On January 24th, 2003, Tom Ridge was sworn into office as the first secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. In the 20 years that followed, the new department proved to be chaotic, strange, and sometimes deeply cruel — a humiliating catastrophe for the officials it employed as well as the Americans it surveilled, rescued, aided, brutalized, or patted down. 

Last year, we published an ambitious series of investigative features looking back on how the Department of Homeland Security rewrote the social contract between the government and its citizens. The Homeland series, along with its beautiful art and design, is now available for a limited time as a full-color anthology. 

From the somber and sobering reporting by Makena Kelly on the recent Afghan refugee experience and Gaby Del Valle’s dispatch from the surveillance apparatus of the border wall to Darryl Campbell’s more lighthearted (and equally maddening) history of the TSA and Sarah Jeong’s character-driven ticktock of the Portland van abductions, this volume is packed with undertold stories. Josh Dzieza’s investigative piece on the post-Hurricane Maria power crisis remains the only major feature on the subject from an English-language publication; and in asking the burning question “why does the DHS suck so much?” Amanda Chicago Lewis found a rich vein of possible answers from over a dozen former homeland security officials.

From the outset, we intended the Homeland series to feel cohesive, even beautiful. The extraordinary care placed into art direction by Kristen Radtke becomes even more apparent when bound into 160 full-color pages with original illustrations and photography. The anthology is now available for preorder in the Verge store. 

If you’ve been following Homeland throughout the year, thank you again for indulging us. For a series about bureaucratic systems and gross incompetence at a national scale, it has been quite fun, hasn’t it?

– Kevin Nguyen & Sarah Jeong