Bill Kristol Is Alarmed That a President Would Ship Accused Foreign Enemies to an Overseas Prison
The hawkish defender of Guantanamo Bay and the post-9/11 security state worries President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown is threatening civil liberties.
Bill Kristol has had a change of heart. He is now opposed to the president sending alleged foreign enemies to rot in overseas prisons, and the claims of expansive executive powers and sprawling homeland security bureaucracy that enables him to do so.
"DHS [the Department of Homeland Security], it should all be defunded," Kristol said on a recent episode of The Bulwark Podcast, per Mediaite. "I've sorta come around to defunding ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] about a month or two ago. But now I'm just on the defund DHS thing."
In a follow-up social media post, he reiterated the need to dismantle DHS and return to the pre-2002 status quo, where its various component agencies—which include ICE—are run out of other departments.
My sense is that the 22 agencies that were combined into the new Department of Homeland Security in 2002 generally functioned better before the combination. Isn't it worth seriously considering whether it's time to do away with DHS and disperse its various functions back to DOJ, Treasury, etc?
— Bill Kristol (@billkristolbulwark.bsky.social) 2025-07-08T13:39:36.159Z
Kristol's recent remarks are part of a trend of increasingly alarmed comments he's made about the Trump administration's immigration crackdown.
Its deportation drive has vindicated the "abolish ICE" movement, he's said. Its use of a centuries-old law to deport alleged gang members to a Salvadoran prison is proof of its authoritarian designs.
Kristol's journey from hardline conservative hawk to the still-hawkish anti-Trump liberal is a long and well-documented one, so his unsparing critiques of the second Trump administration shouldn't be surprising per se.
What is surprising is the substance of Kristol's recent criticisms.
Kristol's break with the Trump-era foreign policy was largely in response to the president's marginally less hawkish foreign policy.
His more recent criticisms of Trump are over his methods of going after illegal immigrants and alleged gangsters—methods Kristol was in favor of when the threat of the day was Islamist terrorists.
From his perch as the founder and editor of the ultra-hawkish magazine The Weekly Standard, Kristol was an early and enthusiastic advocate of the "global war on terror" and the expanded national security state needed to fight it.
On foreign policy, that famously meant pushing America to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein. On the home front, it meant the president prosecuting the war on terror as a war and not as a "law enforcement" exercise—and all the constitutional limitations that would entail.
Terrorists were enemy combatants, not criminals, according to the Kristol-helmed Standard's editorial line.
Any suspected terrorist that ended up in U.S. custody should therefore be deprived of the normal due process protections a defendant would typically receive in the criminal justice system.
In his George W. Bush-era editorials, Kristol would repeatedly defend shipping suspected terrorists off to Guantanamo Bay, and was unsparingly critical of most any action, whether by Congress or the U.S. Supreme Court, to put legal guardrails on how long they could be held in the military prison without trial or what kinds of "enhanced interrogation" methods could be used on them there.
Kristol likewise condemned President Barack Obama's efforts to shut down the prison at Guantanamo as a dangerous public relations exercise.
Its decision to treat Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (the so-called "underwear bomber") as a criminal suspect was downright reckless, because it meant he could access a lawyer and had the right to remain silent.
When libertarians and libertarian-leaning lawmakers criticized the most lawless aspects of the war on terror, Kristol largely just rolled his eyes.
"It does no favor to the cause of conservative constitutionalism to let it become identified with pseudo-constitutionalist paranoia," he wrote in response to Sen. Rand Paul's (R–Ky.) 13-hour filibuster of John Brennan's confirmation to be CIA director in 2013. "America's got many problems, it isn't, as Paul sometimes seemed to suggest, hurtling towards tyranny."
Paul had used that filibuster to raise serious constitutional concerns presented by the Obama administration's refusal to even answer what, if any, limits it accepted on its powers to assassinate people it identified as terrorists with drones.
Contra Kristol, Reason's Nick Gillespie saw plenty of merit in that endeavor.
"By foregounding the issues of limited government, transparency, and oversight as they relate specifically to the most obvious and brazen threat to civil liberties imaginable, Rand Paul and his filibuster have also tied a direct line to a far more wide-ranging and urgently needed conversation about what sort of government we have in America - and what sort of government we should have," wrote Gillespie.
Now, 12 years later, Kristol appears to have come around on the threat posed by a president who believes himself to have the power to identify and remove threats to domestic tranquility without any legal limits.
"From its unlawful invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, to the frantic removal of these men already in custody in the United States to a brutal prison in a third country—the Trump administration had demonstrated purposeful contempt for the rule of law," he wrote in an April column. "That's no longer a hypothetical question. That future is now. The crisis is upon us. We'll be judged as a nation by how we respond."
Turns out the slope we were on in 2013 was pretty slippery after all.
While Kristol wants to abolish DHS now, it's important to point out that the Standard was never particularly hot on the idea of creating a cabinet-level homeland security department. War demanded more than reshuffling the org chart.
In a 2002 editorial, the Standard's Executive Editor Fred Barnes suggested that instead of creating DHS (which he considered a useless bureaucratic exercise), airlines should instead arm pilots, and airport security should engage in "ethnic profiling" of Arab travelers.
In this way, the Kristol-helmed Standard was proto-Trumpian. Bureaucracy was bad not because it expanded executive power, but rather because it constrained the executive's ability to respond to threats with needless process.
The use of racial profiling by immigration officers under the supervision of DHS in Los Angeles during their recent crackdowns shows that the choice between bureaucracy and racism was a false one.
It's, of course, bad form to yell at people for agreeing with you, even when they were very smugly wrong for so long.
Trump's immigration crackdown is indeed deeply concerning. Civil libertarians should applaud Kristol's belated criticism of the national security state he once aggressively advocated for. Welcome to the team, Bill.
His recent conversion to the rule of law does provide a teachable moment. No matter how important you think the current threat is, be it Al Qaeda or Tren De Aragua, you'll live long enough to regret abandoning core civil liberties to fight it.
