Rep. Delia Ramirez is expected to introduce a bill to abolish the Department of Homeland Security and eliminate all immigrant detention in the United States on Tuesday, the Illinois Democrat shared exclusively with The Intercept.
The Reimagining Safety Act would repeal “duplicative and overreaching terrorism laws,” according to the bill summary and text, and curtail the widespread surveillance state that emerged in the wake of 9/11 terror attacks.
It comes the day after agents from Homeland Security Investigations searched the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., in what the Department of Justice has described as an opaque “federal criminal investigation.” HSI is a component of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the agency at the center of mounting concerns about the violent weaponization of DHS against immigrants and the Trump administration’s perceived political enemies.
The sweeping legislation faces long odds in Congress, but Ramirez argues that strictly limiting the government’s immigration enforcement apparatus is critical for public safety in the wake of yet another shooting by federal immigration agents.
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No party is more progressive than Democrats when they know their bills have absolutely no hope in hell of passing.
I also advocate for incrementalism, but I do think that very progressive positions need to be staked out and anchored by certain members in Congress, to move the Overton window allowing more moderate Democrats to ‘make compromises’ and still land everyone in a better position.
For DHS/ICE, if Congress can’t herd enough cats to abolish them, they can hamstring anything they are permitted to do without a judge-signed warrant. They can also first cut the slush fund appropriated in 2025. If neither of those things work, they can change the purpose of DHS/ICE to go after employers who abuse undocumented workers or leverage restrictive visas against them, and help immigrants get visas instead of locking up and torturing them.
It’s easier to settle on the three improvement positions if the initial anchor is closer to the extreme.
It’s not the party, though. There are progressive members of the party, and when they introduce bills like this, the rest of the Democrats cough uncomfortably, and sidle away quietly, leaving the brave progressive to bear the full brunt of the right-wing outrage machine. (See, for example, the Green New Deal.)
Would it not make more sense to bring it early next year though? Then it goes from a 0% chance of being enacted to a .05% chance
Get the buzz going now to force the issue when they can, because you can’t move the overton window without speaking out about it.
Abolish the police state, don’t stop at DHS.
Gotta slowly reverse boil the frog - these are definitely great first steps and will hopefully warm the public up to demilitarizing, then defanging, then defunding/abolishing the police state.
Yeah I really don’t want to just jump into a sudden backlash that undoes every gain
Nope, unless they promise to immediately fix every problem they’re not worthy of supporting
/s
You /s but over at Hexbear they’re sth that Mamdani isn’t solo sailing to Gaza
Yeah, but those idiots aren’t wort worrying about. Hell, they may not even be real people and if they are I’d be willing to bet most of them aren’t American.
You forgot the part where you’re literally a fascist for even thinking that it would be better than no progress at all /s
Sadly, a lot of people on the left think this way
OMG someone on lemmy who understands that things don’t happen over night. I had heard such people existed but I seriously doubted it. The majority I run into think it could all be gone by next election cycle if we all voted for some fringe candidate with no hope of election.
End the Patriot Act.
I think a live streamed execution of George W. Bush would be a good way to build back the patriotism after we destroy the Patriot Act. A legal execution of course after he is found guilty for his countless war crimes. Then we can do Clinton, Obama, Biden, and Trump.
a live streamed execution of George W. Bush
This is no better than live streaming Hasan Nidal’s execution. The US may be fucked, but it’s still better than that, currently.
Just ratify the Rome Statute like we should have, instead of backing out in 2002. Let the International Criminal Court try US government officials for their many international crimes.
Yes. The comment was meant to be tongue in cheek in reference to that. We don’t have to live stream it. I think it would be better to sell tickets. Do it in a major sports stadium.
I’ve thought about this a lot and if it were up to me, I wouldn’t harm a hair on his head. I’d simply extradite him to Afghanistan and let them decide what to do with him. They deserve first dibs, plus it’s deliciously ironic considering how Bush skirted torture laws by extraditing prisoners to be tortured in other countries.
Also the Espionage Act.
