While fentanyl was killing Americans and millions of migrants poured across the southern border, Biden's Department of Homeland Security had its calendar full — just not with anything resembling homeland security. FOIA documents obtained by the Center to Advance Security in America show DHS components scheduling bisexual forums, pansexual discussions, and LGBTQ video watch parties at federal law enforcement training centers, all during government working hours.
The 20-page June 2023 calendar, obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation, lays out the priorities of a bureaucracy that had lost the plot. FEMA Pride scheduled a "Bisexual and Pansexual Forum" for June 13, 2023, from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. A transgender and gender-nonconforming forum followed on June 20, an intersex forum on June 22, and an asexual forum on June 27 — all afternoon events on the taxpayer dime. The Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, where agents who patrol the border are trained, planned a June 27 video watch party at 11:00 a.m. featuring "A Living History of the LGBT Movement Since the 1800s" and "LGBTQ+ 101: An introduction to Queer community."
At DHS headquarters, then-Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Deputy Secretary John Tien attended a Pride flag-raising ceremony on June 2. Mayorkas marked the occasion on social media, posting that the flag was a "symbol of our commitment to stand with our LGBTQ+ colleagues and the community with pride." The Secret Service and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services also scheduled a June 7 program featuring a speaker described as the first intersex and transgender graduate of the Secret Service's Law Enforcement Officer Academy.
James Fitzpatrick, director of CASA, told the Daily Caller: "The Biden DHS failed the country in many ways, and part of the reason for its failure was its focus on non-mission-oriented activities such as these." He's right. The same department that couldn't keep fentanyl out of American communities or process migrants in any orderly fashion found the hours to host forums on pansexuality and asexuality.
Trump moved to dismantle these programs on his first day back in office, directing agencies to terminate DEI programs on January 20, 2025. The Office of Personnel Management followed up the next day, ordering agencies to close DEIA offices and cancel related training. The Daily Caller asked DHS whether it discontinued the Biden-era Pride programming, whether similar events occurred in 2025 or 2026, and what policy changes were implemented. DHS did not respond. FEMA and OPM also declined to comment.
HotAir, covering a separate story about Americans who fled the country after Trump's return only to regret life overseas, highlighted one expatriate who discovered that "the quality of life is significantly lower than in the US" — a useful reminder that the same crowd that ran government agencies as Pride event planners also sold Americans on the idea that everywhere else was better.
The open question remains: who inside DHS greenlit this calendar, who signed off on using law enforcement training hours for queer identity seminars, and has anyone in the bureaucracy been held to account for misallocating resources while the border collapsed?
