A former high-ranking Homeland Security official is launching a new initiative aimed at organizing protests against proposed ICE detention facilities, the Daily Beast has learned.
Miles Taylor, who worked as chief of staff to several DHS secretaries in the first Trump administration, has created GTFO ICE, with the mission to track planned ICE facilities and organize protests against them.
“We want to try to stop these, these facilities, including in areas where communities have had no heads up, no consent whatsoever, and to give people a rapid alert mechanism to know when they need to step up,” he told the Daily Beast in an interview.
Taylor said he viewed protests against the facilities as necessary pushback because “detention capacity is one of the most important variables on whether the Trump administration is going to be able to carry out its lawless immigration crackdown.”
“But there’s a bigger concern here that we have, and it’s, it’s not hyperbole, and that is, if DHS has the detention capacity to rival the entire federal prison system, a lot of scarier things can happen,” he said.
“I say that having spent years helping to run that department, it’s in the wrong hands,” Taylor added. “DHS goes from a bulwark of American security to a police state.”
The new GTFO ICE initiative, which says it plans to “‘crowd cancel’ ICE detention facilities before they open,” is a part of Taylor’s online tool defiance.org, another group organizing protests against the administration.
Several watchdog groups and lawmakers have raised concerns about the physical conditions of detainees in ICE detention centers.
A report from Georgia Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff found hundreds of “credible” reports of human rights violations at ICE detention facilities, including the alleged abuse of pregnant women and children.
DHS has previously disputed these reports of poor living conditions, but GTFO ICE still refers to ICE facilities as “modern-day concentration facilities.” Taylor said that was based on his own personal experiences from visiting the facilities while he was at DHS.
“I have been to these facilities. I’ve been on the receiving end of internal complaints about the conditions at these facilities. They are not suitable for human beings,” Taylor said, adding that they are “certainly not suitable for children.”
He pointed to the rapid expansion of detention facilities, including places like Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz, as part of the reason why living conditions are so poor, as all the more reason he is calling for new facilities to face protests.
“Their priority is not humane conditions, and I know that. And the people who work in these places know that the priority is speed, because in their minds, once someone is in one of these facilities, well, they’re eventually going to get deported,” he said.
“But the reality is, given how broken our immigration system is, people will languish inside these facilities for days, weeks, months, potentially even years. It’s not a suitable place for folks to be,” he said, noting that immigration backlog was not just a problem for the Trump administration, but other presidential administrations as well.
Taylor, who penned the 2018 anonymous New York Times op-ed titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” which ruffled feathers within the first Trump White House at the time, has become one of the most outspoken ex-Trump officials against the current administration.
The Daily Beast reached out to DHS and the White House for comment on Taylor’s new initiative. White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson sent a one-word response: “Who?”
The Department of Homeland Security under the second Trump administration has been riddled with controversy over its “mass deportation” policy and former Secretary Kristi Noem’s disastrous time leading the agency.
Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets to protest ICE’s aggressive immigration tactics as they have been deployed to predominantly Democratic cities and states to execute the president’s hardline immigration agenda.
Federal agents shot and killed two American citizens earlier this year: 37-year-old Minnesota mother Renee Good and 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti, both of whom DHS branded domestic terrorists. Their killings prompted tens of thousands to take to the streets of Minneapolis.
“If that type of thing was happening at this scale when I was there, I mean, all of us should have been completely fired. We should have been impeached by Congress,” he said of Noem’s tenure. “This is mind-numbing incompetence that is leading to these sweeping violations of people’s human rights and their civil liberties.”
“One thing more than anything that became very, very striking to me in that first term, which was how easy it would be in the wrong hands to turn the Department of Homeland Security into the warden of the police state,” he said. “I don’t say this to glorify the people who stood up to Donald Trump in the first term. We weren’t heroic in doing that. We were literally doing the bare minimum anyone should expect from a public servant.”
He added that it was “just a handful of people with a fraction of a conscience are all that was keeping that from spilling out into the open the first time, and now we’re seeing it.”
