Bad Watchdog: The Red Herring

We're excited to bring you an episode from Bad Watchdog, the podcast from the Project on Government Oversight and one of our colleagues in The Democracy Group podcast network. This is the first episode of the show's second season, which takes a deep dive on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Established in the wake of September 11, the DHS was entrusted with protecting the U.S. from national security threats. Since then, much of the agency’s focus has been on the southern border — with tens of thousands of people held in its detention centers on a daily basis. Host Maren Machles explores how this came to be and delves into what happens to people held in immigration detention centers with the presumption that they may be national security threats. And she asks the question: How does this relate to the way DHS addresses the most dangerous threat currently facing our nation — far-right violent extremism?

To find out, host Maren Machles talks with Daryl Johnson, who recounts his work as the former lead analyst for domestic terrorism at DHS. She also speaks with Alejandro Beutel, a criminologist who focuses on domestic terrorism, and Berto Hernandez, who shares their story of being brought into the U.S. as a child and held in detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement years later.

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[Audio from January 6th insurrection:] Capitol Police: We just had protestors...Circle… breached the line. We need backup.

MSNBC anchor: We are seeing the buildup of the last five years spill out onto [Anchor 2: Yup.] the Capitol steps.

Maren: Remember how tense this time was, right after January 6? The insurrectionists had come from across the country, and while they didn’t share a single ideology, it was clear that many were motivated by anti-government extremism and white supremacy. And a really big threat — violent, far-right extremism — dominated the conversation about the events that day.

WUSA anchor: The Oath Keepers are charged with planning their attack. They’re charged with conspiring to obstruct Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential election. 

ABC anchor: A self-proclaimed white supremacist will spend time behind bars now for his role in the US Capitol riots. Bryan Betancur was sentenced to four months…

Maren: That’s why, less than five months later, Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, has been called to testify about the threat of domestic violent extremism. Ignore the hum in the background; it signals to members of Congress that there’s about to be a vote.  

United States Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT): So let me ask first, Secretary Mayorkas, is it still your assessment that white supremacist extremists are the most lethal threat we face in the homeland today?  

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas: Mr. Chairman, I do believe that the intelligence reflects the fact that indeed that is the case. 

Maren: Here’s then-Senator Patrick Leahy from Vermont, giving his remarks.   

Senator Patrick Leahy: Our nation’s history has been marred by the violent, deadly acts of extremists pushing a range of hateful white supremacist ideologies. From the Ku Klux Klan to Timothy McVeigh, we’ve witnessed and we’ve suffered through as a people extremists killing innocent people in the name morally bankrupt causes. The violence on January 6th was simply the latest chapter in this long history of domestic extremism in America. 

[Music plays.]

Maren: But during this hearing, something weird happens. Then-Senator Richard Shelby, from Alabama, puts something else on the agenda.

United States Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL): Domestic violent extremists threaten the rule of law, but so too does turning a blind eye to the flood of illegal immigration at our southern border.  

Maren: This is a moment that makes me go, “Huh?” In this hearing called specifically to talk about domestic violent extremism, why is the southern border coming up? 

But in the frenzied months after January 6th, the southern border has come to overshadow domestic violent extremism and more specifically, far-right violent extremism in the discourse around national security. Some Republicans have taken the Biden administration to task for the growing number of migrants coming across the southern border.

[Music out.]  

Maren: Last November, during a supplemental budget hearing for DHS, Senator John Hoeven grilled Mayorkas about security at the southern border.  

United States Senator John Hoeven (R-ND): Do you think that millions of people crossing our border illegally creates the risk of a terrorist attack in our country?  

Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas: Senator, um, uh, I think that uh the men and women of the Department of Homeland Security do an extraordinary job of ensuring the safety and security of the American people—    

Senator John Hoeven: That wasn’t the question I asked. I said, do you think that millions of people crossing our border illegally every year, two and a half million last year, creates the risk of a terrorist-- With what’s going on in the world, people coming from more than a hundred different countries crossing here illegally. You don’t even know how many of them are still here. You came here today without that information. Do you think that creates a risk of a terrorist attack in our country?    

Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas: Senator, um, you mischaracterized my testimony. What I sh— what I shared with—   

Senator John Hoeven: Yes or no? Do you do you think that creates a ri— Millions of people come here, are here, illegally. Does that create the risk of a terrorist attack in our country?

Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas: Let me assure you—

Senator John Hoeven: Simple question.    

Maren: As we talked about in season 1 of Bad Watchdog, DHS is a huge federal department, with vast and sprawling power. Its mandate is national security, and most of the immigration system, including border security, falls under its purview. So under DHS, everyone crossing the border illegally isn’t just breaking the law. They’re considered a national security threat. There’s just one problem with this framing--the facts just don’t bear it out.  

[Music plays.] 

Maren: In some cases, people have gone through customs or crossed the border illegally and they were on the terrorist watchlist, and while we can’t fully write off the impact of the militarized borders on terrorism, there is evidence that the lack of similar attention on domestic threats has allowed far-right violent extremism to fester.

And there is overwhelming evidence that the number of terrorist plots and attacks are far greater among far-right extremist groups than any other group. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan, top defense and national security think tank, did an in-depth analysis of terrorist plots and attacks from 1994 to May 2020. Far-right extremists, which include anti-government extremists, white supremacists, and incels, were responsible for the majority — 57% — of attacks and plots in that time frame.

This February, things escalated even further when House Republicans impeached Mayorkas. The resolution says quote, “His refusal to obey the law is not only an offense against the separation of powers in the Constitution of the United States, it also threatens our national security.”

[Music out.]

This isn’t the first time we’ve been here, by the way, trying to address far right violent extremism, but every time we are here the same thing seems to happen. The window of opportunity to pursue it seems to shrink, while the intent to put more resources towards the border — that continues to grow.  

[Theme music in.]

This is a podcast about finding the truth and holding the powerful accountable. What happens to people who are thrown into the Department of Homeland Security’s detention facilities, with the presumption that they may be a national security threat. This season, we dig into POGO’s exclusive investigations uncovering the agency’s treatment of people in detention — all justified in the name of homeland security, and all overshadowing the most dangerous threat: far-right violent extremism. 

I’m Maren Machles. And from the Project on Government Oversight, this is Bad Watchdog. 

Episode One: The Red Herring 

[Theme music out.]

Maren: Before September 11th, the deadliest attack perpetrated on US soil was the Oklahoma City bombing. 

NBC anchor: The chaos in downtown Oklahoma City did indeed resemble Beirut after what police believed to be a 1,200-pound car bomb ripped through the nine-story federal building shortly after 9 o’clock this morning.

Maren: On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh set a car bomb off at the Alfred P. Murrah federal building, killing 168 people, including 19 children. 

Then-President Bill Clinton: Bombing in Oklahoma City was an attack on innocent children  and defenseless citizens. It was an act of cowardice and it was evil.

Former DHS Intelligence Analyst Daryl Johnson: My name is Daryl Johnson, and I’m the former lead analyst for domestic terrorism at the Department of Homeland Security.

Maren: Daryl Johnson has been studying people like Timothy McVeigh for a long time. He’s wanted to know what draws people to white supremacist ideology ever since he was a kid.

Daryl Johnson: I saw the inscription “KKK” written on a bathroom stall of a store in Manassas, Virginia, as an 11-year-old child. And I was just naturally curious as to what that was. And when I went home and talked to my parents about it, they had told me it was a kind of a, uh, remnant of the Civil War, that you know, terrorizing Blacks in the South. And I remember when we went to the library, that was like one of the first things I did was run to the encyclopedia and looked up KKK, the Ku Klux Klan.

I was naturally curious as to why people would quit their jobs, cut off ties to their family, join different racist religions, and basically await Armageddon or actually want to hasten Armageddon. And so I was fortunate to turn this into a career.

Maren: Daryl’s spent four decades studying white supremacist extremism. 

Daryl Johnson: In the ’80s, we started seeing, uh, the rise of these white supremacists, uh, committing bank robberies and murders and killing police officers and things like this. 

So some of the first cases that I started following was the Aryan Nations’ secretive subgroup called the Order. These were a group of about 10 violent criminal offenders, domestic terrorists, going around conducting robberies, bombings of abortion clinics, uh, bombing of an adult movie theater in Seattle, uh, the murder of a radio show host in Denver. We continue to see white supremacy continue to kind of be the main domestic terrorism threat all the way into the ’90s.

Maren: In 1992, federal law enforcement attempted to arrest Randy Weaver, a veteran who had attended several meetings of the Aryan Nation, for failing to appear in court on federal firearms charges. Weaver refused to surrender. During a tense standoff, Weaver’s wife was shot by an FBI sniper. This standoff is known as Ruby Ridge.

