America's Failing "Homeland Security Enterprise"

(This is the first article in a three-part series on the Department of Homeland Security.)

They don’t know what it is, so they call it an “enterprise.”

In the tradition of the Defense Department’s quadrennial review, Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, released the department first Homeland Security Quadrennial Review on Feb. 1. As part of an attempt to address the department’s deep-seated identity problem and to distinguish it from its DOD big brother, DHS now refers to itself as a “Homeland Security Enterprise.”

George W. Bush will be remembered as the president who created this unwieldy new federal bureaucracy as part of his "Global War on Terror." But Democratic Party security hardliners like Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut was one of the original proponents of a homeland security department, and the new Democratic Party administration of Barack Obama has unconditionally embraced the department as a core government institution. 


Rather than using the review (mandated by Congress in 2007 in the midst of rising criticism of DHS) as an opportunity to reexamine the wisdom of creating this amalgam of 22 separate agencies organized around the homeland security theme, the Obama administration is allowing the department to consolidate and expand. Last year the administration moved ahead with plans to construct a $3.4 billion building to house this sprawling admixture of disparate agencies. The newly released Quadrennial Review now outlines plans for “maturing and strengthening the homeland security enterprise,” and the department's budget will rise 2% in 2011.

Faced with persistent criticism about management, oversight, and its lack of a unifying mission,  DHS is putting a new spin on its diffuse identity. In the Quadrennial Review, DHS states: “Homeland security is a distributed and diverse national enterprise.”

According to DHS, the term enterprise “refers to the collective efforts and shared responsibilities of Federal, State, local, tribal, territorial, nongovernmental, and private-sector partners—as well as individuals, families, and communities—to maintain critical homeland security capabilities. It recognizes the diverse risks, needs, and priorities of these different stakeholders, and connotes a broad-based community with a common interest in the public safety and well-being of America and American society.”

Politics and a rush to create a new font of security-related funding were largely responsible for the ill-considered creation of DHS; and the continuing search for meaning and definition at DHS, as illustrated by this new DHS report, underscores the department’s fundamental and continuing dysfunction. 

It’s worth recalling that, as part of his aggressive but badly focused response to the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush created at first not a department but rather a new White House office -- the Office of Homeland Security. However, the homeland security office, headed by Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, was short-lived. Congressional Democrats, led by Senator Lieberman, insisted that the country needed more than an executive office to monitor domestic security. 

According to Lieberman, the country needed a full-fledged homeland security department to organize domestically against terrorism. Lieberman, a leading Senate hawk and foreign policy neoconservative, also began beating the drums of war. He campaigned for the launching of wars against Iraq and Iran in the aftermath of Sept. 11, as well as for boosting the Pentagon's budget and its domestic response capabilities.

President Bush -- although increasingly won over by the neoconservative foreign policy agenda promoted by Lieberman and others -- initially rejected the senator’s demand for  the creation of a homeland security department, arguing that bureaucratic expansion was a typically big-government Democratic response. But nine months after Sept. 11,  President Bush reversed course, tacitly accepting the proposals of congressional Democrats led by Lieberman to establish a new department.

In announcing his plan to establish the department on June 6, 2002, President Bush declared that the government should “be reorganized to meet the new threats of the 21^st century” and that the new department would involve “the most extensive reorganization of the federal government since the 1940s.”

Although the Homeland Security Act of 2002 was largely his proposal, it did not bear Lieberman's name but was sold to Congress as the president's initiative. But having succeeded in his mission to expand the nation's security apparatus, Lieberman didn't begrudge the president and the Republicans for having adopted his proposal. Instead he
began pushing hard for the other parts of his security agenda. 


In a speech to the Progressive Policy Institute (an affiliate of the center-right Democratic Leadership Council) on June 26, 2002, Lieberman not only reiterated his vision for a domestic defense department but also proposed adopting a new vision of the Pentagon's role in the domestic response to terrorism. With respect to the need for a homeland security department, Lieberman proclaimed:

“Our challenge and our responsibility after September 11^th is to meet the deadly fervor of our terrorist enemies by adapting, responding, and reforming to protect our people from future attacks.

