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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Frankly, think the Department of Homeland Security is a problem and should be broken up into multiple agencies with some elements dissolved as the wastes of resources there are. But if I were to do it I would:
- Dissolve Ice
- Fire everybody involved in the human rights abuse and ban them from any job related to immigration
- Make a new agency with a charter that explains in simple terms its job is to protect and process immigration
- Move the resources for human trafficking into the FBI or their own agency so the immigration and criminal prosecution sections do not intersect. Hell, make it the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Human Protection
- Decriminalize border crossing as a whole and make it a matter of deportation or fines.
- Dramatically reduce the power and increase restrictions of immigration control so its not an antagonist service
- Rename it with a strong emphasis it is not remotely the same agency.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Sep 15th 2019 at 3:58:08 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.Part of the problem with ICE is that it isn’t just run by shit people, large parts of it are staffed by terrible people, abolishing ICE has the added advantage of making everyone who works for ICE unemployed, thus removing them from positions of power which they can use to abuse and harm others.
The few good eggs within ICE can find new jobs, but without abolishing the agency there will be a lot of bureaucratic inertia when it comes to people and culture, to reform ICE a blank slate is needed. You don’t just want to remove the blatant criminals, you also want rid of the sneaky criminals, the enablers, the supporters, the maliciously incompetent and the “not my problem” lot. Those people aren’t easy to remove without just scrapping the organisation.
Yes firing literally every single ICE employee would have the same effect, but it’s much more logistically difficult if the organisation still formally exists.
Edited by Silasw on Sep 15th 2019 at 11:00:43 AM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranFrankly that seems like tearing down your whole house and building a new one just because you found a few broken beams. ICE is a huge agency, only like a third of it is actively involved in deportation.
You’d get the job done far quicker just by replacing the broken beams.
I’d also point out that there’s a reason DHS exists. Splitting everything up would basically be a return to the pre-9/11 status quo, which wasn’t particularly efficient or organized. Having all of the cross-border stuff in one place makes sense, just like how domestic stuff is handled by the FBI and overseas stuff is the CIA. Highly decentralized law enforcement agencies do not do good work.
Edited by archonspeaks on Sep 15th 2019 at 4:06:02 AM
They should have sent a poet.That’s going to be the determining factor here, are we dealing with just a few rotten beams or something that’s broken from the top down to the foundations?
I doubt there’s anything salvageable in the deportations part of ICE, it’s possible that other sections of ICE could be salvaged in large part and moved wholesale into a renamed organisation.
Edited by Silasw on Sep 15th 2019 at 11:11:30 AM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran![]()
Hence the need for some kind of inquest or official review.
But realistically, like I said, ICE is a big agency. There’s something like 17,000 officers plus civilian personnel. ERO has 4-6,000 officers plus civilian personnel. Even if we’re assuming the other parts of the agency have a lot of corruption as well, which I don’t think is likely, we’re still talking a good half or two thirds of the agency keeping their jobs. At that point you’re just wasting your effort going the “destroy and rebuild” route, it would be less work for the exact same result to simply rebrand the agency.
Edited by archonspeaks on Sep 15th 2019 at 4:20:01 AM
They should have sent a poet.We also get into:
- What is the institutional culture like this.
- How many of these people are fully onboard with what ICE was doing?
- How many of the people in non-immigration related matters collaborated with the immigration ones?
An agency is often far more intertwined than people think.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
You fix the institutional culture by firing the leadership, not the rank and file.
And again, 17,000 people. They employ forensic accountants and evidence technicians, counterterrorism specialists, narcotics detectives, hundreds of different kinds of officers. If they got reassigned to a deportation team and brutalized people, then sure, they should be fired. But we’ve seen officers in those other parts of ICE speak out against the agency. Hell, there was that petition signed by officers in HSI denouncing immigration raids because the connotations “ICE” had because of them made it way more difficult for them to do their jobs.
There’s no reason to fire people who didn’t behave unethically.
Edited by archonspeaks on Sep 15th 2019 at 4:34:40 AM
They should have sent a poet.Trump is itching for a war over the Saudi Arabia attack: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/15/trump-says-us-is-locked-and-loaded-after-attack-on-saudi-oil-supply.html
My biggest fear about disbanding ICE is that the people responsible for human rights violations won't necessarily just be fired and go away forever. They might just get new jobs in other departments where they can continue doing human rights violations.
If "ICE, The Organization" takes the fall, the individual actors responsible just move on to their next terrible opportunity. That's always how it works in the corporate world. "Oops, Jewels N' Stuff turned out to be using slave labor, that's a bit of a whoopsy-doodle! Better fire 50,000 employees, give million-dollar severances to all of the people at fault, and then give the worst of the lot cushy new jobs where they can bring their brilliant ideas to the rest of Corporate America!"
Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 15th 2019 at 7:27:11 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.It's also worth nothing that the rank and file of ICE aren't exactly innocent.
Despite my comparison, ICE isn't a department store or something. They're a law enforcement agency, and the actual law officers working there have been doing some pretty ugly shit.
But there's a safety net there, too. If they lose their jobs, they'll just trickle into various law enforcement agencies at the local, state, and federal levels.
I guess my question is, for the purpose of cleaning up this problem, which is easier to deal with: one agency with a million awful people in it, or a million awful people disseminated among thousands of agencies across the country?
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.One is easier, but the second is a far more ethical method to deal with the issues.
Doubtful, Trump is all bark and not bite. He wants to look like a hawk to his hawkish voters, but it's painfully obvious that his Isolationism is the most consistent thing of him.
Edited by KazuyaProta on Sep 15th 2019 at 9:17:13 AM
Watch me destroying my country
x4 I'd say the latter makes it easier to keep these people on the straight and narrow, because now they're working alongside actually ethical people, but that heavily depends on what agencies they end up at and what the work environment there is.
Edited by HailMuffins on Sep 15th 2019 at 10:53:52 AM
Quite, and with Bolton gone there is no major hawk in the White House to push him towards war.
It could still happen but I think it's less likely.
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangMore importantly, what is Sean Hannity saying right now.
That's why I wasn't counting him, he's a Trump loyalist before he's a hawk. If Trump says no, which is plausible, then he'll defer to his final word.
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangTrump is a sabre rattler through and through. He won't go to war unless circumstances or his handlers convince him he has to.
"We're all paper, we're all scissors, we're all fightin' with our mirrors, scared we'll never find somebody to love."I mean, technically speaking we’re still at war in Yemen. The 2001 AUMF says we can send our military anywhere Al-Qaeda and “associated forces” are found, and we’re still providing logistical support to the Saudi coalition there.
Of course, aerial refueling and drone strikes don’t exactly fit the classic definition of a war.
They should have sent a poet.

Eliminating the agency and replacing it with an identical one is a lot of work for very little pay off, and having all those functions in different places proved to be very inefficient prior to 9/11. Hold some hearings, fire the leadership and anyone else who behaved criminally, and then change the name to CIS or DHS Police or something.
They should have sent a poet.