Daryl Johnson: On the aftermath of Ruby Ridge a group got together in Estes Park, Colorado, at a YMCA camp and held what was called the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous. And John Trochmann had proposed at that conference that in order to repel the tyranny of the federal government, we need to form these private citizen armies, these militias. And so that’s where this militia concept was introduced. Months later, we had the standoff at Waco.

Maren: On February 28, 1993, federal law enforcement raided a compound in Waco, Texas. It belonged to the Branch Davidians, a cult. The feds were trying to execute a search warrant and arrest the group’s leader, David Koresh, for illegally stockpiling weapons. There were also allegations that Koresh had physically and sexually abused children in the compound.   

On April 19, 1993, the FBI tear gassed the compound. Shortly after, it caught fire. More than 70 people in the compound died, including more than two dozen children. 

By many accounts, law enforcement botched the raid.

Daryl Johnson: It wasn’t until these two standoffs, Ruby Ridge and Waco, back to back, 1992, 1993. We see the emergence of this new movement of anti-government type groups.   You know, 1993 to 1995, we saw the proliferation of these militia groups and they numbered in the hundreds.

[Music plays.]

Maren: One member of the anti-government movement was a 24-year-old Gulf War veteran named Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh also signed up to be a member of the KKK at one point in time. Daryl said that McVeigh was infuriated that the US government was using the same military tactics and weapons that he’d used during the Gulf War.

Daryl Johnson: And when the Waco siege happened, he went down there. As part of the protesters that were protesting the government’s uh, handling of that. 

Maren: McVeigh timed the Oklahoma City bombing to occur exactly two years after the Waco fire that ended the federal government’s siege. Daryl says that the Oklahoma City bombing prompted more scrutiny of violent white supremacist extremist groups and militias.

Daryl Johnson: A number of plots were thwarted. It was a combination of the violence of Oklahoma City bombing, the passing of anti-paramilitary training laws in 22 states, people getting bored with the revolution that never came. And so there was this migration away from the militia movement. And that brings us up to the year 2000.

[Music out.]

Maren: On September 11th, 2001, the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil happened. 

CBS reporter: It’s 8:52 here in New York. I’m Bryant Gumbel. We understand that there has been a plane crash on the southern tip of Manhattan. You’re looking at the World Trade Center. We understand that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. We don’t know anything more than that.

CBS reporter 2: Oh, there’s another one. Another plane just hit.  Right, oh my god, another plane has just hit. It hit another building. Flew right into the middle of it. Explosion.

Then-President George W. Bush: Good evening. Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed. Our country is strong. A great people has been moved to defend a great nation.

Then-Vice President  Dick Cheney: We’ve been subject to targets of terrorist attacks before, especially overseas with our forces and American personnel overseas.

Maren: Then-vice President Dick Cheney on Meet the Press five days after the attack.

Dick Cheney: This time, because of what happened in New York and what happened in Washington, it’s, um, uh, it’s a qualitatively different set of circumstances.

[Music plays.]

Maren: Federal officials were caught on the back foot. They had let the terrorists slip through the border — in fact, US consulates had given them all visas to enter the country.

Less than a month after 9/11, Bush announced the creation of an office of homeland security. This new office was tasked with coming up with a “comprehensive and shared vision” on how to best prevent future terrorist attacks. The mandate for a Department of Homeland Security would come out of this office.

The Homeland Security Act took agencies scattered around the federal government — from Justice to Transportation to Energy, even Agriculture — and consolidated them under one department: the Department of Homeland Security. 

[Music out.]

Maren: Berto Hernandez was a high school student in southern California when 9/11 happened. 

Berto Hernandez: Our teachers, I remember them turning on the television and just playing this on repeat. 

Maren: With the rest of the country, Berto’s community felt the first ripple of shock watching the towers fall. 

Berto Hernandez: Getting home and then having my aunt, again, watching the same things I had been watching all day. She was crying and my parents were crying and my siblings were, like, trying to make sense of it.

Maren: And then a second pang of fear. One that was familiar to families like Berto’s. 

Berto Hernandez: Yeah, and I remember the months that followed.

Maren: Berto had crossed the border illegally with their family when they were 10 years old. 