“For the U.S. Congress today, that means taking the disconnected pieces of a disorganized federal bureaucracy and reordering them into a unified, focused domestic defense department. While we create the new department, we must also develop a coherent and comprehensive homeland security strategy that can and will safeguard the American people -- and that the new department can implement as soon as it is up and running.”

But the core of Lieberman’s speech concerned not this new "domestic defense department" but the Defense Department itself. As Lieberman told his fellow Democrats: 

“Today I want to talk to you about what should be one of the core components of such a larger strategy: maximizing the use of our military resources here at home. Our Department of Defense has more tools, training, technology, and talent to help combat the terrorist threat at home than any other federal agency. Our military has proven capable of brilliance beyond our borders. Now, we must tap its expertise and its resources within our country -- by better integrating the Defense Department into our homeland security plans.”

Lieberman went on to sketch out his proposal for the Pentagon's own role in domestic defense, with the homeland security department as its new junior partner. He set forth his vision of a well-funded security sector at home, including expanded domestic use of the National Guard by the Pentagon, funding for a new array of security technologies, and stepped-up intelligence operations.


This post-Sept. 11 rush to create a new security department and at the same time beef-up the Pentagon’s and intelligence community’s role in counterterrorism at home rose in part from a new bipartisan fervor to protect the homeland and strike out against Islamist terrorists. 


But the birthing of DHS cannot be explained without also considering how military contractors and their politician partners had begun rallying around proposals calling for Congress and the White House to unleash vast sums of federal revenues in new homeland security-related contracts, issued either by the new department or by the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies.


DHS’s Missing Mission

From its conception the Department of Homeland Security was a hodge-podge without a clear mission or clear authority. It brought together 22 agencies and more than a hundred bureaus and subagencies. The decision as to which agencies to include was based more on political bargaining than on any clarity about the department’s mission or what would it take to create a cohesive department.

The one entity that had already had a mission somewhat aligned with the notion of homeland security was the National Guard, but it was reported that White House officials couldn’t figure out how to extract the Guard from DOD. It was also likely that both the Democratic Party architects of homeland security and White House officials saw from the beginning that DHS in counterterrorism matters would always be subservient to DOD, the intelligence agencies, and to a certain extent the FBI. 

Organizational and mission problems plagued DHS from the start, as excellently reported by the Washington Post in its Dec. 22, 2005 investigative article, “Department’s Mission Undermined from the Start.” Reporters Susan B. Glasser and Michael Grunwald concluded:

 “DHS was initially expected to synthesize intelligence, secure borders, protect infrastructure and prepare for the next catastrophe. For most of those missions, the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission recently gave the Bush administration D's or F's. To some extent, the department was set up to fail. It was assigned the awesome responsibility of defending the homeland without the investigative, intelligence and military powers of the FBI, CIA and the Pentagon; it was also repeatedly undermined by the White House that initially opposed its creation. But the department has also struggled to execute even seemingly basic tasks, such as prioritizing America's most critical infrastructure.”

The DHS’ Quadrennial Review strains to formulate a strategic framework for the Homeland Security Enterprise. The creation of DHS added another vast bureaucracy – with a $50-billion-plus department -- and to its security apparatus without bothering to explain to voters and taxpayers why such a multidepartmental complex is necessary.

As was to be expected, the initial strategic foundation of DHS was counterterrorism – warding off and responding to attacks on the homeland. The founding National Strategy for Homeland Security, issued in July 2002, declared that the department’s mission was to “mobilize and organize our nation to secure the U.S. homeland from terrorist attacks.” The strategy statement defined homeland security as “a concerted national effort to prevent terrorist attacks within the United States, reduce America’s vulnerability to terrorism, and minimize the damage and recover from attacks that do occur.” 

