To investigate just how inhuman and blunt the American justice system can be, I scan through the Office of Inspector General press reports year by year. In 2009, there were 45 reports covering incidences like people defrauding Hurricane Katrina relief funds, child porn in a Customs and Border Protection office, immigration officers receiving bribes, and so on. In 2014, I find thirty-six such reports recounting bribery and misappropriation of funds. Thirteen were tallied in 2019, less than half the typical number over the last few decades—signaling not less corruption and malfeasance, but less interest in rooting it out. Sadly, three of those thirteen reports are not inspections of corruption at all, but declarations of honors for various personnel or commemorations.

These numbers are even more concerning in 2020.

So far this year, OIG has put out a single press release regarding a single indictment. And that target? The OIG itself: The indictment alleges that, from October 2014 to April 2017, Charles Edwards (a former acting(!) inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, Murali Venkata (one of Edwards’ subordinates), and others “executed a scheme to defraud the U.S. government by stealing confidential and proprietary software from DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG), along with sensitive government databases containing personal identifying information (PII) of DHS and USPS employees, so that Edwards’s company, Delta Business Solutions, could later sell an enhanced version of DHS-OIG’s software to the Office of Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Agriculture at a profit.”[4] True, we are in a pandemic, and our attentions are understandably diverted elsewhere. And even in the best times, we seldom watch the watchers.

But here is the rub. In 2020, this year when government oversight for massive, million dollar criminal activities has been lacking, ICE raids have continued, labelled as “targeted enforcement operations,” with names like “Operation Broken Promise.” There have been five raids between September 1 and October 16, rounding up 2,390 people. The news media speaks at length today about the orphaned children in detention, but they make no mention of the fact that many of these children have been there since 2018 or sooner. Can we compare for a moment the overzealous vigor applied to migrant families at the southern border and in the country to the silence of the OIG during the Trump administration? The optics of ICE officers rounding up illegal immigrants reads well with the demographic that sees Trump as the defender of las and order in this nation. The optics of the OIG rounding up criminals within Trump’s government does not. Not to mention that, once power becomes sufficiently centered, the OIG becomes a lame body, only useful as a government tool for internal purges of remaining dissenters.

Notes

[1] Kavi Shah, “Safety Versus Freedom: An Eternal Fallacy Unveiled in Modern America,” International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research 4, no. 10 (2013): 4.

[2] “Lawyers: We Can’t Find Parents of 545 Kids Separated by Trump Administration,” NBC News, accessed October 21, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/lawyers-say-they-can-t-find-parents-545-migrant-children-n1244066.

[3] Office of Inspector General, “CBP Separated More Asylum-Seeking Families at Ports of Entry Than Reported and For Reasons Other Than Those Outlined in Public Statements” (Washington, DC: Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General, May 29, 2020), https://www.oig.dhs.gov/reports/2020/cbp-separated-more-asylum-seeking-families-ports-entry-reported-and-reasons-other-those-outlined-public-statements/oig-20-35-may20.

[4]U.S. Department of Justice, “Former Acting Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Indicted on Theft of Government Property and Scheme to Defraud the United States Government,” March 6, 2020, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-acting-inspector-general-us-department-homeland-security-indicted-theft-government.