Berto Hernandez: From the moment that I got here till now, like my family always told me, “You have to be nice. You have to fit in. You really can’t draw attention to yourself. We had to learn English, we had to watch out for immigration. You can’t be doing anything bad.” You have to be like the good immigrant, right?

Maren: The family settled in Ontario, a city east of LA. Lots of kids, lots of Spanish speakers. The kind of place where families from all the apartments would spend Thanksgivings and Christmases together. But the circumstances of 9/11 changed things for Berto’s family.

Berto Hernandez: I remember my, my aunt and my mom and my uncle and my dad, um, just kind of being like, “Well, we’re not going to go out for like a little bit.” This whole idea of not drawing attention to yourself because it was a very tumultuous time. It was not only like in our house, it was all around that apartment complex. Right after that, like we began hearing things about DHS and what that was.

Maren: DHS was now responsible for controlling the border and immigration enforcement on US soil.

Berto Hernandez: I remember my aunt sitting us down and telling us, “If you see them, don’t run, don’t do anything.” They were thinking of like La Migra again, but they thought, “Oh, immigration is going to go to the schools or to your workplaces.”

Maren: La Migra — immigration enforcement. Rumors of more aggressive raids spread through Berto’s community. 

But unsurprisingly, DHS focused predominately on Muslim immigrants as potential terrorist threats. 

Criminologist and domestic terrorism expert Alejandro Beutel: Basically anyone who was Muslim or perceived to be Muslim, were often profiled, they would be stopped at airports.

Maren: This is Alejandro Beutel. He’s a criminologist who mostly focuses on domestic violent extremism. He’s spent a lot of time thinking about the origins of DHS and its mandate to root out terrorism.

Alejandro Beutel: They would be, uh, given extensive amounts of security screening, sometimes denied from flights, getting searched, and having their possessions seized at borders, laptops searched — a lot of these things were extremely common.

[Music plays.]

Maren: After 9/11, the federal government consolidated immigration enforcement under the banner of DHS, whose mission was to protect the homeland. Out of this rearrangement came Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. It was formed in 2003. Almost immediately, it set up eight Fugitive Operations Teams, which focused on targeted raids within U.S. borders, with the goal of finding and deporting “unlawfully present noncitizens.”

Alejandro Beutel: There were a series of raids that happened, against primarily Arab and Muslim communities, and then were also deported, often under the flimsiest of charges. There would be say announcements about potential terrorist violations, but it would be with something like overstaying a visa and then they’d be gone.

Maren: Twenty-five hundred foreigners were targeted in these raids, with most from predominately Muslim countries. Ultimately, many were found to have been in the country legally, and most were found to have done nothing wrong. 

Alejandro Beutel: This is also an era in which there were high flows of, uh, unauthorized entry into the United States from our southern border. 

Maren: Alejandro said that it wasn’t just people perceived to be Muslim who were experiencing higher levels of deportation. 

Alejandro Beutel: You also then had lots of people who were getting arrested and being deported, or in many cases put into custody under, uh, extremely questionable circumstances who are people often of Latin American background  often purportedly for the purposes of public safety. But most of these people who are being rounded up weren’t hardened criminals per se. These were just people who had unauthorized entry, but were otherwise looking for work. And they were the easy targets who could fulfill quotas.

Maren: By 2005, the agency had added 26 more teams. From 2005 to 2008, deportations went up by almost 45%.

[Music out.]

Maren: In 2004, back in D.C., counter-terrorism expert Daryl Johnson was recruited to work for DHS. 

Daryl Johnson: One thing you need to understand, um, in Washington, D.C., is domestic terrorism at the time was a very small group of analysts and agents that were familiar with this topic and work in this issue. So there wasn’t a lot of analysts in the intelligence community, or even the federal law enforcement community, that was paying attention to domestic terrorism.

When Homeland Security stood up in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, they had an intelligence office that was supposed to be the new agency that was going to connect the dots and prevent the next 9/11 terrorist attack. 

All of the analysts that they had hired up to that point were, you know, familiar with international terrorism. However, they realized that, you know, there wasn’t anybody covering home base, uh, so to speak.

Yours truly, um, got recruited by Homeland Security to go over to this Office of Intelligence and Analysis and be the lone ranger, uh, for a number of months,  um, where I was the only person looking at domestic terrorism.

Maren: And he wasn’t just tasked with looking into far-right groups. Daryl said he and his team of five were the only people in DHS hired to do intelligence analysis for all domestic extremism. 

