Since it was established to "prevent terrorist attacks within the United States," the DHS has grown from a post-9/11 knee-jerk reaction to a leviathan with tentacles in every aspect of American life, stresses John W. Whitehead in his article "Has the Department of Homeland Security Become America’s Standing Army?" As a national police force, the DHS demonstrates all the brutality, ineptitude and corruption such a role implies, notes the author and calls for the abolishment of the department. He points out facts and figures, unmasking an excessive concentration of power that the DHS has gained in the past 12 years.

According to the attorney's list, the DHS is militarizing local police departments and organizing SWAT teams handing out "six-figure grants" to purchase military-style vehicles, bomb-disarming robots, assault weapons and combat uniforms. Mr. Whitehead emphasizes an increased tendency on the part of police to shoot first and ask questions later, as if citizens were the enemy.

The author notes, that at the same time the DHS has been stockpiling an alarming amount of ammunition in recent years. It has already bought 1.6 billion rounds, "enough, to sustain a hot war for 20+ years," according to Forbes.

Furthermore, the DHS is at the forefront of funding and deploying surveillance robots and drones for land, sea and air. Turning a deaf ear to the repeated concerns over the threat surveillance drones pose to American privacy rights, the DHS goes on expanding its exploitation of Predator UAVs, equipped with numerous sensors, radar and video cameras. Besides that, the DHS conductswidespread spying activities using so-called "fusion centers." These are collecting and cataloguing various data, including users' internet activity, web searches, text messages, phone calls and emails. The data is then redistributed to government agencies. The author points to the DHS's infamous reports on Right and Leftwing "Extremism," and another entitled Operation Vigilant Eagle, outlining a surveillance program targeting veterans, released in 2009. In 2013, it was revealed that the DHS, the FBI, state and local law enforcement agencies, and the private sector were working together to conduct nationwide surveillance on protesters' First Amendment activities, the constitutional attorney adds.

John W. Whitehead also mentions that in 2006 the DHS got a $385 million contract to build detention centers in the the United States for cases described as "an emergency influx of immigrants," or "a support to the rapid development of new programs." The constitutional attorney believes that such an initiative may be aimed against American citizens, "viewed in conjunction with NDAA provision allowing the military to arrest and indefinitely detain anyone".

"This, too, is nothing new," concludes John W. Whitehead, "Historically, as I show in my book 'A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State,' the establishment of a national police force has served as a fundamental and final building block for every totalitarian regime that has ever wreaked havoc on humanity, from Hitler’s all-too-real Nazi Germany to George Orwell’s fictional Oceania. Whether fictional or historical, however, the calling cards of these national police agencies remain the same: brutality, inhumanity, corruption, intolerance, rigidity, and bureaucracy—in other words, evil."