One of the architects of the Department of Homeland Security says the agency he helped create has turned into a monster.
Following this weekend’s fatal shooting of 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse Alex Pretti by a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis, the second this month, John Mitnick—a conservative lawyer who served under both Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump—took to social media to express his fury at the agency’s conduct.
“I helped to establish DHS in 2002 and 2003 and later had the Homeland Security portfolio as a White House counsel and served as general counsel of the department,” said Mitnick on Saturday. “I am enraged and embarrassed by DHS’s lawlessness, fascism, and cruelty. Impeach and remove Trump—now.”
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Mitnick, a former Republican candidate for Congress, served as an associate general counsel for science and technology at DHS from 2002-04, during the agency’s infancy. An agency webpage credits him as someone who “assisted in establishing the department as an attorney in the Transition Planning Office.”
After the Bush presidency, Mitnick served in a number of private-sector roles, including as senior vice president, general counsel, and secretary at the Heritage Foundation—the influential right-wing think tank that would go on to author much of the second Trump administration’s agenda.
He returned to DHS in 2018, when he was confirmed by the US Senate as general counsel to the department under Trump. The New York Times explained that “part of Mr. Mitnick’s job as general counsel was to push back against policies that could put the Homeland Security Department in a legally dubious position.”
In an ominous precursor to Trump 2.0, Mitnick was forced out of his role as DHS counsel in 2019 after pushing back against a policy to release detained migrants into Democratic-led sanctuary cities as part of a political stunt, as opposed to border towns.
That policy was spearheaded by none other than Stephen Miller, who was then serving as a senior adviser to Trump, who has become arguably the most powerful single figure in his second White House and the brains behind his “mass deportation” agenda.
Multiple White House sources described Miller as the driving force behind Mitnick’s ouster as part of a larger “purge” of officials who refused to cosign orders they felt were legally questionable.
In contrast with other officials who have stated that they regret their involvement in creating DHS, believing it paved the way for Trump’s authoritarianism, Mitnick contested on Saturday that “the name [of the agency] is not responsible for the conduct.”
“Laws do not apply themselves; it takes officials of integrity and good character devoted to the rule of law to apply them,” he said. “Current DHS leadership is devoid of those qualities.”
Within hours of Pretti’s shooting—just as they did following the shooting of 37-year-old mother Renee Good weeks ago—White House officials raced to absolve the agents involved of any wrongdoing while casting the victim as a dangerous terrorist threat, even as video evidence directly contradicted their claims.
Miller specifically described Pretti as a “would-be assassin” who sought to kill agents despite zero evidence of this being the case, other than the fact that he was legally carrying a handgun, while Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem baselessly described his actions as “domestic terrorism," prompting calls for her impeachment.
In the Guardian, columnistGeorge Chidi described it as part of “a pattern… emerging, in which the Trump administration prioritizes the vilification of the dead victim as to blame for the incident over preserving the neutrality of any investigative process.”
Polls show that the American public has rapidly grown hostile to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the wake of its rampage across Minnesota, which—in addition to the extrajudicial killings of two US citizens—has involved cases of explicit racial profiling, unconstitutional “citizenship checks,” and extreme uses of force against protesters, legal observers, and detainees.
A YouGov poll published Sunday found that just 20% of American adults found Pretti’s shooting to be justified. That same poll found that a record high 46% of Americans now want to abolish ICE, compared with just 41% who want to maintain it. This includes 19% of Republicans, a higher percentage than ever recorded during Trump’s second term.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said that if ICE’s conduct has so disturbed even a lifelong conservative functionary like Mitnick, it’s a sign of how far the agency has truly gone.
“Beyond helping establish DHS itself in 2003, Mr. Mitnick was a Senate-confirmed Trump choice for general counsel for DHS in his first term, and is not a man for hyperbole,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “So bear that in mind when you see him calling out DHS’s ‘lawlessness, fascism, and cruelty.’”
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