Growing up in an immigrant community in Southern California, Berto got wise to the threat DHS could pose. 

[Music plays.]

Berto Hernandez: By the time that I was a senior in high school, all of the checkpoints, the immigration checkpoints followed. Every weekend, if it was a Friday or a Saturday, you would know not to take Euclid Avenue in Ontario, because every weekend, they had a checkpoint in 2007, 2006. 

Maren: Berto and their two best friends would try to spread the word, letting people know not to take certain streets on weekends because DHS had set up checkpoints. 

Berto Hernandez: And then we began hearing those checkpoints, they were happening in Pomona, they were happening in Fontana, they were happening all around the IE, which had, again, like a high concentration of brown folks.

Maren: Berto, their friends, family, and community all feared that any encounter with law enforcement, period, could mean being passed off to DHS and deported — being sent back to a country where you didn’t know anybody, didn’t fully speak the language, with no money, and no way to see your family again.

Berto Hernandez: There was no safety of existing. There was no safety in, in being. You can’t fuck up. We as immigrants can’t fuck up. Our humanity is just reduced by like the simplest thing of like you being a teenager, you being a young person, you know, taking the wrong decision.

Maren: And people were scared of ICE, not just for the possibility of removal, but for the abuses they’d heard about. Here’s one high-profile example: ICE came under hot water in 2007, for conducting a sweep on an apartment complex in San Rafael, California. Early morning, agents came into the complex. The ACLU filed a lawsuit against ICE, claiming that they had violated the constitutional rights of a child during that raid, a 6-year-old US citizen who’d been detained for 10 hours. 

[Music out.] 

Maren: While DHS was expanding its immigration enforcement apparatus, Daryl and his small team were plugging away on the fringes of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis. 

Daryl Johnson: We got a call in uh, January 2007. This is the US Capitol Police that had called us. That a young African American senator from Illinois was going to announce his bid for president and they wanted us to do some internet monitoring. 

Maren: And once Barack Obama secured the Democratic nomination, in the run up to the election …

Daryl Johnson: That’s when we started seeing the threats rolling in. So that’s when we started postulating. What if, you know, an African American became president of the United States, what would that do to the threat landscape?

[Music plays.]

Daryl Johnson: We all knew that this would be a huge recruitment opportunity and radicalization, uh, facilitator for both anti-government and white supremacist type groups. So we started collecting, you know, all kinds of information related to that over the next 12 months and started putting pen to paper right after the day after the election was held.

Maren: The team was in a rush to finish writing the report. 

Daryl Johnson: It was a race against time to get this report out, uh, because that morning we found out, the day after the election, uh, that there was an arson attack against a black church in Massachusetts. A month or two later, we had a Neo-Nazi outside Boston go on a shooting rampage. And then a few months later, we had three cops that were killed in Pittsburgh by a white supremacist.

Maren: Daryl said the report drew from many sources, including law enforcement, civil rights organizations, media reporting, and “open-source intelligence,” like websites and internet chatter. They gathered data on the number of white supremacist rallies that were being held, and they monitored web traffic to certain websites. 

Daryl Johnson: We saw how many members had joined Stormfront, which was the largest website for Neo-Nazis at the time and white supremacists. In fact, I want to say one year after the election, it had doubled its total membership from like 60,000 to 120,000, something like that. We also were looking at YouTube and saw how the militia movement had gone to YouTube and began uploading all these paramilitary training videos, um, to get other militia units formed and trained and indoctrinated in the different conspiracies and anti-government ideology that they had. So the internet was really a force multiplier. And so we finally got it out,  uh, think we’re sending out this prescient warning of this  change in the threat landscape from al Qaida and international terrorists to more homegrown domestic terrorists. And, uh, never did we think that this political controversy would ensue when that document was leaked.

[Music plays.]

David Asman: GOP strategist Andrea Tantaros calling it an attempt to silence the right.

Well Andrea, I’m looking at the report and it says, among other things, that the federal government is gonna begin gathering information on right-wing extremist activity in the United States. Does that mean they’re gonna be spending sending spies to these tea parties?

Sean Hannity: I’m not Ron Paul’s biggest fan, but if you have a Ron Paul bumper sticker, you, you might be viewed as a radical by the government.

James Dobson (guest on Hannity): They were also saying today that, uh, when the, uh, troops come back from Iraq or Afghanistan that they’re gonna be a big problem because they have military training.

