Look at what DHS is doing now, it is frightening!

THE VIDEO OPENS with dim shots of men preparing weapons and equipment in the dark. Over the moody noodling of an electric guitar, the actor Robert Pattinson’s voice can be heard. “They think I’m hiding in the shadows,” he growls. “But I am the shadows.” A rolling electronic beat comes in under the guitar, and we see the men march into the night.

So far, so The Batman (2022). But there are signs that we have left the DC Comics universe. The men have American flags on their uniforms, and as the soundtrack builds, a Bible verse slowly materializes over the b-roll: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth; but the righteous are as bold as a lion.” (It’s Proverbs 28:1.)

The video is not a trailer but a bleak riff on the superhero film intended as a warning—“TO EVERY CRIMINAL ILLEGAL ALIEN IN AMERICA”—and tweeted by the official X account of the Department of Homeland Security. The portentous caption continues: “Darkness is no longer your ally. You represent an existential threat to the citizens of the United States, and US Border Patrol’s Special Operations Group will stop at nothing to hunt you down.”

The faux-Batman video exemplifies DHS’s recent posting strategy, which combines appeals to scripture, dark and foreboding imagery, nihilistic memes, combative and often cruel rhetoric, and allusions to homegrown American mythology about our country’s history, especially in the form of paintings evoking the frontier, reported The Bulwark. 

The overall effect is disconcertingly surreal. And the strategy’s objectives are even darker than the remixed Batman clip suggests.

For example, almost every current or former American high school student will remember seeing American Progress, an 1872 painting by John Gast, reprinted in the pages of their history textbooks. It is most commonly used to illustrate the rhetoric of “manifest destiny” that provided an ideological basis for the country’s westward expansion. The painting depicts a mythical vision of the settling of the continent: A radiant classical goddess floats across the plains stringing telegraph wire as white farmers plow the earth and pioneers and settlers travel by Conestoga wagon, stagecoach, and railroad. Herds of buffalo and small groups of Native Americans flee in front of them—into darkness.

DHS recently posted the painting on X—but rather than use it as an occasion for reflecting on American self-mythologizing (especially when it comes to our country’s history of conquest), as generations of high-school history teachers have done, DHS simply endorsed the vision of American Progress with a short caption:

Reposted by the White House, this tweet is a good example of Donald Trump’s ongoing effort to wrap himself and his movement in the legend of the frontier. “In reaffirming our heritage as a free nation, we must remember that America has always been a frontier nation,” he said during his 2020 State of the Union address. At his second inauguration five years later, he reiterated the theme: “Americans are explorers, builders, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts. The call of the next great adventure resounds from within our souls.” His plan for a National Garden of American Heroes includes $200,000 statues of famous frontiersmen Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Buffalo Bill Cody, a showman after Trump’s own heart.

Trump’s rhetoric of MAGA frontier optimism depends on maintaining a rosy, uncritical view of the past—reviving and perpetuating the myths that generations of students have been taught to think about more critically. This is the goal of several of the president’s executive orders designed to reshape the story our country tells about itself. There is the mandate to make American public school classrooms sites of “patriotic education,” and another aimed at “restoring truth and sanity to American history” by policing monuments, museums, and parks across the nation for signs of any attempt to “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” The tendency of these orders should be clear. As Sen. Cory Booker said during his record-breaking 25-hour speech from the Senate floor, “I don’t want a whitewashed history. I don’t want a homogenized history. Tell me the wretched truth about America, because that speaks to our greatness.”

But while the Department of Homeland Security’s blithe view of our country’s history is deeply concerning, the real message of the Gast tweet—and other DHS posts like it—isn’t about how we interpret the past. It’s about the Trump administration’s vision of the future.

IS IT POSSIBLE there is another meaning hidden in that oddly worded, quaintly capitalized tweet? That’s a theory going around; you be the judge. There are fourteen words in the tweet, and two words beginning with “h” are capitalized. Highlighting these features, a law professor in Illinois named Evan Bernick wrote that “there is literally Nazi code” in DHS’s post.

Bernick argued that the DHS post was subtly but directly invoking the Aryan Nations’ white supremacist numerology of 14/88. The first part of this formulation refers to “the 14 words,” the first phrase of neo-Nazi terrorist David Eden Lane’s white-supremacist mantra: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children, because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth.” And the 8s of the latter part refer to the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, doubled up to signify the Nazi greeting: “Heil Hitler.”

Lane and his ilk had their own point of view on America’s westward expansion in the nineteenth century; the Aryan Nations drew on frontier ideology and iconography to promote a secessionist and segregationist “white homeland,” a domain they intended to carve out of the Northwest while displacing any Jewish and nonwhite residents. The goddess striding across Gast’s painting as people flee before her takes on more sinister meanings when this context for DHS’s caption is taken into account.

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Opportunity for more Congressional oversight for DHS

Even before DHS deployed its military-styled law enforcement personnel into the streets of Portland, Oregon, more robust congressional oversight of the department was long overdue, reported Just Security. 

In the 18 years since its creation, DHS has ballooned: It operates with a $50 billion budget and has a workforce of more than 240,000 employees. It is also the country’s largest law enforcement agency, with over 60,000 law enforcement officers. And its activities have grown in parallel, so that they are now substantially out of sync with its statutory mandate. For instance, Homeland Security Investigations, a component of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), claims the authority to investigate literally any federal crime.

Oversight and accountability of this massive department have lagged far behind. The agency’s sheer size and its sprawling, diverse missions have hobbled effective internal oversight. The secretary’s office is too small (and, in the current administration, too politically pliable) to conduct adequate supervision. Internal controls, guidelines, and coordinating mechanisms are often lacking or woefully insufficient.

Oversight by congressional committees has also been difficult for two reasons. First, jurisdiction over the department is spread across more than 100 committees and subcommittees, creating competition, confusion, and gaps in coverage. That’s why consolidating congressional oversight of DHS remains the most important recommendation of the 9/11 Commission that has never been implemented. Second, the political dialogue concerning immigration and border security specifically has become so polarized that bipartisan cooperation on DHS oversight has been severely strained.

The DHS’ trend toward lawlessness is on full display in Portland. Videos captured by bystanders show unidentified federal agents, dressed in camouflage, conducting arrests and detentions that look more like kidnapping than law enforcement. Agents are routinely using tear gas and have fired rubber bullets at members of the press. And they appear to have gone far beyond their remit to protect federal facilities, encroaching on state police powers and the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Even the U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon, an officer in Trump’s own Department of Justice, referred agents’ conduct for further investigation by the DHS Office of Inspector General.

Given this state of affairs, there is no excuse for Congress to rush through another multi-billion-dollar appropriation for the department. Before any funds are made available, Congress should conduct some of the oversight that’s been missing to date.

Congress should start by holding hearings to demand answers about the conduct of DHS agents in Portland (one such hearing is already scheduled for this Friday, but House leadership is still planning to move forward with DHS appropriations in the interim). But it should not stop there. Congress should insist that the president fulfill his constitutional responsibility to nominate a DHS secretary, a position that has been filled by “acting” secretaries since April 2019. It should require the department to develop, modernize and, to the extent consistent with national security, publish operational guidelines ensuring that the department’s law enforcement activities are conducted with appropriate care for constitutional rights and clear channels of accountability. It should commission a thorough outside review of the legal authorities and activities of Homeland Security Investigations. These actions can then inform, not only any conditions or limitations that Congress might want to place on funding, but additional legislative reforms to tackle the department’s many problems.

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