Trauma in the Twin Cities: Effective Federal Civil Rights Oversight is Desperately Needed

Congressional shadow hearing titled Kidnapped and Disappeared: Trump’s Deadly Assault on Minnesota reflects a moment of reckoning for the president’s draconian immigration policies and the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) assault on civil rights and liberties. The nation has seen Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s killing of Renée Good, a U.S. citizen and protestor exercising her First Amendment rights, and similar video footage of Veterans Affairs nurse Alex Pretti being thrown to the ground and shot 10 times by masked and militarized Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers in Minneapolis. Mass deportation, detention, and deaths in detention have reached the highest number in decades, and ICE arrests and detention of children have skyrocketed, yet effective internal review of conditions of detention has been decimated. These conditions echo those of authoritarian regimes and destabilize democracy, with ramifications here and abroad. To make matters worse, Trump’s aides also declared that 16 shootings by ICE and CBP were justified prior to any internal investigation, further galvanizing widespread protests and demands for accountability. The administration has also functionally eliminated internal oversight by career investigators and experts, including the 140 career staff in the DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) who were fired earlier this year.

While CRCL alone could not stop today’s abuses, we know from experience that if it were fully operational, the office would have advised DHS leadership that CBP and ICE cannot use force indiscriminately. CRCL would have played a role in DHS law enforcement training regarding public order policing near constitutionally protected activity, and advised that officers may be held accountable for disproportional and unreasonable use of force. Prior to this administration, CRCL was notified of every death in DHS custody, and, in practice, the civil rights office was also regularly notified of deaths and use-of-force incidents during operations. As per statutory authority, CRCL also made ongoing recommendations for needed systemic changes, and its recommendations memos were available to the public. During our tenure, CRCL staff were often on the ground monitoring operations and immediately investigating use-of-force incidents.

Trump’s DHS has reduced CRCL to a skeletal staff, and the concurrent lack of accountability for civil rights violations shows that Congress should require the full funding and professional staffing of CRCL, where career professionals advised DHS policymakers on appropriate civil rights and civil liberties protections, reviewed hundreds of allegations of abuses of civil rights and liberties, initiated investigations and issued numerous policy recommendations to address violations of law and policy, strengthen training and increase accountability.

CRCL’s recommendations included systemic policy changes such as those found in the current DHS Use of Force Policy, requiring that use of force must be “objectively reasonable.” This should serve as the minimum benchmark for evaluating CBP and ICE’s recent actions. CRCL is also charged with holding stakeholder convenings to listen to community concerns, which it would carefully evaluate and convey with recommendations to DHS components while helping them come into compliance with civil rights. This collaborative approach was never perfect, as the results depend on components such as ICE accepting CRCL’s recommendations, but it is obvious that CRCL’s core duties–investigation of rights violations and developing policies to protect fundamental rights–are sorely missing at DHS. At the very least, CRCL is needed to ensure that law enforcement officers know that, contrary to what they have been told by the White House, they are not absolutely immune to being held accountable for civil rights violations.

There is a tremendous amount of important litigation against DHS’s implementation of Trump’s mass deportation policies, but litigation alone will not stop the violent use of force by ICE in American cities like Minneapolis today. Part of the mission of DHS is “to ensure that the civil rights and civil liberties of persons are not diminished by efforts, activities, and programs aimed at securing the homeland,” and when the Department was created, Congress created CRCL in order to ensure that these fundamental American values are always protected. Reestablishing and strengthening CRCL is a critical step toward fully integrating statutory and constitutional guardrails into DHS. While dramatically increasing their own oversight to rein in an outsized DHS workforce and mission, Congress should also compel DHS to fully fund and staff CRCL before more lives are lost and democracy is even further compromised.

Katherine Culliton-González is a veteran civil and human rights lawyer, a widely published expert on inclusive democracy in the Americas, and chair of the Hispanic National Bar Association’s Committee on American Democracy. A former Fulbright Scholar who contributed to the transition to democracy in Chile, she also served as lead attorney for immigrants’ rights and access to justice at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund during the post-9/11 era. She also served as Director of the Office of Civil Rights Evaluation in the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, as a Senior Attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, and as a Presidential Appointee in the Biden-Harris Administration, where she led the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties for the Department of Homeland Security. She is a member of The Steady State.

Peter Mina is a former Deputy Officer and Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. He is a member of The Steady State where he serves as the Chair of The Steady State’s Law Working Group and as a co-host of The Steady State Sentinel Podcast.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 360 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.