Homeland Security

Arun Kundnani and Mizue Aizeki
Illustrations by Anuj Shrestha

Capitalism / Fiction & Literary Nonfiction / Art & Culture

Copublished with Surveillance Resistance Lab

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.”