And Taft-Hartley
A lot of us remember an America without it and the DHS. They are both 9/11 knee jerk reactions that have been nothing but bad for us, exactly like the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions. We would have been so much better off to just take the (L) after 9/11 but W kept trying for a (W).
It’s crazy how many people think we’ve always had DHS…
There are a lot of adults alive today who’ve had it their entire lives
Famously, anything that happened before I was born, is not relevant to my life.
I see your dhs and raise you the police.
DHS has always been a dystopian reminder of the ruination of America that began with the response to 9/11. I never agreed to give up any freedom for their security theater. They just did all that shit to us.
I think the pew research poll immediately after 9/11 shows you’re in the minority, unfortunately.
Back then I probably would have agreed with it, if I had a clue what it even was.
But I’ve changed a LOT since then and have actively hated the entire existence of DHS ever since.
You might not have. But Americans reelected Bush after all these awful post 9/11 policies. There was no appetite for an antiwar and anti surveillance state post 9/11. Americans aren’t all victims. They are just mostly sheep.
Won’t pass
The duplicative nature of DHS isn’t incompetence, it’s deliberate deception. DHS was created to put down dissidents in America, not terrorists.
Yep, start rolling back all those patriot act police state bullshit.
Go further abort Capitalism
In theory, a cabinet-level department can be removed with a bill that says “this entity is no longer a thing”. But capitalism isn’t an entity… You can’t really remove it so much as you set up entirely new policies that would replace it. And that is a much different ball of wax to figure out
Sounds radical.
But I can’t think of a single reason why we shouldn’t abolish DHS
Homeland Security was a Bush Administration creation too, in the wake of 9/11 that they used to do things they long wanted.
Just as they submitted the patriot act like 10 days after, a thousand page law referencing other laws, something that would take years to create. They had it already, that was their wish list.
Homeland Security denies the Bill of Rights applies to them, and should be abolished.
The next time there’s a 9/11 blowback on our soil, they won’t have pre drafted the patriot act 2.0.
They’ll just ask Grok to draft it, and all the Reps will pass it, after having had Grok read it for them. Then it will pass, hallucinations and all, without anyone having actually read it in full.
And then, years later, judges will ask Grok how we should interpret it, when deciding if the countless human rights violations were legal under it
Ha ha, it sounds all too plausible I’m afraid, meaning it’s not stupid enough for what will happen in the future, sorry, I don’t make the rules.
But we are on the Patriot Act III now, they did II just a year or two after the first one. But, as the aforementioned rule suggested, they will likely name it something much more stupid. We are like the reverse of the improvement curve of computer chips fitting more transistors onto a chip.
Abolish the presidency
Abolish America.
Many of us remember the creation of DHS and we said then, and many experts also said then, that the department was going to be bad for Americans. In fact, it has been just as bad as we expected.
Does anyone actually feel safe because of TSA compared with previous airport security? I sure don’t. We certainly got safety by having locked reinforced cockpit cabins. But the agents who are doing the scanners, they miss weapons all the time. And of course they don’t get paid well so if they wanted to smuggle weapons in I’m sure they could do so easily enough.
And that’s before we started talking about ICE.
Honestly, I’m more scared of TSA than anything they are supposedly preventing.
They do prevent a lot water bottles and belt buckles that would otherwise be a serious threat to the safety of good law-abiding citizens.
Security theatre is security theatre. However, prior to TSA airlines were responsible for security. They contracted that security out to the lowest bidder:
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/10/1035131619/911-travel-timeline-tsa
That being said, my argument is not that TSA is better. I’m not arguing at all. I’m just offering some additional information to highlight what came before TSA.
💯
It was created in my lifetime and it totally fucking sucks. If we have to cut things because of budgetary concerns, it’s a great candidate.
Abolish the Republican party. Abolish corporate entities. Abolish private ownership of powerful technology. Abolish secret science in the form of private research. Everyone needs to know what you’re doing with the worlds resources and whether it’s a threat to the community. Eliminating the privacy of the powerful is the only surveillance system that is actually needed, for the safety of the community.
