The Senate Intelligence Committee has approved legislation that would curtail a controversial domestic intelligence program that let Department of Homeland Security officials interrogate jailed Americans without their lawyers present.
The proposal was passed last month in the committee’s bill governing the intelligence community, but it was not widely noticed. It would significantly limit the type of people that DHS’s intelligence officials can question as part of their domestic intelligence work. It also aims to curtail those officials’ authority to collect Americans’ social media posts and use them in intelligence products.
In March, POLITICO reported that officials in the DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis had been questioning people in prisons, jails and immigration detention centers without their lawyers present. The practice concerned civil liberties advocates, who said conversations between incarcerated people and government officials are inherently coercive.
The new language would bar DHS officials from “the collection of information or intelligence targeting any United States person,” with limited exceptions. DHS’s 2016 instruction manual for the intelligence program let officials question virtually anyone in the United States.
The language is in the Intelligence Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 2024, which passed through the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously on June 14. That bill is set to be added to the National Defense Authorization Act, which is currently working its way through Congress.
In comments on the bill, all the Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee — helmed by Vice Chair Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) — emphasized that it aims to block domestic intelligence abuses. That commentary is in the committee report language, which gives guidance to DHS on lawmakers’ intent. The comments have not been previously reported.
They noted that people in the intelligence office collected journalists’ social media posts about the unrest in Portland, Ore. in the summer of 2020. Officials then wrote intelligence reports on those journalists and circulated them in the office.
They added that a “news story from March 2023 exposed a troubling I&A practice of conducting custodial debriefings of individuals — including American citizens —without those individuals having any representative counsel present,” they noted in their comments, referencing POLITICO’s reporting.
“We strongly support federal, state and local law enforcement investigating domestic violent extremism in its many manifestations,” they said, but “domestic law enforcement is not a job for the IC,” — using a common abbreviation for the intelligence community.
The amendment itself passed with support from Republicans and Democrats. But that support wasn’t unanimous.
A spokesperson for Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he opposed the language as he thought it was too broad and could undermine the office’s mission. The spokesperson said Warner also believes the amendment could make it harder to share intelligence about drug smuggling, illegal immigration, and other issues. An aide to Sen. Gary Peters (D., Mich.) said he also opposes the amendment’s changes to the program.
Reached for comment, a DHS official pointed to a letter that the head of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis sent to the Hill on May 31. That letter, previously reported by Bloomberg, said the domestic intelligence program is consistent with the law and with DHS’s internal policies on civil rights and civil liberties. The letter also said that the office is running “a deep-dive examination” of the program. And it specifically said that the practice of “custodial interviews” — meaning interviews with incarcerated people — is lawful and proper.
The letter also gave several examples of intelligence gleaned from custodial interviews, including information on corrupt Mexican police officers working for a drug cartel and on how a human smuggling network moved people from “a high threat Asian country.” It said more than 200 incarcerated people have been interviewed under the program, primarily people in immigrant detention.