it.”
“there’s little evidence that DHS has any interest or ability when it comes to admitting and correcting its flaws. Even the people specifically assigned to keep an eye on DHS seem more concerned with shielding the department from consequences for bad behavior than with tempering its malignancy.
“The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general and his top aides directed staff members to remove damaging findings from investigative reports on domestic violence and sexual misconduct by officers in the department’s law enforcement agencies,” Chris Cameron of The New York Times reported earlier this month. Among the information suppressed were descriptions of cash payouts to settle sexual harassment claims without going through formal procedures. “The inspector general, Joseph V. Cuffari, also directed his staff to remove parts of another draft report showing internal investigations had found that dozens of officers working at the agencies had committed domestic violence, but that they had received ‘little to no discipline.'”
The documents were obtained and published by the Project on Government Oversight. Their existence was subsequently acknowledged by Mayorkas in an internal DHS memo. If history is any guide, don’t hold your breath waiting for big reforms. Charles K. Edwards, a former DHS acting inspector general, was charged with stealing proprietary software and confidential databases from the federal government. He pleaded guilty in January of this year.
Don’t harbor too much hope that DHS will improve its respect for people’s rights. A federal agency whose official watchdog hides details of abusive conduct by its employees against their colleagues and family members when it’s not pilfering property can’t be trusted to be diligent about addressing civil liberties violations against the general public. That’s especially true when those violations are seemingly a baked-in part of how the agency justifies its existence. To repeat the Brennan Center’s warning, DHS suffers from “a dangerous combination of broad authorities, weak safeguards, and insufficient oversight,” and it’s not at all obvious how to fix what’s so profoundly broken.”
“”Social media has become a significant source of information for U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies,” the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law noted in a report released last week. “The Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the State Department are among the many federal agencies that routinely monitor social platforms, for purposes ranging from conducting investigations to identifying threats to screening travelers and immigrants.””
“In the 24-page report and a seven-page supplement, Murphy alleges four main incidents of wrongdoing by his superiors at the agency:
That then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen repeatedly, and perhaps knowingly, exaggerated the number of suspected terrorists crossing the southern border into the US in official documents and sessions with lawmakers — despite having been briefed numerous times by Murphy that the numbers she was citing were not accurate.
That DHS acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli told Murphy to alter an intelligence report detailing the high levels of corruption, violence, and economic problems in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras to make those countries look like safe destinations for migrants, a judgment that would aid Trump’s restrictive asylum policy.
That DHS acting Secretary Chad Wolf, at the request of White House National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, ordered Murphy to “cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States and instead start reporting on interference activities by China and Iran.”
That Cuccinelli and Wolf at different times instructed Murphy to modify domestic terrorism threat assessments to downplay the threat from white supremacists and add information on the prominence of violent left-wing groups like antifa “to ensure [the assessments] matched up with the public comments by President Trump.””
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“A word of caution: Multiple people familiar with Murphy’s time at DHS told me he’d often engaged in the same kind of behavior he now accuses his superiors of doing, namely altering assessments to fit the administration’s policies. In addition, news reports in late July revealed that Murphy’s office had been compiling “intelligence reports” on journalists and protesters in Portland, Oregon.
Murphy fiercely denies those allegations, but shortly after the reports were published, he was demoted from his position and reassigned to an administrative support role. Some people I spoke to said Murphy’s whistleblower report is “definitely” meant as retaliation against his superiors for his demotion.
His credibility, then, is somewhat suspect.”
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“two sources I spoke to confirmed one of the claims in Murphy’s complaint: that National Security Adviser O’Brien directed DHS to minimize intelligence reports on Russian interference in the 2020 presidential election and instead focus on interference by China and Iran.”