One problem with such a formulation was that in the first two of these three functions the new department played only a supporting role to the FBI, DOD, and intelligence community. Another problem became startling clear in August 2005 when DHS flailed in face of the disaster left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. DHS, organized around a counterterrorism mission -- albeit for politically opportunistic reasons and in a shockingly reckless fashion -- grossly failed its first test. 

Funds are running low. With no foundation grants or institutional support, Tom Barry and the TransBorder Project of the Center for International Policy count on individual financial support to continue this investigative, analytical, and advocacy work. 

Go to the CIP online donation page, and write TransBorder Fellowship in comment section when making your donation. Or mail a check to CIP, noting this project. Thank you!

Immigration Challenge for Obama

During his tenure as homeland security secretary, Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff has overseen a dramatic buildup in border security and immigration enforcement. As part of this crackdown on illegal immigrants, Chertoff has launched such new programs as Operation Community Shield (going after immigrant gang members), Operation Streamline (arresting and detaining illegal border crosses), and the Secure Border Initiative (which includes the 670-mile fence and the virtual fence).

Today, DHS deploys nearly 18,000 border patrol agents and has 30,000 prison beds dedicated to immigrants. In pursuing the immigrant crackdown, Chertoff has won broad bipartisan support for large annual increases in ICE and CBP budgets and for his initiatives that merge federal enforcement with local and state policing. What is more, many local and state governments have passed new laws aimed at driving unauthorized immigrants out of their communities.

Chertoff has set in motion a well-coordinated and unremitting immigrant dragnet in motion. The law-and-order immigration apparatus directed by DHS is certainly demonstrating results. But with its emphasis on law enforcement and its disregard for justice it is destroying millions of lives while splitting communities and families.

“Whether you like what we are doing or not,” said Chertoff in his "State of Immigration" speech on Oct. 23, “it would be hard to argue we were conducting business as usual in the last year and 18 months (since his appointment).”

Now that the infrastructure, funding, rationale, and strategy for a wide-ranging enforcement regime are in place, a new “business as usual” immigration policy is being passed on to the Obama administration. Despite declarations as a candidate that he would pursue comprehensive immigration reform in his first term, Obama will be hard put to back away from Chertoff’s strategy to enforce immigration law “as it currently exists.”

Any retreat from Chertoff’s hard-line position on enforcement will be met with an upsurge of angry anti-immigration organizing. And any Chertoff-like proposal for an expanded temporary workers program will likely be opposed, as FAIR signals, as a de facto legalization initiative. As the economy stagnates, active support for immigrant rights and legalization is likely to decline, making yet more difficult for the Obama administration to summon the political will to fight back against the enforcement-first measures that Chertoff and the restrictionists have set in motion.

The Obama administration and the new Democratic Congress will soon face the challenge of addressing the immigration crisis. The path of least resistance may be to accept the “State of Immigration” as shaped and defined by Chertoff and the Republicans.

But the bolder path is to stand on reason and principle in backing a new comprehensive reform bill, which meets valid citizen concerns about effective border control and sustainable immigration flows while also ensuring that immigrant workers and their families are treated with justice and fairness.

Remove Illegals, Contract Temporaries

Homeland Security Secretary (DHS) Michael Chertoff made clear in his wrap-up speech on the “State of Immigration” that comprehensive immigration reform should include a three-pronged strategy of strict enforcement, border security, and immigrant worker programs.

Business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce, have objected to employee verification programs because they cost businesses time and money. Noting this opposition, Chertoff retorted: “In my experience, making money is not a sufficient justification for violating the law, since most people break the law in order to make money.”

But he readily acknowledged that enforcement-only is not the answer. “I think it would be a lot easier if we said to businesses if we can work together to have a legal way to get the workers, that is a win-win. You get the workers, the workers get protected, and we are obeying the law.” What’s needed, he said, is “comprehensive immigration reform that addresses the issue of temporary workers.”

