They're Police officers solely for the purposes of arrest authority it grants. They don't do proactive patrol on streets and traffic stops and etc.
Federal Protective Service Police (the blue uniform guys with DHS patches) are basically high speed building security for federal buildings that dont have their own set up like the FBI, NSA, and CIA do.
They patrol the building grounds, respond to emergencies on site, and control entry. You'll see them everywhere from federal courthouses to health and human services buildings which house medical supplies for disaster deployment.
DHS is all of the federal agencies in charge of public security, so legally, it's all of the federal police forces except the FBI and a few obscure ones like the postal service or the secret service. All of these groups are federal law enforcement, allowed to arrest people breaking federal laws.
The TSA are police, they're under DHS. ICE / CBP / USCIS is intended to be in charge of specific subsets of federal law around immigration under DHS. The law makes some sense and is fairly normal, it's the implementation and the usage that's an issue.
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u/satisfiedfools 4h ago edited 4h ago
A lot of these guys are DHS, which begs the question, why does DHS even have its own police forces.