[Music out.]

Maren: Daryl was devastated by the politicization of his report. 

Daryl Johnson: I was a Republican, third generation of Republican for, you know, 45, 48 years of my life. And if I have the courage to stand up and call this threat out for what it is, shame on every Republican leader that has kept their silence and has not said a thing.

Maren: Instead of taking the threat seriously despite political backlash, the higher-ups at DHS responded by telling Daryl to lay low at first. 

[Music plays.]

Daryl Johnson: They just told us, let’s wait this out over the summer, and then you guys can get back to work in the fall. Well, that didn’t happen. Next thing you know, there’s rumors of a reorganization, there’s rumors that our domestic terrorism unit’s being disbanded. So I called the analysts into an office and basically told them, “Hey, you know, it’s not looking good. I’m sorry that you’ve only been here for a year, but you’d better start looking for another job.”

That’s kind of how everything ended and then for 10 years, there was no one at the Office of Intelligence and Analysis doing this type of work, and it was finally reconstituted after January 6th.

[Music out.]

Maren: As Berto was approaching graduation, they struggled with how their undocumented status was going to impact their future. 

Berto Hernandez: I remember, like, being in the honors and AP classes and being like, oh, like, yeah, like, “Where are you going to go?” And some of my friends, like, someone went to Harvard, the other one went to Princeton, one went to MIT. And then they’re like, “Oh, so what are you going to do?” And I’m like, “I don’t know.”

Maren: And then, when Berto was 21 years old, their sibling, only two years older than them, was ordered to be deported. I just want to quickly flag, Berto identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns. Their sibling, Jonathan, uses he/they pronouns. When Berto describes Jonathan’s experience they switch back and forth between he and they.

Berto Hernandez: They went out partying and, you know, they got caught up. We are, we are so close. We are still so close to this day, and, and just feeling this emptiness, and trying to figure out what happened to them. Um, them leaving and not coming back, and then thinking, “Are they dead? Are they in a hospital?” And then realizing that they, they, they are in a detention center.

Maren: Jonathan was taken to an immigration detention center to await their deportation. This means they would be sent back to Mexico with no family, friends, place to live, job. Their whole world was turned upside down.

[Music plays.]

Berto Hernandez: The culture shock, the isolation, and just the fear that they felt like for a long time, really, like, and to this day, they still, it still hurts me, and it has stayed with me, like that grief and that resentment.

Maren: Jonathan is also part of the LGBTQ+ community. Berto said after he was deported,  Jonathan faced violence in Mexico. 

Berto Hernandez: My sibling, he had to leave Mexico. Um, he recently went to Canada because he was attacked multiple times. And he sent me pictures of, like, the whole thing because he needs proof of that.  Like, you need to prove that your, that your life is in danger.

[Music out.]

Maren: Berto says they had a hard time for several years after Jonathan was deported. 

Berto Hernandez: I have grieved it a lot. Um, I, it was also part of like the reasons why I also began drinking a lot. Because I have always experienced like really traumatic family separation.  Um. And especially for somebody that was very, like, integral to, like, my well-being, which was my sibling. That’s really hard.

Maren: In 2014, and twice in 2018, Berto was arrested for driving under the influence. To this day, they carry a lot of shame and remorse for their actions. They were sentenced to 30 days for their third offense. 

Berto was able to fly under DHS’s radar until 2019, when they would end up in its crosshairs.

By this time, Berto had gotten their life back in a direction they were excited about.

Berto Hernandez: When I turned 30, I was 29 actually, I had already made a whole change in my life. I surrounded myself with new people. My friends were like, “No, like you can actually go to school. Like, this is how you do it.” And also like having the knowledge to go to school, right? In 2019, I started to go to school.

I was like, “Oh my God, like, I love this. I miss this. This is everything that I had hoped for.” Um, and that was, I was like, like, you’re giving access to, like, something that you have wished for, for your whole life and you want to, like, take a bite out of everything, like, eat it all in one bite. I remember that’s how I felt.

[Music plays.]

Berto Hernandez: It was a Saturday, two weeks into the new semester. Really early in the morning, it was 7 AM.

Maren: Berto was studying psychology. This particular morning, they were on their way to the library to pick up a textbook for class. 

