Like his new boss, Donald Trump, Kelly has railed against the media. These self-proclaimed experts always seem to know better, but have never themselves been in the arena. Retired Marine Gen. John F. Veterans Day Speech John F. Official Biography Department of Defense. Jeh C. He was confirmed by the Senate for the post December 16, Johnson whose first name is pronounced Jay was born in New York City on September 11, , and grew up in Wappingers Falls, New York, living across the street from the woman who would eventually become his wife, dentist Susan DiMarco.
He graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta in and received his law degree from Columbia University in While he was an undergraduate, he was a summer intern for Sen. Johnson started his career in at the law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, but in , he joined the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison.
Johnson would move back and forth between that firm and government service right up to his appointment as DHS secretary. His first move into government service came in , when he became an assistant U. During his stint in the U. Johnson returned to Paul Weiss in He had many more successes during his stints with the firm, however. He won while defending flooring company Armstrong World Industries in an anti-trust suit and successfully defended Citigroup and Salomon Smith Barney against claims.
He served in that post until when, with the arrival of the George W. Bush administration, Johnson returned to Paul Weiss. He remained there until , but did work in as a campaign advisor to then-Sen. John Kerry D-Massachusetts in his run for the presidency.
In addition, he was a major bundler of campaign funds in that race. Congress took its recommendations to heart and now gays may serve openly in the armed forces. Armies have been doing this for thousands of years. As part of a congressionally authorized armed conflict, the foundation is even stronger. Furthermore, the parameters of congressionally authorized armed conflict are transparent to the public, from the words of the congressional authorization itself, and the Executive Branch's interpretation of that authorization, which this Administration has made public.
At the end of , Johnson left government service, returning once again to Paul Weiss. Johnson, at one time president of historically black Fisk University. The elder Johnson was sent to Liberia on a fact-finding mission for the League of Nations. While there, he met a tribal chief whom he admired and named one of his sons for him. That son was Jeh Johnson Sr. Johnson was reprimanded over the incident.
Official Biography. Nomination of Hon. Johnson to be Secretary, U. Department of Homeland Security U. Main Menu.
Department of Homeland Security. History: The terrorist attacks on Sept. Exactly one month after the attacks, Sen. The Bush administration rejected the idea, but Democratic members of the Senate continued to press it. Finally, in June , more than seven months after the initial proposal, President Bush reversed his stand. In creating DHS, some agencies maintained their name and missions, while others ceased to exist and their duties were distributed among new DHS units.
Altogether, the missions of 22 federal offices were either shifted or folded into DHS. The responsibilities of many DHS offices were to prepare for future terrorist attacks in order to minimize the impact of such assaults.
When the hurricane slammed into the Gulf Coast, it caused catastrophic damage to the city of New Orleans. Almost 1, people died and thousands of others were left stranded with no help for days following the storm. Media reports repeatedly showed residents stranded on rooftops while looting and mayhem occurred in areas throughout the city, including the Superdome where thousands of refugees had sought shelter from the hurricane.
A short time later, Brown was forced to resign. The bungling of the crisis proved to be one of the largest political failures of the Bush administration. Numerous investigations were launched to determine why FEMA had performed so poorly. Congress adopted legislation, the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act , which reorganized FEMA in order to make the agency more capable of handling future disasters, either natural or man-made.
Orszag, Los Angeles Times. How Reliable Is Brown's Resume? What it Does: The Department of Homeland Security is responsible for ensuring the safety and security of the United States from both man-made and natural disasters. A visit to the DHS web site clearly demonstrates that the department is still fixated on terrorism. It provides research, resources and technology to federal, state, local and tribal officials, emergency personnel, Border Patrol Agents, Federal Air Marshals and airport baggage screeners in order for them to handle CBRNE attacks.
DNDO finances the creation of radiation detection equipment and tests its effectiveness before providing it to customs officials, border guards and Coast Guard sailors. FEMA is charged with providing help to local and state governments and residents both immediately following a disaster and in the longer term.
