14 November 2024; Miles Taylor, Co-founder, Washington Office, on Government Summit Stage during day three of Web Summit 2024 at the MEO Arena in Lisbon, Portugal. Photo by David Fitzgerald/Web Summit via Sportsfile
Former Trump Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor said that despite his many years at DHS, President Donald Trump has corrupted the organization and is calling for it to be detonated, reconfigured, reimagined, and remade — or else Americans will have to face a police state.
“The Department of Homeland Security has been weaponized against the people, the damage has been done, and it’s time to go back to the drawing board,” Taylor wrote at Defiance News, his home on Substack.
He said he believed that DHS “was the future of our defense against foreign threats and terrorists,” but now, “it’s being used to terrorize Americans.”
Taylor noted that even during Trump’s first term, the president was “magnetically attracted” to DHS’s power and wanted to use it “against the people, not to protect them.”
“DHS had two things he really liked — badges and guns — and it had lots of them,” Taylor wrote. “Indeed, it is America’s largest federal law-enforcement agency, and Donald Trump soon saw those gun-toting agents as his agents, not just the nation’s. They were a means to an end. As Trump told us face-to-face on several occasions, if there’s one thing he learned in business, it’s that you need leverage over people to get what you want from them.”
“Nothing gives you leverage like a gun.”
Now that Trump is back in office, “we are watching the darkest nightmares of a weaponized DHS come to fruition, as the Department is transformed end-to-end into Donald Trump’s ‘pocket police.'”
Taylor lamented how “DHS social-media accounts mused on New Year’s Eve about mass deportations in the breezy iconography of a vacation advertisement. Then DHS agents were dispatched for their largest deployments in history to Minnesota, under the thin veneer of investigating alleged accounting discrepancies at Somali-American kindergartens.”
And he pointed to the “breathtaking and aggressive crackdown, in which two innocent U.S. citizens were killed at the hands of DHS agents and branded ‘domestic terrorists’ before facts were established, before investigations had even begun, and before the public could get its hands on contrary evidence.”
Taylor warned that “when the president himself tells agents to use ‘whatever means necessary’ against protesters — or the Vice President says officers have ‘absolute immunity’ after killing civilians — ordinary people everywhere rightfully worry that they’re under siege.”
He wrote that “what’s happened in Minnesota is by design. It’s the deliberate implementation of top-down presidential guidance. And it’s working. Officials are turning DHS into a juggernaut for ridding America of so-called ‘domestic terrorists,’ whose crimes appear to be that they hold viewpoints contrary to the president.”
“But it doesn’t stop there,” he observed.
Taylor said that DHS “must be taken apart and put back together with the clear goal of making it harder — much, much harder — to weaponize.”
Here is how.
“First, split immigration off from the DHS mothership,” Taylor wrote, then, “give more DHS agency heads an apolitical tenure,” “supercharge the Inspector General,” and finally, “revoke the president’s domestic terrorism order.”