Stamped, Sealed, & Deported

Why is the USPS involved in the immigration crackdown?

Photo by Humberto Chávez on Unsplash

The Hill’s Elizabeth Crisp reports,

House Democrats are seeking more information and a face-to-face briefing from the U.S. Postal Service about the Trump administration’s use of Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) officers to aid the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with President Trump’s immigration crackdown. … The House Oversight Democrats wrote in their letter [to postal leadership] that they want to know more about how postal workers are aiding with immigration efforts after a Postal Inspection Service officer was spotted at a recent immigration raid of a Colorado nightclub where more than 100 migrants were detained.

This USPS-DHS collaboration has been going on for at least a couple of months. According to an April report in The Washington Post by Jacob Bogage and Hannah Natanson, USPIS “recently joined a Department of Homeland Security task force geared toward finding, detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants.” At the time, it was reported that immigration officials were using outside pictures of envelopes and packages and tapping into USPIS’ broad surveillance network as part of a nationwide hunt against illegal immigrants.

Unfortunately, the USPIS has a long history of mission creep and focusing on much more than mail crime.

According to the USPIS, “We enforce more than 200 federal laws and investigate any crime that involves the mail. ... Postal Inspectors work tirelessly to protect the mail while building cases against anyone who misuses it.” If only this were true. Over the years, the USPIS has repeatedly reached beyond its mandate and gotten involved in cases far removed from stamps, envelopes, and packages. One famous example was in August of 2020, when “gun-toting members of the Postal Service’s investigator unit” arrested Trump acolyte Steve Bannon on his yacht.

Bannon and his business partners were indeed up to no good, pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars from an online crowdfunding campaign known as “We Build the Wall” after promising donors that all the money would go toward constructing a border wall. However, this fraud took place over the World Wide Web, and any connection to the USPS is far-fetched at best. It is of course possible that a few donors decided to go the old-fashioned route and mail their donations in to Bannon and company. But, this scheme promising 100 percent wall construction was 100 percent a byproduct of the digital age and really had nothing to do with the USPS.

Ditto with BitConnect, a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme in which “co-conspirators obtained approximately $2.4 billion from investors [and paid] earlier BitConnect investors with money from later investors.” The Department of Justice reported in 2021 that the USPIS was “assisting with the liquidation of the cryptocurrency proceeds,” even though the fraud was digital and far removed from the Postal Service.

Even when the USPIS does carry out mail-related enforcement, the actions reek of overreach. The USPS has jealously guarded its monopoly on first-class mail, even if that means raiding private companies for doing nothing wrong.

The USPS allows for “extremely urgent” mail to be delivered privately but interprets this niche in a very narrow way. Postal scholars J. Gregory Sidak and Daniel F. Spulber recount, “In a highly publicized incident in 1993, armed postal inspectors arrived at the Atlanta headquarters of Equifax Inc., a large credit reporting company, and demanded to know whether all the mail that it had sent by Federal Express was truly urgent.” While subsequent postmasters general have pledged not to repeat these costly raids, private companies delivering time-sensitive correspondence must now constantly watch their backs against an aggressive agency.

And, consumers must face the ever-present prospect of surveillance by the USPIS and USPS. In April 2021, Yahoo News reported that the service runs an investigation unit known as the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP; since renamed the “Analytics Team”) that spies on Americans via social media. Yahoo noted, “[t]he work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as ‘inflammatory’ postings and then sharing that information across government agencies.” The USPS and USPIS refuse to release any information about this program, despite Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the Taxpayers Protection Alliance Foundation.

The USPIS should be focused on postal crime, and agency officers must be allowed to do their jobs. Stretching agency resources paper thin to focus on the priority of the week makes everyone less safe.