It also conducts programs to help prepare for disasters. The kinds of assistance FEMA provides ranges from advising on building codes and flood plain management to helping equip local and state emergency agencies to coordinating the federal response to a disaster.
Federal Law Enforcement Training Center: FLETC is the largest training program of its kind in the country, providing teaching and vocational instruction to a wide range of law enforcement and security personnel at the federal, state and local government level.
Graduating approximately 50, students annually, FLETC helps to train officers and agents from more than 80 federal agencies, as well as numerous state and local governments. The center also trains international police in selected advanced programs. The remaining instructors are federal officers and investigators on short-term assignment from their parent organizations or recently retired from the field. Training programs offered by FLETC vary from core instruction required by many government agencies to highly specialized training for select security officials.
Office of Infrastructure Protection: OIP helps secure key buildings and other structures across the United States from terrorist attack.
OIP is not directly responsible for guarding private and public infrastructure but rather is tasked with identifying important locations and assessing their vulnerability to attack or other dangers, such as natural disasters. Office of Intelligence and Analysis: OIA serves as the intelligence wing of DHS, gathering intelligence from other government and non-government sources on potential threats to US domestic security.
OIA works with members of the Intelligence Community, as well as state, local, federal and private officials, to carry out its mission. Specifically, it safeguards airports and airplanes, mass-transit systems, highways, seaports, railroads and buses. Americans are most familiar with TSA personnel who man security checkpoints at airports throughout the country. During its brief existence, TSA has been inundated with charges of ineptitude and corruption. ICE enforces both immigration and customs laws, which involves going after illegal immigrants in US territory, employers who hire illegal immigrants and those trying to smuggle goods or contraband into the country.
Another priority for ICE is to prevent terrorist groups and hostile nations from illegally obtaining US military weapons and sensitive technology, including weapons of mass destruction components.
US Citizenship and Immigration Services: USCIS handles all matters pertaining to immigration and the granting of citizenship to non-nationals, having taken over the responsibilities of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service. Bush 11 days after the September 11, , terrorist attack. Department of Defense under President Harry Truman. In , under Secretary Michael Chertoff, the department underwent changes to improve efficiency.
According to the Department of Homeland Security's official website, the department's mission is as follows:. Three key concepts form the foundation of our national homeland security strategy designed to achieve this vision:.
In turn, these key concepts drive broad areas of activity that the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review QHSR process defines as homeland security missions.
These missions are enterprise-wide, and not limited to the Department of Homeland Security. These missions and their associated goals and objectives tell us in detail what it means to prevent, to protect, to respond, and to recover, as well as to build in security, to ensure resilience, and to facilitate customs and exchange. Hundreds of thousands of people from across the federal government, state, local, tribal, and territorial governments, the private sector, and other nongovernmental organizations are responsible for executing these missions.
These homeland security professionals must have a clear sense of what it takes to achieve the overarching vision articulated above.
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Islamic State and terrorism. DHS should continue to facilitate lawful international trade and travel, ensure that U. S waterways and maritime resources. This includes border management issues, where the focus should be more on facilitating safe and secure travel and commerce to ensure that businesses get the goods and workers they need, visitors are able to travel safely and efficiently, and families can be reunited more quickly.
DHS should invest in innovation and first-rate customer service approaches that allow the department to secure our air, land, and sea borders while providing a welcoming and dignified experience. To put America on the strongest foundation, DHS should emphasize its unique role in welcoming the people who visit, immigrate to, or seek refuge in the United States.
First, DHS should adopt a service-oriented approach to citizenship and immigration services that is welcoming to immigrants and the U. It should also prioritize reducing the backlog of visa applications accumulated under the Trump administration. Second, DHS should recalibrate its activities at the border to emphasize efficient and secure management of the flow of goods and people while welcoming asylum-seekers with a safe, legal, and orderly process for them to seek refuge in America; to rehabilitate its relationships in border communities; and to work to create a vibrant border region.