Chertoff said:

“It is our philosophy, it is my personal philosophy that the answer to dealing with the problem of jobs that Americans do not seem to want to fill, is not to allow people to come in illegally, to break the law to fill them, but to create a regulated legal, visible and secure path, to invite people in when we want to invite them in, under the terms and conditions that satisfies us as Americans, that we are comfortable with the security and the economic impact of that migration in that temporary work, and also using a path that is transparent and protects the workers themselves from the kind of exploitation some of them experience when they come in an illegal status.”

There is simplicity to Chertoff’s proposal missing from other comprehensive immigration reform proposals. Rather than address the complexities of a “pathway to citizenship” or “earned citizenship,” Chertoff simply ignores the entire issue of possible citizenship for the 11-12 million illegal immigrants, focusing exclusively on temporary work programs as the legal path for new foreign workers.

In its simplicity – enforcement plus temporary worker program – Chertoff’s proposal for comprehensive reform lays out only two options for illegal immigrants – removal or temporary work permits.

This solution suddenly looked more possible when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that any solution would have to be bipartisan, which would mean sacrificing some of Democrats' past priorities, such as giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.

"Maybe there never is a path to citizenship if you came here illegally," Pelosi said. "I would hope that there could be, but maybe there isn't," she said.

If there is no pathway to citizenship, immigrants now in the country illegally can expect increasingly precarious lives. Only if they sign up for a temporary or guest worker program will illegal immigrants likely be permitted to stay in the country. But most illegal immigrants don’t work in industries, such as agriculture, that have traditionally been included in temporary worker programs.

Immigration restrictionists, while pleased that “pathway to citizenship” proposals seem to be losing support even among Democrats, are already preparing their forces to do battle against a broad new temporary workers program that would possibly give worker visas to current illegal immigrants and to new flows of foreign workers.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform, for example, has incorporated a response to a Chertoff-like proposal to expand temporary worker programs. In FAIR’s newly released Seven Principles of True Comprehensive Immigration Reform, one of its reform principles states: “Redefining illegal aliens as ‘guest-workers’ or anything else is just that: a redefinition that attempts to hide the fact it is an amnesty, not reform.”

While acknowledging that there may be some need for temporary workers in the U.S. economy, FAIR aims to wage battle on the benchmarks Congress and the new administration set for determining the need for foreign workers. Rather than relying on employers or even the government to document a shortage of workers, FAIR says that “the need for guest workers must be determined by objective indicators that a shortage of workers exists, i.e., extreme wage inflation in a particular sector of the labor market.”

In other words, unless businesses can show that they are paying exorbitant wages to attract labor, any plea for foreign workers should be rejected. Echoing the language of many unions and progressives, FAIR, in its principles for comprehensive immigration reform, declares: “Immigration policy should not be permitted to undermine opportunities for America's poor and vulnerable citizens to improve their working conditions and wages.”

State of Immigration, According to Chertoff

Citing “record-breaking” numbers of “removals,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff last week, in his “State of Immigration” address, said that DHS has “laid out” the path and the tools of immigration. It’s up to the next administration, he said, to “continue the job of securing the borders and get it done.”

Named DHS chief in 2005 by President Bush, Chertoff has vigorously pursued the post-Sept. 11 immigration crackdown with a $15 billion annual budget dedicated to immigration enforcement.

In the absence of comprehensive immigration reform that includes legalization and new worker programs, Chertoff has implemented an enforcement-only immigration policy that has won the support of immigration restrictionists. He has put immigrants on call that their papers best be in order or that risk imprisonment and deportation.

Despite a wave of lawsuits, investigative reports criticizing DHS detention practices, and protests by immigrant advocates, Chertoff has forged ahead with the controversial border fence, the large-scale jailing of illegal immigrants, and programs to enforce immigration law at the workplace.

But unlike immigration restrictionists who are cheer-leading the immigrant crackdown, Chertoff says that the enforcement-only policy is not sufficient and unsustainable. As he has in the past, Chertoff used the State of Immigration address to call for the introduction of a new temporary workers program.

