by J. David McSwane and Hannah Allam

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On Feb. 10, more than a dozen Department of Homeland Security officials joined a video conference to discuss an obscure, sparsely funded program overseen by its Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. The office, charged with investigating when the national security agency is accused of violating the rights of both immigrants and U.S. citizens, had found itself in the crosshairs of Elon Musk’s secretive Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

It began as a typical briefing, with Homeland Security officials explaining to DOGE a program many describe as a win-win. It had provided some $20 million in recent years to local organizations that provide case workers to keep people in immigration proceedings showing up to court, staff explained, without expensive detentions and ankle monitors.

DOGE leader Kyle Schutt, a technology executive who developed a GOP online fundraising platform, interrupted. He wanted Joseph Mazzara, DHS’s acting general counsel, to weigh in. Mazzara was recently appointed to the post after working for Ken Paxton as both an assistant solicitor general and member of the Texas attorney general’s defense team that beat back public corruption charges.

Schutt had a different interpretation of the program, according to people who attended or were briefed on the meeting.

“This whole program sounds like money laundering,” he said.

Mazzara went further. His facial expressions, his use of profanity and the way he combed his fingers through his hair made clear he was annoyed.

“We should look into civil RICO charges,” Mazzara said.

DHS staff was stunned. The program had been mandated by Congress, yet Homeland Security’s top lawyer was saying it could be investigated under a law reserved for organized crime syndicates.

“I took it as a threat,” one attendee said. “It was traumatizing.”

For many in the office, known internally as CRCL, that moment was a dark forecast of the future. Several said they scrambled to try to fend off the mass firings they were seeing across the rest of President Donald Trump’s administration. They policed language that Trump’s appointees might not like. They hesitated to open complaints on hot-button cases. They reframed their work as less about protecting civil rights and more about keeping the department out of legal trouble.

None of it worked. On March 21, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem shut down the office and fired most of the 150-person staff. As a result, about 600 civil rights abuse investigations were frozen.

“All the oversight in DHS was eliminated today,” one worker texted after the announcement that they’d been fired.

Eight former CRCL officials spoke with ProPublica about the dismantling of the office on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution. Their accounts come at a time when the new administration’s move to weaken oversight of federal agencies has faced legal challenges in the federal courts. In defending its move to shut CRCL, the administration said it was streamlining operations, as........

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