Don’t lock up asylum-seekers; focus on the real domestic threats we face | Opinion

For two decades, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has targeted migrant families and asylum-seekers, while ignoring the threat of domestic terrorism by far-right white nationalists. Now, on its 20th anniversary — March 1 — it’s time for DHS to shift focus to the real danger facing our country — and abandon the outdated and inhumane policies that have caused so much harm.

For too long, DHS’s anti-terrorism mandate focused squarely on Muslim Americans, resulting in unlawful profiling and discrimination. Meanwhile, the number of domestic terror attacks by far-right white nationalists has been on the rise for years. There is broad consensus among federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies that the two most lethal domestic threats are: 1. racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists who advocate for the superiority of the white race; and 2. anti-government or anti-authority violent extremists, such as militias.

Meanwhile, during the past 20 years, the number of migrants and asylum-seekers locked up in inhumane detention centers has ballooned — especially in the South. Georgia hosts two mega-detention centers: Stewart Detention Center — the nation’s deadliest — and Folkston ICE Processing Center. The federal government only recently closed a third, Irwin County Detention Center, after a doctor was discovered conducting unwanted sterilizations on detained women. After recent reforms in Louisiana led to the state locking up fewer people, DHS rushed in to fill those jails and prisons with immigrants. Louisiana is now home to eight immigration detention centers.

And Florida — where modern immigration detention began in 1980 — has four detention centers, all of which provide inadequate medical and mental healthcare, and employ solitary confinement, a recognized form of torture. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) also claims law-enforcement authority over the entire state and has used it to conduct warrantless searches of people traveling on Greyhound buses, sowing fear and distrust. Meanwhile, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has issued immigration detainers for numerous U.S. citizens in Florida, upending lives.

We are paying more than ever before for DHS’s immigration enforcement work. In 2003, when DHS launched, the combined budgets for ICE and CBP were less than $10 billion. This fiscal year, the two agencies will cost more than $25 billion.

Meanwhile, the threat of white-supremacist domestic terrorism is real. DHS should prioritize preventing threatening attacks, rather than locking up and traumatizing families who are seeking asylum — a human right protected under U.S. and international law. We need to reduce and reprogram funding to ICE and CBP and reinvest that money in services that benefit communities and help prevent polarization, extremism and radicalization.

The current approach to immigration policy is based on fear and misinformation. Politicians and media outlets have perpetuated the myth that immigrants and asylum-seekers are threats to our safety and security, when, in fact, most pose no danger at all. The structure of DHS — which places nearly all federal immigration functions in a security-focused agency created in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks — reinforces that notion.

Jan. 6, 2021 was a wake-up call. Yet many politicians and media outlets have instead focused on the so-called “crisis” at the border rather than those who carried out the deadly attack.

Worryingly, extremist groups have embraced ICE and CBP. The Federation for American Immigration Reform, founded by a white nationalist and eugenicist, supports programs deputizing local law enforcement as an extension of DHS’s deportation machine. A Political Research Associates report found over 100 sheriffs associated with extremist groups who have entered these so-called 287(g) programs — including in Brevard and Bradford counties in Florida.

The SPLC has exposed CBP agents working in tandem with extremist border paramilitary groups. These extremists are driven by racist conspiracy theories of an “invasion” at the Southern border. Problematic rhetoric has also been reported within CBP’s own ranks. The situation is not under control. DHS has not produced an adequate response to inquiries about whether agents are terminated if they are found actively engaging known hate and extremist groups.

DHS has an important role to play in protecting our country from domestic terrorism, but it cannot do so effectively if it continues to focus on locking up migrant families and asylum-seekers.

DHS has to shift its focus. Twenty years of mistargeted priorities are enough.

Sarah M. Rich is a senior supervising attorney with the SPLC’s Immigrant Justice Project. Caleb Kieffer is a senior research analyst with the SPLC’s Intelligence Project.