‘Maybe DHS Was a Bad Idea’
Two decades after its founding, the department has become what its critics feared.
“We don’t do politics in the Department of Homeland Security,” Tom Ridge, the nation’s first DHS secretary, liked to say whenever reporters would ask how he handled pressure from the White House. Ridge, a moderate Republican and a Vietnam vet with a square jaw and gentle manner, was the governor of Pennsylvania when nearly 3,000 Americans were killed on September 11, 2001. The nation was gripped with fear and horror, and President George W. Bush put the bipartisanship-seeking Ridge in charge of making sure there wouldn’t be another terrorist strike. The new Cabinet-level entity that he would lead mashed together more than 20 federal agencies under one Orwellian name.
I’ve spoken with Ridge a few times over the years about DHS’s origins, and I thought of him on New Year’s Eve, when a serene image popped up on the department’s social-media accounts showing a classic car on a sandy beach with palm trees and a banner that read America After 100 Million Deportations, along with the caption: “The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world.” It was chilling to see DHS, founded to protect Americans from attacks by foreign terrorists, fantasizing breezily about the removal of nearly one-third of the U.S. population, which would have to include tens of millions of citizens. The department has published many provocative posts since President Trump took office last year, but nothing that perverse.
