Homeland Security: Myths and Monsters

This is the century of homeland security.

The federal government created a monster. They said it would keep us safe. The monster hatched in November 2002. It was named the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). An appetite for control and conquest was in its DNA. Its early influences, in the years after 9/11, were paranoia and vengeance.

The DHS is the only new department the United States has spawned in this century. With its birth, issues that were previously seen as separate-immigration control, policing, and counter-terrorism--were brought into a single, sprawling entity. Twenty-two preexisting agencies were absorbed into what became the nation’s third largest government department. Today it has a budget of over ＄100 billion and employs a quarter of a million people. Every danger is now conceived of as a threat to ＂homeland security,＂ and as the 9/11 Commission said in 2003, ＂the American homeland is the planet.＂

Arun Kundnani is a writer based in Philadelphia. Born in London, he moved to the US in 2010. His books include What is Antiracism? And Why it Means Anticapitalism (Verso, 2023), The Muslims are Coming! (Verso, 2014) and The End of Tolerance (Pluto, 2007). He is currently working on a biography of Jamil Al-Amin. A former editor of the journal Race & Class, Arun has been described by the Guardian as ＂one of Britain’s best political writers.＂

Mizue Aizeki is the founder and Executive Director of the Surveillance Resistance Lab. For nearly twenty years, Mizue has been organizing to end the injustices at the intersections of the criminal and migration control systems--including criminalization, imprisonment, and exile. While at the Immigrant Defense Project, Mizue led multiple policy and individual case campaigns at the to end the entanglement of local law enforcement and ICE policing, and also built community defense programs to combat ICE raids. Mizue is a coeditor of Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence (Haymarket Books, 2024). Mizue’s photographic work appears in Dying to Live, A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid (City Lights Books, 2008) and Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016).

Anuj Shrestha is an illustrator and cartoonist currently residing in Philadelphia after having lived in nearly all four corners of the United States. His illustration work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, ProPublica, Wired and Playboy, among others; and has been featured in the Society of Illustrators and American Illustration annuals. He has won two gold medals for his comics from the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art Festival Awards of Excellence and a gold medal from The Society of Illustrators. His most recent zine is Both/And(Issue Press, 2022).