The Department of Homeland Security is a very large, very powerful federal agency. It’s also extremely secretive. Who monitors the agency and holds it accountable the actions it takes as part of its mission to protect the homeland? In this episode, Maren explains how hard it is just to access information about conditions in DHS detention facilities. She breaks down the ways agencies like DHS withhold information from the public — and how journalists and advocates fight back. And she explains how transparency has always been an issue at DHS, detailing how the post-9/11 push to create an agency dedicated to counterterrorism raised lawmakers’ concerns about accountability, civil rights, and civil liberties at its founding. 

POGO Senior Paralegal Lance Sims walks Maren through the five-year — and, at times, absurd — legal fight to get DHS to release reports documenting abuses and poor conditions in its detention centers. Former POGO Senior Researcher Freddy Martinez examines the larger pattern these reports revealed, and what that pattern indicated about systemic issues in DHS detention facilities.

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Bad Watchdog is a member of the Airwave Media network and a part of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what’s broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it.