DHS tried to turn Americans on each other

Documents released Thursday by America First Legal, a legal group driven by Stephen Miller, a former senior adviser to President Trump, show that a group from the Department of Homeland Security proposed that Americans report each other to federal law enforcement.

The documents released were after the AFL sued the DHS for creating a “Homeland Intelligence Panel,” alleging that the panel was unlawfully partisan and in violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act. In response to the lawsuit, DHS agreed to dissolve the group and give its records to the AFL, in exchange for the AFL dropping the case.

In the now-dissolved committee documents, DHS discussed ways to increase its collection of information on US citizens, including by trying to “enter local communities in a non-threatening manner.”

The documents also included the suggestion that political dissent would deal with “public health” infrastructure and that information be collected with “a public health gauntlet”.

The documents also show that the DHS group intended to use various companies to collect information, and the documents say that “we need to know how commercial companies collect their data.”