“Defund ICE” is a slogan for people who confuse symptoms with diseases.

ICE is not the problem. ICE is the inevitable output of the Department of Homeland Security—a bureaucratic contraption born not of strategy, but of panic, cowardice, and political theater.

DHS was never wanted. Not by Defense. Not by Justice. Not by Commerce. Not by Transportation. Not even by the White House forced to midwife the thing. If George W. Bush had actually believed in a muscular homeland-security state, he wouldn’t have stuffed Tom Ridge into a White House closet and called it leadership.

Ridge didn’t design DHS. He was assigned to absorb the blame for it.

The department exists because John McCain—never a man troubled by second-order consequences—decided that the proper response to 9/11 was to look decisive rather than be effective. Institutional failure had occurred, yes. But instead of repairing coordination, accountability, and legal authority, Washington built a talisman. A shrine to seriousness. A monument to “doing something.”

And everyone inside the system understood exactly what it was.

In the early 2000s, DHS was a professional dead zone. A career ending appointment. Serious national security people went to DoD, the three-letter agencies, or—at a stretch—Justice or INR at State. DHS wasn’t a stepping stone; it was a reputational kill shot. You didn’t take a job there unless you were out of options or unaware of the cost.

I turned down multiple offers. Accepting would have ended my career. That stigma wasn’t accidental—it was diagnostic.

Here’s the part polite critics miss: DHS didn’t centralize power. It deprofessionalized it.

It ripped agencies out of their institutional cultures and recombined them under a narrative label—“homeland”—that meant nothing operationally and everything politically. Customs duct-taped to immigration. FEMA stapled to counterterrorism. The Coast Guard orphaned from DoD. Intelligence functions invented without coherent legal footing, operating in open contradiction to Title 50.

Even the Secret Service fought like hell not to be absorbed, because they knew exactly what kind of bureaucratic sewer this would become. They lost. The FBI nearly followed—until the Attorney General asked the only question that mattered: “Then who investigates federal crimes?” No one answered, because no one could. FBI has stayed with Justice.

DHS exists not because it solved problems, but because it allowed everyone else to externalize risk. Defense avoided domestic entanglement. Justice avoided political heat. Commerce avoided enforcement messes. Transportation avoided security failures. DHS became the place where every fucked up, ass up, screwed up, unsolvable problem went to die (or perhaps more accurately zombify)—along with accountability and professionalism.

And systems like that don’t merely fail. They select.

They repel professionals and attract zealots, opportunists, and mediocrities. ICE isn’t an aberration; it’s the selection mechanism for the phony tough and the crazy brave made flesh. When judgment, tradition, and law are stripped away, what remains is force without restraint and authority without legitimacy.

We see this now, every day, in body cam and cell phone footage. We read articles about how these men were put out on the street with four weeks of training.

As weak as it is, the average for police department training is about 21 weeks. On top of that, most academy graduates then complete 8-16 weeks of additional training with a senior officer before being placed in the field. DHS’s training schedule is hardly long enough to hand out the syllabus, a tactical vest, a badge, and a gun, by those standards.

Today DHS is a $100-billion behemoth—larger than DOJ, Commerce, and Transportation combined once you strip out construction spending. And for what? Armed incompetents slipping on ice, shooting civilians, and laundering failure through press releases, “operations,” and gross misstatements of the law by America’s top officials?

America never needed a domestic Gestapo. It never needed a “homeland” department. What it needed after 9/11 was brutal accountability for intelligence failure, sharper coordination, and narrower legal authorities—not a Frankenstein bureaucracy designed to look serious while evading responsibility.

The fix is obvious and politically impossible.

Border enforcement belongs under Justice. Customs goes back to Commerce. The Coast Guard returns to DoD. Protective services are split from investigative functions. DHS’s intelligence arm should be dismantled outright—its existence is a legal absurdity.

None of this will happen. Bureaucracies do not commit suicide. They expand, radicalize, and justify themselves as they get worse.

But let’s stop pretending this is about ICE.

ICE is the exhaust.

DHS is the engine.

And it was rotten from the first turn of the key.

Short of a “Church Commission” style inquiry into the whole mess, everything else is putting bow ties on bullshit.