Berto Hernandez: I just remember getting into my car and this gray SUV following me around, like, as I left my house. I didn’t think too much of it, right, because there was only one way to get the freeway from where I live. But then as I changed lanes, the SUV would change lanes as well. And then I began to panic. We hit a stoplight. And I remember this man,  like, getting out, like, of that SUV with a huge gun. This person wasn’t dressed like a police officer. 

And I just remember, like, holding on to my steering wheel, and this person screaming at me to get out of my car. I kept asking him, “Who are you? Like, tell me who you are.” And he would not stop pointing at me with a gun and he would not answer to me who he was. And then he came back, and I saw, like, the little ICE insignia, and then I knew, I was like, “Oh, shit.”

Shaking, like panicking, anxious, really anxious, and, and, and, and just not knowing what to do because I’m like, if I move, this person’s going to kill me.

I opened my door slightly. He grabbed, he pushed me against the, the trunk of my car and he literally knocked the wind, like he hit my ribcage. And then I just, like, at this point, um, I lost it. I began to cry because I was assaulted.

Maren: And in that moment, all the fears that had been following Berto since their childhood came rushing back. 

Berto Hernandez: They didn’t tell me who they were until like they actually like put the zip ties on me. And at that moment, I was like, “Oh my God, I’m getting deported. Oh my God, like, what is going to happen to me? Oh my God, like, like, what’s my life going to be like? Can I survive in Mexico? Like, my life is here.”

Maren: Berto was in shock. They were taken to an ICE detention center in California.

[Music out.]

Berto Hernandez: I didn’t understand how much immigration, migration and just, like, policy has affected my life until, like, I actually was at the detention center.

Maren: Their whole life, they had lived with this fear. And now they would have to face it head on. 

[Music fades.]

Maren: This season on Bad Watchdog, we’re looking at what happens when someone is taken into ICE custody. What does it look like when migrants and immigrants like Berto encounter officers who are, first and foremost, there to protect the homeland from national security threats?

[Theme music plays.]

We explore how immigration infrastructure became intertwined with counterterrorism.

Law professor at The Ohio State University and author César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández: In the aftermath of the horrible, uh, bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, you know, politicians immediately latched on to the idea that this must have been perpetrated by foreigners, by migrants. It turns out that that was anything but the truth.

Maren: We’ll bring you firsthand accounts of abuses from people who were held in these ICE facilities. 

Arely Westley: I’m afraid to be alone because of the months and the days that I had to spend in those cages.

Berto Hernandez: I woke up one day and like the back of like my pillow was full of blood because that was like that was bleeding so much throughout the night.

Maren: And walk you through how POGO fought for five years, tooth and nail for records  giving us a window into what’s happening inside these facilities. 

Former POGO Senior Researcher Freddy Martinez: We spent a couple of months, uh, really digging into what the records told us, um, and the sort of systemic patterns that they revealed.

Maren: And we’ll talk about what DHS has dropped the ball on — the biggest threat that security experts point to: far-right violent extremism.

Daryl Johnson: For DHS to finally acknowledge the threat in the aftermath of the threat literally coming to the doorsteps of the Capitol building, it’s a little bit too late.

Las Americas Director of Cross-Border Strategies Crystal Sandoval: I am more concerned in the mornings to take my daughter to school and for me to receive a call that there’s a shooting at the school than for me to take her, um, into a shelter.

Maren: Next time, on Bad Watchdog, we’re going back to the ’90s to learn about the history of immigration detention — and how it connects to counter-terrorism. And we’re going to bring back Nick Schwellenbach, POGO’s senior investigator, who dug into DHS data on solitary confinement and found some troubling patterns.

[Theme music out.]

[Music plays.]

Maren: Bad Watchdog is a production of Investigations and Research at the Project On Government Oversight. It’s co-written and produced by Padmini Raghunath and me, Maren Machles, and based on investigations by Nick Schwellenbach, Freddy Martinez, Mia Steinle, Andrea Peterson, and Katherine Hawkins. Additional research by Julienne McClure. Edited by Julia Delacroix, Brandon Brockmyer, and Henry Glifort. Fact checking by Amaya Phillips. This episode was mixed by Padmini Raghunath. Our sound engineer is Verenda Lowe. Our theme music was written and recorded by Will Wrigley. POGO’s director of Investigations and Research is Brandon Brockmyer. POGO’s editorial director is Julia Delacroix. Find out more about our work to investigate and improve the federal government at www.pogo.org.     

This podcast is part of The Democracy Group.

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