Washington, DC – Greater than 100 employees members from america Division of Homeland Safety (DHS) have signed an open letter to Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas denouncing the division’s dealing with of the warfare in Gaza.
The letter, solely obtained by Al Jazeera, expresses frustration with the “palpable, glaring absence in the Department’s messaging” of “recognition, support, and mourning” for the greater than 18,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza because the begin of the warfare on October 7.
“The grave humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the conditions in the West Bank are circumstances that the Department would generally respond to in various ways,” the letter, dated November 22, stated.
“Yet DHS leadership has seemingly turned a blind eye to the bombing of refugee camps, hospitals, ambulances, and civilians.”
The letter’s signatories embrace 139 employees members from DHS and the businesses it manages, like Customs and Border Safety (CBP), the Federal Emergency Administration Company (FEMA), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and US Citizenship and Immigration Companies (USCIS).
However some employees members “elected to sign this letter anonymously” for concern of backlash, the doc defined. It known as for DHS to “provide a fair and balanced representation of the situation, and allow for respectful expression without the fear of professional repercussions”.
DHS didn’t reply to Al Jazeera’s request for remark by the point of publication.
The letter is the most recent indication of fractures throughout the administration of President Joe Biden, who has faced inner criticism for his authorities’s stance on the Gaza warfare.
Final month, greater than 500 officers from 40 authorities businesses issued an nameless letter pushing Biden to name for a direct ceasefire in Gaza. Another letter, signed by 1,000 staff from the US Company for Worldwide Improvement (USAID), expressed the same enchantment.
However Biden has been reluctant to criticise Israel’s ongoing army offensive in Gaza, as an alternative pledging his “rock solid and unwavering” help for the longtime US ally.
In an inner message on November 2, Mayorkas echoed Biden’s stance. He denounced the “horrific terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7”, perpetrated by the Palestinian group Hamas, however made no point out of the humanitarian disaster in Gaza.
“The impacts [of October 7] continue to sweep through Jewish, Arab American, Muslim and other communities everywhere,” Mayorkas wrote.
“I am heartened knowing that our Department is on the front lines of protecting our communities from antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of bigotry and hate.”
However two DHS employees members who spoke to Al Jazeera on the situation of anonymity felt that division management needs to be going additional to deal with the mounting demise toll in Gaza, the place civilians stay beneath Israeli siege.
United Nations experts have already warned of a “grave risk of genocide” within the territory, as provides run low and bombs proceed to fall.
“I’ve been very dedicated to the federal government,” one nameless DHS official stated. “I’ve served in numerous capacities. I very a lot believed in our mission.
“And then, after October 7, I feel like there has just been a drastic shift in this expectation of what we’re supposed to do when there’s a humanitarian crisis and what we’re actually doing when there’s politics involved, and that has a very, very scary, chilling impact.”
The employees’s open letter requires DHS to take actions in Gaza “commensurate with past responses to humanitarian tragedies”, together with by the creation of a humanitarian parole programme for Palestinians within the territory.
That will permit them to briefly enter the US “based on urgent humanitarian or significant public benefit reasons”.
The letter additionally pushed DHS to designate residents of the Palestinian territories eligible for “temporary protected status” or TPS. That will allow Palestinians already within the US to stay within the nation and qualify for employment authorisation.
Such programmes have been put in place for different conflicts, including for Ukrainians going through full-scale invasion from Russia.
Final month, 106 members of Congress — together with Senator Dick Durbin and Representatives Pramila Jayapal and Jerry Nadler — even despatched a letter to Biden, urging a TPS designation for the Palestinian territories.
However one of many nameless DHS officers who spoke with Al Jazeera stated that, though there was dialogue a few potential TPS designation, motion appears unlikely.
“There have been a lot of serious systemic and programmatic obstacles driven purely by politics,” she stated.
A part of the problem is that the US doesn’t recognise Palestine as a overseas state, placing its eligibility for TPS unsure.
“We don’t recognise Palestine as a state. We don’t code them with that,” the DHS official defined. “And that’s something across Customs and Border Protection, ICE and USCIS. There have just been obstacles raised at the highest levels of those agencies.”
The official suspects she is aware of why. “They’re worried about their own operations in terms of removing or deporting people to Gaza and the West Bank, if they were to change these codes.”
However that inaction has levied a steep toll on staff’ psychological well being, in line with the DHS officers Al Jazeera spoke to.
One described how colleagues with household in Gaza had acquired no help from DHS management as they tried to deliver their family to security.
The opposite, a senior employees member who has spent greater than a decade working for the federal authorities, described having nightmares of dropping his personal youngsters.
He stated he wakes up “with the knowledge that we’re not actually doing all that we can to provide programmes and relief for the Palestinians”.
“It’s definitely distressing and dispiriting to feel like, for political considerations, we’re not addressing [the conflict] in the same way that we would other previous, recent humanitarian crises, for instance, like Ukraine.”
The senior official voiced dismay that Biden’s immigration policies have remained similar to that of his predecessor, former President Donald Trump.
Biden has confronted stress to restrict the variety of arrivals within the US, significantly as migration throughout the US-Mexico border spikes.
“The issue is, honestly, that the Biden administration has been really tepid about moving too far in front on immigration and is focused almost entirely on the southern border and how that impacts the administration politically. That has informed a lot of the decision-making with respect to new programmes,” the official stated.
That tepidness has left most of the nameless DHS officers feeling demoralised, questioning their sense of mission.
“We have the ability to do anything, something, and we’re just not,” one of many officers stated.
