The Department of Homeland Security is redesigning its official seal so the national eagle turns toward war rather than peace, alarming critics.
In a Tuesday report, journalist Ken Klippenstein flagged the change after DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin defended the switch in a weekend Fox News interview.
On the current seal, the eagle faces the olive branch clutched in one talon. Mullin now wants it to face the arrows gripped in the other, and he said the new posture is deliberate.
“We’re actually changing our seal to make it look towards the arrows because…when it looks towards the arrows is when it means we’re at war,” Mullin told Fox News. He said Homeland Security is at war every day against bad actors trying to hurt American communities, according to Klippenstein.
“So in other words, the United States is at war here at home — but Iran somehow isn’t a war. What?” Klippenstein wrote, referring to a reluctance by some in the Trump administration, including Vice President JD Vance, to call the war in Iran a war. “There’s something very creepy about our government seeing America as a battlefield in ways it doesn’t even see overseas.”
Klippenstein noted that no federal agency has depicted the eagle in a wartime stance since World War II. He added that even the seals adopted after the September 11 attacks kept the bird facing the olive branch. President Harry Truman codified the peacetime design in 1945 to signal a new era of peace after Japan surrendered, according to Klippenstein.
Immigration policy analyst Aaron Reichlin-Melnick was similarly alarmed by the redesign and added context by pointing out recent actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency overseen by DHS.
“The Trump admin declares war on American communities,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote on X. “Secretary Mullin says DHS is ‘at war,’ so he’s changing The Great Seal. This comes after dozens of people died in ICE custody and ICE officers have shot and killed multiple people this year, including two American citizens.”
Klippenstein tied the seal change to a wide federal effort to surveil and prosecute Americans over their speech. He pointed to a Trump memorandum signed last September that orders agencies to disrupt organized political violence. He wrote that FBI officials have described repurposing tactics once aimed at Iran and turning them on domestic targets.
The post DHS chief turns agency seal toward war in ‘very creepy’ new seal: analysis appeared first on Raw Story.
