A nonprofit watchdog group says it has obtained emails showing Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials may have unlawfully shared private information about immigrants to right-wing news sites as part of the administration’s ongoing anti-immigrant propaganda campaign. The emails, obtained by Democracy Forward through the Freedom of Information Act, reportedly show administration officials providing protected information to sites including Breitbart and Fox News—and at times completely unprompted.
The organization is now calling for a federal investigation from the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. “If DHS is illegally sharing protected information with media outlets as part of a deliberate attempt to further an anti-immigrant narrative, that would be an egregious misuse of power,” Democracy Forward legal policy director Aman George said. “DHS is a national security agency, not the Breitbart research team.”
“In one instance, Fox News reporter Alex Pappas emailed a DHS official touting a Fox story about an Iraqi man accused of shooting a police officer,” Democracy Forward said. He apparently expected brownie points for being a good boy, but the organization said: “The DHS official was quick to chide Pappas for not emphasizing to the public that the man was a refugee. ‘The news here,’ the official wrote, ‘is that he is a refugee. It is not mentioned. That is new.’” Totally normal bureaucratic communications here for sure.
“In yet another instance, a DHS official reached out to reporters to share information about an individual’s immigration status in the event that the reporters decided to write about the individual,” the organization continues. “In sharing this information, DHS officials may have violated the Privacy Act of 1974—passed in the aftermath of Watergate to regulate federal agencies’ use and dissemination of personal information.”
Democracy Forward is now calling on the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties to probe the charge, writing in a letter that the “information-sharing raises serious concern that DHS is violating restrictions on Department officials’ authority to disseminate information about individuals to third parties,” and that “these DHS officials seem motivated primarily by an interest in advancing a narrative that immigrants, even those legally within the United States, are criminals.”
The weaponization of government is a long-running tradition of this corrupt administration. It seems like 30 years ago, but really only a year ago as of March, a whistleblower revealed officials had been tracking a number of journalists, organizers, and immigrant rights advocates who covered or had associations with 2018’s so-called migrant caravan in a secret database. For some, the level of detail in the database was frightening, including information on the kind of car one immigrant rights advocate drove.
“Democracy Forward is actively investigating a broader pattern of improper communications between Trump administration officials, Fox News, and similar media outlets,” the group said. “To date, these investigations have exposed a cozy relationship between Fox Business and Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s Treasury Department, the promise of an “easy interview” for Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and more,” as well as a lawsuit last year that eventually found that Trump administration official and anti-immigrant loudmouth Ken Cuccinelli was unlawfully appointed to his job.