This article first appeared in Slate.
President-elect Donald Trump has threatened to implement a slate of controversial policies in his second term, including military strikes on Mexican drug cartels, restrictions on abortion pills, a new “Muslim ban,” immigration raids, and mass deportations. Any one of these moves is likely to bring tens of thousands of protesters onto the streets. Trump has made it clear he will meet opposition with force. A major player in that crackdown will be the Federal Protective Service, a little-known but powerful law-enforcement agency that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 identifies as key to quashing dissent. Congress, as well as state and local authorities, must act urgently to prevent its weaponization against the president’s political opponents.
The FPS is part of the Department of Homeland Security. Its officers carry guns and make arrests just like other police—with the difference being that Congress has empowered the agency to bring in additional forces from among the department’s 90,000 other law-enforcement officers. The homeland security secretary can assign those officers to work directly for the FPS at a moment’s notice, augmenting its police force with huge numbers of personnel who have received little more than cursory training to execute domestic law-enforcement functions.
The agency was at the heart of the heavy-handed response to racial-justice demonstrations in Portland, Oregon, in 2020, when the first Trump administration sent hundreds of officers—including 300 Border Patrol special forces agents—to suppress crowds engaged in largely peaceful protests protected by the U.S. Constitution. Instead of leaving local police to deal with any trouble, federal officers shoved protesters into unmarked vans, compiled dossiers on individuals to drive potential prosecutions, spied on journalists, and took to the nightly news to attack the protests.
In 2020 I was a DHS attorney. I advised the department’s intelligence officers who operated in Portland and participated in internal postmortem reviews that identified how politicized targeting and chaotic processes invited abuse. Regrettably, nothing has changed at the FPS in the past four years to prevent abuses like these from recurring, as I wrote in a recent report for the Brennan Center for Justice.
The FPS’s core mission is a far cry from what happened in Portland. Its basic job is to guard thousands of federal buildings, including courthouses and agencies that provide Social Security benefits, housing, and other governmental services. Millions of people access and work in these buildings daily. They deserve to do so safely.
But a post–Sept. 11 reorganization pushed the agency well beyond that security mandate and laid the groundwork for abuse. The 2002 Homeland Security Act authorized its officers to work off-site to the extent “necessary” to protect federal property but did not define that term. Weak internal safeguards have led to sweeping off-site operations. The secretary of homeland security can also direct the agency to take actions “for the promotion of homeland security,” giving officials wide latitude to determine what those actions might be.
The 2020 Portland operation was not the only time the Federal Protective Service has targeted Americans for exercising their First Amendment rights. In 2015, too, the agency sent hundreds of federal officers into Baltimore to police Black Lives Matter demonstrators and, years later, arrested and threatened to criminally charge a Texas woman who criticized the overturning of Roe v. Wade on social media. The agency has routinely monitored political views expressed online and people planning political events that lacked any plausible connection to federal property, from Occupy Wall Street protests in New York to anti-vaccine truckers to recent protests over the war in Gaza on college campuses. The agency often relies on secretive intelligence contractors to do this work.
In Trump’s second term, we’re likely to see much more of this kind of activity. Indeed, Project 2025 calls on Trump to make the FPS directly responsive to the DHS’s political leadership, a dictate that would leave the agency even more vulnerable to weaponization.
The federal government can take immediate steps to protect against overreach. Before its current term runs out, Congress should prohibit the use of specialized police like Border Patrol for domestic law enforcement. Border special forces simply do not belong on American streets policing protesters. Congress should also eliminate the authority to deploy the FPS in undefined activities for the “promotion” of homeland security—an open-ended, easily abused power. And the Biden administration should promptly release all policies and guidance governing the agency’s operations to help the public understand what the coming months will bring.
Cities and states have a critical role to play as well. The Department of Homeland Security often supercharges its sweeping law-enforcement operations by tapping into state and local resources, such as databases, intelligence facilities, and personnel. To protect constituents, elected leaders should enact laws limiting such cooperation. The Brennan Center has developed a set of principles for state and local governments to adopt, which can serve as a starting point for such efforts.
The Federal Protective Service has an important mission to safeguard governmental facilities, but it is also a proven tool for politically driven targeting. Trump has promised to go after his “enemies from within” and praised police crackdowns on dissent. A broad mandate and lack of meaningful safeguards at the FPS will position the agency to take a leading role. Serious change is overdue.