Recognizing that screening remains a key safety component, a better-managed system would increase the capacity of DHS to process and screen applicants for family, employment, and visitor visas; to reduce processing time and delays; and to provide more reliable and dignified services.
A better-managed system would also plan for shifting flows of migrants and asylum-seekers at the border, anticipate the infrastructure needed to safely and humanely process and screen them, and cultivate a welcoming culture of front-line service agents. DHS also has a traditional role in disaster relief services that should be expanded. DHS should work toward expanding existing capacity and investing in new, flexible headquarters and regional capabilities that can address a wide range of emergencies and situations.
As extreme weather events and changing environments become more common, DHS should quarterback incident response, leading coordination with state and local officials, leveraging its flexible and responsive capabilities, and drawing on capacity within other federal departments and agencies. This approach should apply for other national incidents and emergencies as well. FEMA recently covered DHS logos on vehicles used for vaccine distribution after concerns that the urban community it was targeting would refuse services from the department.
DHS currently protects 16 critical infrastructure sectors whose networks and systems are deemed crucial to U. Cybersecurity now demands a whole-of-government solution to protect national security, critical infrastructure, intellectual property, and sensitive personal information.
Given these demands, DHS will be relied upon to bridge the gap between public and privately owned infrastructure and ensure that federal protection efforts can effectively extend to all sectors and are executed with strong civil liberties and privacy protections in place. DHS could have played a larger role in responding to the severe winter storms that crippled the electrical grid in Texas in early FEMA declared an emergency and allowed Texans to apply for federal assistance for storm recovery, 71 but a more proactive response—with better cooperation at the state and local level—might have prevented such severe destruction from occurring in the first place.
An expanded DHS role might focus on planned disaster response and preparedness as expectations for climate-related disasters increase. DHS is best positioned among the federal bureaucracy to cross the private-public divide at the state and local level to help municipalities mitigate anticipated climate effects. DHS could also develop better warning and prediction systems that enable a more proactive federal response and assistance presence. DHS should maintain its core objective of securely, efficiently, humanely managing our air, land, and maritime borders.
CBP, under DHS, is charged with functions that range from countering terrorism, securing the border, and facilitating trade and travel. ICE is charged with enforcing immigration laws and investigating the illegal movement of people and goods. These agencies—especially CBP and ICE—center their focus and activities around the law enforcement aspects of their functions.
But viewing immigration law violations, which are often civil in nature, through a punitive lens has resulted in a heavy-handed approach at the border and in the interior. It has also warped the public perception of migrants as well as the political debate about immigration policy and has sidelined the service provider components of DHS which encompass the equally important mission of facilitating travel, trade, and administration of immigration benefits.
Even more so, the Border Patrol has a significant deficit of trust to make up in border communities, which in turn has led to morale issues within the rank and file and resistance to policy changes. Service orientation and safety need not be in tension; the Coast Guard provides a good model for how the two can be well balanced within a single organization.
To bring its law enforcement and service provision roles into similar balance, CBP must understand and embrace its important role in providing service to asylum-seekers at the border.
Working to recruit and train CBP agents with the tools to excel at working with populations seeking protection will help create the foundations for a shift in cultural norms. Though it will be hard, the potential outcome would be well worth the effort; the entire system would start moving toward being more fair, humane, and workable.
CBP would still retain its law enforcement functions, but it would operate with a better understanding of the broader agenda—as well as the border communities—it serves.
A well-managed border will be safe and secure while also efficiently offering different services needed to travel, trade, or seek asylum in the United States. In achieving this recalibration toward a safety and services model, the two biggest components of CBP—the Office of Field Operations OFO , staffing ports of entry, and the Border Patrol, securing the border between ports—should be merged into one integrated entity focused on border management.
