So I came across a story on Facebook last night and I wanted to share what I found out.

A thread follows.

So I was sent this post on Facebook. I've cut out the name of the person who posted it because that's not necessary here. And it contains a misnomer, but we can overlook that. It raised an eyebrow.

So, the "Black River" in the post is supposed to be Blackwater, a private military company (read: Mercenaries) founded by former Navy Lieutenant and SEAL, Erik Prince - the brother of the current Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos. So at least that part is true.

However, Prince is no longer the CEO of the company. He stepped down as the CEO in 2009 and resigned from the Board in 2010 when the company was sold to a private equity firm. I expect, though, that he still owns interest in the company, though it being private, I don't know.

Moving on. The men we keep seeing in the green-ish camo in Portland are part of the Federal Protective Service, which falls under DHS. They are tasked with the protection and enforcement of law inside government owned or leased buildings.

However, most of the people paid by the FPS aren't government employees. They are, in fact, contractors. The FPS only has 900 LEO's on the payroll, but contract another 13,000 from companies such as Triple Canopy - which is owned by the same company that owns Blackwater.

Since many of you have been contractors before (like a temp in an office), you know that most contractors still have to follow company guidelines to get hired. That isn't true for this type of work.

In fact, investigations have found that some employees of companies like Triple Canopy and Blackwater have criminals records that would exclude them from consideration for most government or law enforcement jobs.

It's also worth mentioning that their typical mandate would be to protect building and act as security. They aren't trained in crowd control or de-escalation. They are trained to keep people out of a building who aren't supposed to be there.

The protection mandate should end at the property line, though since DHS has the authority to use FPS as it sees fit, they feel like they can be deployed as local law enforcement to break up riots NOT on Federal land.

This should scare all of us. It means that an organization that believes as Trump does, and who feels it has unlimited law enforcement capability, can deploy thousands of questionably-trained private contractors in any city with a Federal Building. We need to restructure DHS.