No Safe Haven
Inside DHS’s little-known center tasked with keeping torturers, genocidaires, and human rights abusers from finding safe haven in the United States
When I meet with lawyers or human rights advocates from places such as Communist Cuba, Nicaragua, or even here in the United States who do this sort of work, we talk about how we can collaborate on cases. We talk about prisoners, about sanctions, about the long shadow of impunity.
And sometimes the conversation turns to a harder, more domestic question: what happens when the perpetrator doesn’t stay put—when the official who signed the order, the interrogator who carried it out, or the party enforcer who ruined lives decides that America looks like a comfortable place to start over? The United States has more anti-impunity tools than most people realize; what follows is a bit of background on one of the quieter, but consequential, ones.
There’s a small, relatively unknown unit inside the Department of Homeland Security that most Americans have never heard of. It doesn’t trend. It doesn’t posture. It doesn’t run on cable news oxygen. But it sits in the machinery of the federal government for one purpose that should matter to every serious country: to keep the United States from becoming a safe haven for people who committed atrocities somewhere else.
The unit is the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center (HRVWCC). It is led by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), an investigative arm within DHS that works cases with an international footprint and broad legal authorities. HSI describes itself as a federal law enforcement agency that investigates crime “on a global scale—at home, abroad and online,” and it explicitly includes “torturers and war criminals” among the categories of actors it has targeted over time.
We sometimes think of “immigration enforcement” as happening at the border or at an airport. That picture is incomplete. America’s modern immigration system, currently undergoing changes, is also a system of screening, investigation, and accountability that extends across time and jurisdictions. Among other things, it is supposed to ensure that lawful immigration is protected and that the people who exploit humanitarian pathways as cover—especially those who participated in gross human rights abuses—do not get to launder their lives through American paperwork.
Created in 2008, the HRVWCC operates as a whole-of-government effort. ICE describes it as leveraging criminal investigators, attorneys, historians, intelligence analysts, and federal partners to prevent the United States from becoming “a safe haven for individuals who commit war crimes, genocide, torture, and other human rights abuses around the globe.” It focuses on two related missions:
Identifying and pursuing human rights violators and war criminals found within U.S. jurisdiction, and
Preventing entry into the United States of known or suspected perpetrators in the first place.