Chertoff is a conservative jurist associated with the right-wing Federalist Society who was the chief counterterrorism prosecutor under former Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Michelle Malkin, a crusader against immigrant rights and author of Invasion: How America Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores and In Defense of Internment, enthusiastically greeted the appointment of Chertoff as DHS chief in 2005, writing: “A look at Chertoff’s strong, aggressive record and statements on homeland security shows that Chertoff supports the kind of hard-headed, threat-profiling measures and immigration enforcement opposed by the anti-profiling zealots.”

Democrats Vote to Increase Homeland Security Budget

Democrats Vote to Increase Homeland Security Budget Each year the Bush administration submits a Department of Homeland Security budget that’s substantially larger than the previous year.

The president’s 2009 budget calls for a 6% increase in DHS spending including a 19% spending increase for immigration enforcement and border security. For the past couple of years the Democratic leadership in Congress sent back to the president DHS spending bills that were billions of dollars higher than the president’s own proposed DHS budget.

Rather than putting the breaks on Homeland Security spending on the immigration crackdown, the Democrats in the appropriations and homeland security committees of the House and Senate routinely increase DHS funding beyond the annual rasies proposed by the Bush administration.

This year the Democrats, eager to show their credentials as hardliners in border security and immigration enforcement will be sending back to President Bush a DHS budget for 2009 that will be at least a couple of billion dollars more than he requested.

“We plan to send the president a bill that exceeds his request, and I hope that he again has the wisdom to sign it,” said Appropriations Chairman Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia (Politico, June 17).

The House Appropriations Committee has approved a DHS budget that adds about $2.3 billion to the president’s request, while its counterpart in the Senate approved a $2.46 addition to the president’s 2009 proposed budget.

With the Democratic leadership on the appropriations and homeland securities behind the increases – and with no opposition from the Republicans – it’s likely that the entire House and Senate memberships will approve a multibillion dollar increase in the DHS budget when it comes up for a vote later this summer.

Both in the House and the Senate, Democrats were adamant that the DHS needed more funding to pursue “criminal aliens.”

Cong. David Price (D-NC), head of the House’s homeland security spending panel, has been a leading proponent for increased DHS attention to criminal aliens. "The department should be as zealous in deporting criminals as it is in disrupting immigrant employment," Price says. "In fact, it should be more zealous."

North Carolina is beset with anti-immigrant fever. County governments have lined up to sign 287(g) agreements with Homeland Security; and Sen. Elizabeth Dole, a major supporter of involving local police in immigration enforcement, is stoking anti-immigrant fever in her hate-filled election campaign. She is betting that anti-immigrant sentiment will boost her chances against Kay Hagan, a strong Democratic challenger.

The target of Dole’s first television ad was illegal immigrants. North Carolina is home to the restrictionist Americans for Legal Immigration.

North Carolina’s Cong. David Price was also successful last year in raising Homeland Security funding for programs that target criminal immigrants, such as the Fugitive Operations Teams, Criminal Alien Program, and 287(g) agreements between DHS’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and local governments.

“Criminal aliens” are an easy target for politicians wanting to increase their standing among constituencies that are applauding the intensifying immigration crackdown. ICE dragnets for criminal aliens are so wide that citizens, legal residents, and many hard-working immigrants are being swept up in supposedly targeted crackdowns.

Homeland Security is increasingly criminalizing all unauthorized immigrants by indicting and sentencing immigrants for what were formerly considered misdemeanors or administrative violations. So those Democrats and Republicans eager to increase the DHS budget under the rationale that they are simply targeting criminal immigrants are just another factor in ramping up the immigrant crackdown.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama, a member of the Senate's Homeland Security committee, has a particular responsibility to speak out against the mounting war on immigrants that is being fought under the cover of homeland security.

Photo: North Carolina's Cong. David Price