(Photo via the Dept. of Homeland Security’s Facebook)
President Donald Trump’s administration has revoked Biden-era expansions of federal protections for LGBTQ+ citizens that prohibited the Department of Homeland Security from “the surveillance of individuals or groups based solely on their sexual orientation or gender identity.”
LGBTQ Nation was among the outlets to report the news, sharing that “the move suggests that Trump may start investigating LGBTQ+ groups as a security threat.”
“Two weeks ago, the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis updated its policy manual to fall in line with President Donald Trump’s executive orders excising diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies from federal agencies and declaring there are only two immutable sexes, male and female,” they noted.
There was no press conference or declaration regarding the revoking of the order, “just a quiet edit to a government policy manual,” Space environmentalist and TED Fellow Moriba Jah pointed out via Medium. “And just like that, in the shadows of bureaucratic language, the United States took one more step toward treating queer people as security threats rather than citizens.”
These protections still exist for those identified by their race, ethnicity, sex, religion, country of birth, nationality, or disability. Sexual orientation and gender identity, both added by former President Joe Biden’s administration, are no longer listed alongside these other protected groups.
Jah also noted that the revoking of these protections was not a clerical error, but “a direct invitation for intelligence agencies to resume treating LGBTQ+ people as potential threats.” They additionally highlighted the Trump administration’s lack of action regarding far-right extremist groups and mass shootings as domestic security threats, along with past federal regulations allowing for LGBTQ+ Americans to be discriminated against under the guise of threatening national security dating back to the 1950s.
For the still protected groups, surveillance “is permitted only in combination with other information, and only where (1) intended and reasonably believed to support one or more of [Intelligence and Analysis’] national or departmental missions and (2) narrowly focused in support of that mission (or those missions),” they shared.
Trump’s executive order that prompted DHS to update their documentation was signed on his first day in office, just as Biden wrote the order adding them on his first. Biden’s executive order was declared “the most substantive, wide-ranging executive order concerning sexual orientation and gender identity ever issued by a United States president,” shared the Human Rights Campaign at the time.
The same executive order protected LGBTQ+ people from discrimination in healthcare, employment, education and housing. The order was said to have changed “the lives of the millions of LGBTQ people seeking to be treated equally under the law,” and made “discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity… not only intolerable but illegal,” HRC added.
The Office of Intelligence and Analysis is the only organization in the American intelligence community “statutorily charged with delivering intelligence to our State, Local, Tribal and Territorial (SLTT) and private sector partners, and developing intelligence from those partners for the Department and the [intelligence community],” as described by the Department of Homeland Security. With this responsibility, the Office is tasked “to identify and mitigate threats to the homeland,” with the intention “to keep the Homeland safe, secure, and resilient,” states the DHS.
However, the Office of Intelligence and Analysis does not have a clean background in doing so. The Office has committed several human and civil rights violations such as “interviews with people held in jails without sufficient constitutional protections, targeted journalists and activists protesting local monuments under the guise of homeland security, surveilled racial justice demonstrators, and monitored political views shared by millions of Americans — about topics like abortion, government, and elections — that DHS baldly asserts will lead to violence,” the Brennan Center for Justice found.