Their combined mission would include traditional security components; facilitating the movement of goods and people to grow binational economies; upholding U.
The way the current Coast Guard balances its enforcement and service mission is commendable and could serve as a guide to recalibrating border management. While the Coast Guard plays an important role in maritime security and maritime law enforcement efforts, it is also responsible for—and takes great pride in—search and rescue and disaster relief efforts.
Balancing these missions effectively ensures that the Coast Guard can play a vital role in combating terrorism and interdicting drug trafficking while also leading efforts to save people, as it did during the deadly hurricanes in in Puerto Rico and the U. Virgin Islands. DHS still has an important role to play in preventing attacks against the United States and Americans at home and abroad.
But the prevention mission must focus on the increasing prevalence of domestic challenges and borderless threats, including white supremacist-fueled domestic extremism, natural disasters, and cyberattacks, as well as external threats. DHS should narrow the scope of its prevention activities to focus its efforts where DHS has sole or unique responsibilities such as in lawful screening and vetting of travelers and goods that cross U.
To avoid duplicating the leading role of the FBI and NCTC, DHS should reduce its investigative activities and narrow the focus of its counterterrorism intelligence analysis, as described more fully below. As discussed above, broad interpretation of DHS authorities by former department officials has led to questionable activities and occasions of abuse or violations, particularly in the immigration space.
Future enforcement activities need to be balanced within broader department goals of safety and service and focused exclusively where DHS is the lead actor rather than in areas in which other federal agencies—such as, for example, the DOJ—play a leading role.
While the department must continue its efforts to enforce U. A limited law and immigration enforcement role would focus DHS enforcement activities only on areas where they assist the support and services model and where other federal agencies and bureaucracies do not have a leading role to play.
Border Patrol agents, for example, would be focused on addressing border issues rather than being deployed in places such as Portland as Federal Protective Service FPS personnel. Likewise, the merging of the OFO and the Border Patrol would help to ensure effective border management that does more to help border communities, businesses, families, visitors, and those seeking refuge here, even as it continues to ensure a secure border.
Department leadership should work to clearly set limits on enforcement activities and constrain them appropriately to ensure past mistakes and abuses are not repeated and work with Congress to codify these restrictions. With the premise that DHS should recalibrate toward a safety and services model, and that DHS should focus on the things that it is best capable of doing, this study distinguishes between two types of law enforcement functions: law enforcement functions that enable a safety and services model to operate and those for which law enforcement is the primary focus.
CAP concludes that DHS components that are primarily or exclusively focused on enforcing federal laws do not belong in a reimagined DHS and should be transferred to other federal departments. Some law enforcement functions are compatible with a safety and services model at DHS. These law enforcement roles enable the safety and services model to operate. The Coast Guard provides perhaps the best example, balancing its search and rescue missions with its clear and tailored drug and migrant interdiction roles.
CBP and the TSA are primarily focused on enabling the safe and secure movement of goods and people and have narrow law enforcement roles that enable these primary missions.
CBP focuses on keeping terrorists and their weapons out of the United States while facilitating lawful travel and trade. Even the Secret Service, which focuses largely on protecting elected leaders, plays an important role in ensuring public safety at National Special Security Events, playing a safety and services role that is critical to working with local communities across the nation on events of critical or high-visibility importance.
The FPS protects federal facilities, their occupants, and visitors by providing law enforcement and protective security services. While it is beyond the scope of this report to detail where every subcomponent within DHS belongs, components that are primarily focused on investigating violations of federal laws should most naturally live within the FBI, the lead agency charged with investigating criminal activity.
Likewise, while CAP has long argued that the nation should move away from a system based on large-scale immigration detention and toward alternatives such as community supervision, 80 for the limited immigration detention that would remain, it would be more effective to have this function merged with, for example, the Bureau of Prisons BOP , also under the DOJ.
