“The Department of Homeland Security has hindered internal investigations amid scrutiny for its handling of President Donald Trump’s aggressive crackdown on immigration, the agency’s official watchdog warned in a letter to Congress.
DHS has been “systematically obstructing” investigations by withholding records, Inspector General Joseph Cuffari said in a letter released Tuesday — hours after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem faced withering bipartisan questioning at a Senate hearing.”
“One of the issues here is that in the press, everything is conflated as being ICE. But Border Patrol had a big presence here, and, you know, Border Patrol are trained differently. They’re trained for operation at ports of entry, and it’s a different use of force policy, it is a different method of training. It’s a different environment totally. And I noticed Bovino himself came from the border patrol. He was acting like just a cowboy.”
“”Observing, following, and recording law enforcement are unambiguously protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution,” Bier tells Reason. “They are not obstruction of justice. The right to record helps guarantee justice by ensuring accountability and an accurate record of events.”
…
The guiding First Amendment principle behind these court decisions was most memorably expressed in the 1987 Supreme Court ruling in Houston v. Hill, which struck down a Houston ordinance that made it unlawful to oppose or interrupt a police officer: “The freedom of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state,” Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote.”
“Only the government could spend 20 years creating a national ID that no one wanted and that apparently doesn’t even work as a national ID.
But that’s what the federal government has accomplished with the REAL ID, which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) now considers unreliable, even though getting one requires providing proof of citizenship or lawful status in the country.”
“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.
…
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.
…
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.
…
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.
…
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
…
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.
…
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.