“In the immediate aftermath of the most devastating terrorist attack in its history, America started screaming, and didn’t really stop for a decade. And while, thankfully, the Riyadh Comedy Festival has since healed the world through comedy, we don’t need to be worried about who or what was actually responsible for 9/11,” says Oliver, “At the time, a major concern was that prior to the attacks, there’d been a lack of communication and information sharing between federal agencies.” And so the Department of Homeland Security was born, bureaucratically linking immigration enforcement with terrorism prevention.
By 2015, however, it was clear that DHS was not actually succeeding at anything it had purportedly set out to do. But it did give the president unprecedented powers against anyone who lived in the United States, legally or not, leaving everyone to rely on the self-restraint of the man in the White House. “In his first term, Trump and this sleep-paralysis demon used DHS to push everything from his Muslim ban to his family separation to his efforts to end DACA. But from the very start of Trump’s second term, it was clear they had much bigger plans for DHS, starting with the fact that Trump put one of his biggest allies Kristi Noem in charge of it.” As Oliver goes on, this seemed like a bad hire from the beginning, not just for killing her dog, but her lack of experience and relentless self-promotion.
Among the roughly dozens of issues this has wrought include the $100 million advertising budget ICE has for the year. This has succeeded in hiring a bunch of new ICE officers, but Oliver highlights how many can no longer pass the physical fitness test and often skip the previously-mandatory five weeks of Spanish language training. The advertisements are also full of obvious dogwhistles (which defeats the purpose of being a dogwhistle, as Oliver says). But the money for this is also coming from other agencies that focus on things like child exploitation and disaster relief. You can check out his full segment below.
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