DHS administering lie detector tests to employees in effort to find leakers

The Department of Homeland Security is administering polygraph tests to its personnel to determine who may be leaking information to the media about its ongoing immigration raids, an agency spokesperson confirmed to CBS News Saturday.  

On Feb. 18, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said DHS would start polygraphing employees in order to crack down on these leaks.

In a video posted to social media Friday, Noem wrote that the department had “identified two leakers of information here at the Department of Homeland Security who have been telling individuals about our operations and putting law enforcement lives in jeopardy. We plan to prosecute these two individuals and hold them accountable for what they’ve done.” 

The polygraph tests have been taking place for about three weeks, the DHS spokesperson told CBS News. It’s unclear how many employees have undergone them.

Since January, the White House has been aggressive in its efforts to fulfill President Trump’s campaign vow of cracking down on illegal immigration and enacting mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is under DHS and is tasked with overseeing immigration arrests and deportations in the interior of the country, has conducted raids across the nation, resulting in thousands of arrests. Noem announced last week that more than 20,000 undocumented immigrants were arrested by ICE during the month of February.

Several other agencies — including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Drug Enforcement Administration — have been asked to provide personnel to help bolster this effort.

The Trump administration also lifted a Biden-era policy which had restricted immigration agents from making immigration arrests near schools, places of worship and other sensitive locations. That policy is facing legal challenges.

In late January, Noem told CBS News that ICE’s filming and publicizing of its immigration raids was an “accountability measure.”

“It’s not a spectacle,” Noem said. “This is our nation’s law enforcement — judicial process. The scales of justice are equally applied to everybody. We want transparency on this. I believe that this is an accountability measure.”

contributed to this report.