Re: OPPOSE Gramm-Miller Homeland Security Bill!
Dear Senator:
On behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and its approximately 300,000 members, we urge you to oppose an amendment to H.R. 5005, the ""Homeland Security Act of 2002,"" that will be offered by Senators Gramm and Miller, and to vote against a cloture motion on the Gramm-Miller amendment because germaneness rules will seriously hinder any effort to add civil rights and other needed protections back into the bill on the floor.
Strong oversight and public accountability measures are needed for this massive department, which includes roughly 180,000 employees from 22 federal agencies, including 74,300 armed federal agents.[1] Under the Gramm-Miller bill, however, basic oversight mechanisms are lacking, and the new department the bill would establish would be an unaccountable bureaucracy shrouded in secrecy.
Now that the text of this proposal is finally available, it is clear that adopting the Gramm-Miller approach would frustrate vital accountability and civil rights provisions in Chairman Lieberman's bill creating a Department of Homeland Security.
In particular, the Gramm-Miller bill:
- Abandons civil rights oversight - Given the enormous potential power of the proposed agency, strong internal oversight of civil rights and privacy must be a central part of the agency. Civil rights and oversight provisions are included in both the House bill and Chairman Lieberman's substitute. Gramm-Miller abandons these provisions, and a cloture vote on Gramm-Miller could prevent a civil rights and oversight package from being added in a separate floor amendment.
- Ignores public concern over TIPS. The House bill, H.R. 5005, includes provisions barring the government from implementing a controversial neighbor-on-neighbor spying program called the Terrorism Information Prevention System (TIPS). Gramm-Miller contains no provision barring or limiting the scope of TIPS. While the Lieberman substitute also lacks a TIPS provision at the present time, a cloture vote for Gramm-Miller could prevent the TIPS issue from being addressed in a separate floor amendment.
- Limits citizen input - Advisory committees to the department the bill would create, which otherwise would include citizen input under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), would be made immune from this requirement, further undercutting the agency's accountability to the public. By contrast, the Lieberman substitute keeps this basic requirement of citizen input intact.
- Guts basic protections for abandoned non-citizen children - Gramm-Miller fails to include the basic protections for abandoned non-citizen children contained in the Lieberman substitute. While the Gramm-Miller bill includes a new office, it fails to ensure that every child has counsel and a legal guardian charged only with ensuring that child's well-being. This is critical to assuring basic due process for the most vulnerable immigrants in our country.
The Senate has taken the time to consider homeland security, which has resulted in substantial progress on the civil rights, open government and accountability issues. This progress must not be sacrificed to the desire simply to enact any bill, no matter how deficient in its protection of basic rights. We urge strong opposition to Gramm-Miller.
Sincerely,
Laura W. Murphy
Director, Washington National Office
Timothy Edgar
Legislative Counsel
Rachel King
Legislative Counsel
ENDNOTE
[1] This number is based on information about the agencies the President's plan included in the Homeland Security Department: INS has 20,000 armed federal agents, the Customs Service has 13,000, the United States Secret Service has 3,300, the Coast Guard has 36,000 employees who act in a law enforcement capacity and the FAA has 1,400. This comes to a total of 73,400 agents with federal police power.