Stomp the Cockroach

Earlier today, David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social asked, "Has anyone written any kind of policy paper about how to organize a post-DHS federal government?"

He then went on to post just a couple of things:

Untangle DHS. It’s not a difficult question because unlike say metro policing, which has been around for a long time, DHS hasn’t.

Return immigration law enforcement to DoJ. Travel issues including naturalization and visas to Commerce. Make FEMA independent. Coast guard to transport. TSA to transport. It doesn’t solve everything (INS enforcement could be draconian too) but it starts the process.

A bit later on BlueSky, attorney Ken White, whose handle was originally Pope Hat, but which he changes for current topics so it's currently "Fucking Bitch Hat" (I'm not kidding), wrote:

Let’s talk about abolishing ICE. Very few people who say “abolish ICE” mean “abandon all immigration enforcement.” Rather, they mean “the structure of immigration enforcement is irretrievably broken and needs to be reorganized, just like we did 23 years ago when we created ICE.”

We created ICE in a flurry of post-9/11 enthusiasm for muscular terminology and reorganization, as part of  creating the Department of Homeland Security. Recall being sneered at by conservative and centrist bien-pensants if you thought “Homeland Security” was ominous?

Nobody had patience in 2003 for the concept “maybe we should reform existing entities rather than dramatically eliminating and reorganizing and renaming.” Nobody had patience for the “sensible reform, modest oversight” message some are now pushing over “abolish ICE.”

That’s because, in part, catastrophic events had completely deprived existing structures of credibility, rightly or wrongly.  Of course, that’s because of evil being done to us by outsiders, not because of evil we were doing to each other; perhaps that’s different.

But it’s true that sometimes entities and agencies are irretrievable because their culture is so enmeshed in complacency or infighting or incompetence. Or, I argue, in bigotry and contempt for the rule of law and thuggish entitlement.

ICE is a monument to totalitarianism, lawlessness, and bigotry. It should be ripped out and woodchippered root and branch and replaced with something focused on the concept that you can’t defend the rule of law by burning it down.

Doing so is not inconceivable because we did it 23 years ago when we perceived the existing entities didn’t work.  Being brutal and lawless to Americans is as much of a problem, if not more, than failing to protect Americans. ICE is infested with lawless bigoted anti-Americanism.

The “monitor and mildly reform” crew remind me of my favorite defense attorney closing argument used to refute prosecution defenses of sleazy cooperating witnesses.

Yes, prosecutors say, our cooperating witness has some flaws, but work around those and look at the corroborating evidence!

The classic response is to say this: imagine you are in your favorite Italian restaurant. The waiter delivers a magnificent dish of delicious pasta. In the middle is a cockroach. Do you send it back, or eat around the cockroach? The government wants to you eat around the cockroach.

The ICE “reformers“ want you to eat around the cockroach.  I want you to send the plate back.  

Stomp the cockroach.

I'm one of the people who said, back when the Department of Homeland Security was formed, that it was a mistake — particularly the Nazi-reference name, because I probably wasn't fully attuned to all of the parts of the punishment bureaucracy that were being brought under one roof. But I knew what it implied about all those frankensteined parts. 

One thing I do clearly remember is belittling George W. Bush's insistence that each American woman would think to herself, "My babies are safe!"whenever she caught a glimpse of his first DHS secretary, Tom Ridge. I used to mimic those words in a high-pitched voice. "My BAY-BIES are safe!" (Sometimes I feel as though I'm crazy for thinking I'm the only one who remembers that.

Now, we here in Minnesota know our babies are not safe with Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, Greg Bovino, the thousands of punisher-wannabes running loose on our streets.