Had these functions been merged under the BOP when the Obama administration announced that it would end the use of private prisons in DOJ facilities, 81 it would have likely meant a similar end to some of the most problematic facilities in the immigration context as well.
CAP recommends that DHS components that are primarily or exclusively focused on enforcing federal laws should be transferred to other federal departments. The Biden administration and Congress have the opportunity to transform DHS into an agency that provides much greater value to the American people and those who visit or seek safety or opportunity here.
The current administration and Congress will need to work together for longer-term changes to institutionalize reforms. But with shared objectives in gaining a more effective agency that can deliver for and to the American people, it can be done. This recalibration of department activities will better fulfill the unmet needs of Americans and those who live, study, work, travel, and seek safety here.
It will also put the department and its workforce in a better position to focus on the needs that only DHS can meet given its flexible authorities and unique capacity to respond to a range of issues that fall between the gaps of responsibilities of other federal departments and agencies.
This study makes the case that DHS should be more active in the areas where it is the most effective player within the federal bureaucracy and less so where its efforts are duplicative of other agencies. The current administration should evaluate how much of this realignment can be done within existing statutory functions and what requires congressional assistance and legislation.
To effectively manage the bureaucracy and oversee the recalibration of the department mission, the Biden administration should work with Congress to increase resources to the DHS secretary and move away from the hyperdecentralization that characterizes its current structure. As the department expands what it means to keep the nation secure, DHS should reimagine its role in protecting personal information and privacy. At a minimum, this would mean elevating the CRCL officer—even while remaining operationally independent to oversee complaints related to civil rights and civil liberties—to an assistant secretary level, with a seat at the management table, to be able to more directly influence agencywide decision-making.
A more ambitious approach would involve making the protection of personal information and privacy a core DHS mission, assigning DHS the lead federal agency for protecting the privacy of U. Efforts are underway to improve departmentwide workforce satisfaction, measured through yearly index scores such as the inclusion and employee engagement indexes. This initiative would be part of efforts to develop a pipeline of leaders, encourage creativity and innovation, and drive a cultural shift within the department toward its new service-oriented framework.
The initiative should consider what changes might be needed in human capital and launch programs to realign the future workforce accordingly. For example, CBP could greatly benefit from specialized training of its Border Patrol agents to initiate a cultural change of its workforce and prepare them to handle asylum-seekers at the border humanely and fairly.
At the same time, DHS should step back from roles where it is neither needed nor best suited. DHS should reduce its counterterrorism investigative and intelligence analysis activities, as described below, and focus its efforts where it has unique responsibilities and authorities: managing the border, countering disinformation, countering violent white supremacy, and investing in evidence-based prevention approaches. While DHS can contribute to efforts to thwart organized crime and bring criminal actors to justice, the DOJ should continue to serve as the lead federal agency for TOC.
It should invest its unique capacity to analyze and contextualize threats to land, sea, and air borders and ports of entry and to deliver intelligence to state, local, tribal, and territorial partners. As DHS as a whole intensifies focus on safety and service, law enforcement efforts should occur within this context rather than as the primary mission.
Consistent with this emphasis—and with the affirmative vision that CAP previously put forth of a more fair, humane, and workable immigration system that would rebalance immigration enforcement—ICE is primarily a law enforcement agency, and as such its responsibilities should be transferred out of DHS.
DHS also plays a critical role in adjudicating immigration benefits and promoting naturalization, which are the primary functions of USCIS. With these adjustments, DHS will be able to execute a clear mission, which includes delivering immigration and asylum services effectively, honoring historic American values as a refuge for those seeking sanctuary from repression and injustice while keeping the nation safe.
The Department of Homeland Security should play an important role in addressing the challenges and threats of today and tomorrow, and it should do so in a way that upholds American ideals and provides value to those who live, study, work, travel, and seek shelter here. Recalibrating the DHS mission would empower the agency and its workforce to play a more effective role in the federal bureaucracy.
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