DHS’s Failure and Its Future
Congress created the Department of Homeland Security in direct response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and twenty-five years later there’s still a question mark as to whether the Department is actually fulfilling its mission—or if it even knows what its mission is.
As someone who worked at DHS for over fifteen years, in the immigration and intelligence realms, I’ve seen firsthand how the Department has always struggled with its identity. It has also been a political pawn since its inception, which has weakened its ability to fight terrorism and keep all of us safe.
That push and pull, those constantly changing priorities, is reflected in the low morale of DHS employees. While some agencies, like U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), where I used to work, have traditionally ranked higher relative to other DHS agencies on the annual “Best Places to Work in the Federal Government,” most agencies within DHS settle amongst the bottom of the list. DHS itself has been ranked dead last ten times between 2010-2024. I guess they could count that as an accomplishment. I wonder if the Social Security Administration gets upset when they don’t “win” that competition or if they’re happy DHS exists so they’re not always in last place? But on a more serious note, low morale often translates to higher turnover and lower motivation, two ingredients that make employees less effective at their jobs. And when your job is to keep America safe, doing your job well is kind of a BFD.
That job, at least as Congress intended when it created DHS, is to, as the name of the Department says, keep the homeland secure. That mission is in many ways a distant memory, if it ever existed at all. As the authors of a recent article on the topic in Politico state, “DHS’s core original mission of combating and responding to terrorism seems all-but forgotten in the public eye — and it seems particularly ill-poised to respond to the modern terrorism or national security threats as they currently exist.”
DHS was borne out of 9/11, but twenty-five years on, the threat has changed. The threat really isn’t al Qaeda or ISIS anymore. It’s domestic terrorism. It’s cyber warfare. It’s technological espionage. National security is never fighting a static threat, but that is how DHS has largely operated.
This is hardly a problem exclusive to DHS. It’s bureaucracy and government agencies are not known to be particularly dynamic. Change is like trying to steer a ship on a new course. And when you have a captain at the helm who doesn't even know how to read a chart, you end up with a Department that is directionless. That is what DHS today has devolved into. When your core mission is to stay left of boom, the ability to change to match the pace of the threat is imperative and I’m not sure DHS has ever hit that mark.
So, what is the mission of DHS then? Is it about terrorism and other threats? And how do they best go about fighting that?
Immigration has a place in that fight, but it’s one that has been overemphasized by the President and Republicans. My last job at DHS before I left was overseeing a team that conducted the classified vetting of immigration cases that had national security concerns. My team were the ones ferreting out the actual terrorists, the spies, the traffickers, the human rights violators, and a whole host of other unsavory characters. I created a systematic process—which shockingly USCIS didn’t have prior to me standardizing these activities—to watchlist the bad actors my team came across. We increased watchlisting entries for USCIS by 300% in one year. That’s made us safer and that is directly in line with DHS’s stated mission.
The work we did, however, represented a small percentage of the actual number of immigration cases that DHS processes each year. And it wasn’t because we missed something, it was largely because not everyone who comes to the United States is a terrorist or criminal. In other words, these mass deportations are probably doing very, very little to make us safer. Removal of criminals has always been a priority under every President since the creation of DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) regardless of political party and yes, that does make us safer. But what we’re seeing today and what we saw in Trump’s first term, yeah, that shit is just smoke and mirrors. It’s a political talking point uninformed by what actually constitutes a threat to the nation.
That’s because detecting threats is about good intelligence, developing sources, sharing information, including sharing with our allies, having strong partnerships and cooperation with other federal agencies, state and local players, and the community as a whole. More emphasis on that and less on all the noise that is DHS today, and then we’d be more secure.
Unfortunately, though, DHS has never been very good at any of the things I list above.
Its intelligence arm, the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, has been a hot mess since it came into being. From writing dossiers on journalists to ignoring warnings from its intelligence analysts that domestic terrorism was on the rise to failing to share what it knew ahead of January 6th and a heaping pile of interpersonal, intraoffice drama, I&A has never been very good at its intelligence mission and its reputation within the Intelligence Community reflects that.
Could things have been better if DHS was designed differently?
That Politico article I mentioned above asserts there were three decisions that doomed the Department of Homeland Security from the start. The first was the decision not to divide the FBI’s law enforcement and intelligence missions. The second was, and still is, that most of the agencies within the Department do not have missions focused on defending and protecting the homeland. And third, the diversity of issues that now fall under the Department’s purview creates mission creep and disorganization.
And often those missions creep into immigration territory, especially these days. Housing divisive program areas like immigration with things that should be relatively nonpartisan, like the work of FEMA, degrades the missions of all the agencies within DHS. This is particularly so when agencies that have, or at least should have, nothing to do with other agencies’ missions, are forced to shift focus to pony up a President’s priorities, like when FEMA was forced to detail employees to ICE. And because DHS is such a political lightening rod, that also means agencies, and indeed the American people, are susceptible to negative impacts when sister agencies are facing the heat, such as the President threatening to withhold disaster preparedness and homeland security grants unless states agree to adhere to his immigration policies.
FEMA gets stuck in the middle of an immigration shitshow and the American people suffer. And none of this nonsense has anything to do with fighting terrorism, which, as a friendly reminder, was why DHS was created in the first place.
So, if I were to design, or redesign, DHS, this is what I’d do to focus its mission:
I’d reduce the number of agencies within DHS from eight to five (USCIS, ICE, CISA, TSA, and a new intelligence agency). FEMA, the Coast Guard, and the Secret Service are moved to other departments and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is eliminated.
USCIS would maintain its current mission and handle the entry/exit process, to include at borders and ports of entry, currently under the purview of CBP.
ICE would handle its current immigration mission areas as well as border patrol.
CBP is dissolved and its duties distributed amongst other agencies. It makes sense that immigration functions should be divided between two agencies rather than three—one agency for immigration benefits and one for immigration enforcement.
Customs functions return to Treasury or otherwise go elsewhere.
Some of ICE’s other areas, like CSAM investigations and drug trafficking, should go to other agencies (e.g., FBI and DEA).
Coast Guard will go to the Department of Defense or War or whatever it’ll be called two years from now. I understand the Coast Guard isn’t part of DoD now because it also has law enforcement authorities, but if it is going to take an act of Congress to make all these moves anyways, Congress can make it so that the Coast Guard can sit under the DoD umbrella and continue its current mission.
CISA remains as is (and also should be expanded).
TSA handles security policy, will conduct investigations when something goes wrong, and will make recommendations to improve security.
Move the day-to-day security screening operations of TSA to the Department of Transportation.
FEMA returns to Health and Human Services.
Secret Service returns to the Department of Justice or becomes an office under the Executive Office of the President.
And finally, create a new intelligence agency within DHS. That means, yes, splitting the FBI’s intelligence and law enforcement functions and the FBI’s intelligence arm will now fall under this new agency. I&A will be subsumed by this new agency. (And of all the things on this list, this is the one that I think will get the most pushback—not because it’s a bad idea, but because DHS, and I&A especially, has such an awful reputation. The FBI will not submit to this change without a fight, but this may be the exact time to do it because the FBI’s reputation is also at its lowest point in generations.)
I’ll add that DHS Headquarters also needs a major reorganization and some of the offices should be combined, eliminated, or their duties moved to different departments.
If you look at what I suggest above, it’s keeping the core mission of DHS—“to safeguard the American people, our homeland, and our values with honor and integrity”—at the forefront. These changes will make for a focused Department, something DHS severely lacks today and has always lacked. And when the mission is clear, and everyone is working to fulfill that mission, we will all be safer because of it.
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