Teams involved in the development, drafting, and editing include National Security and International Policy, Immigration, Art, Editorial, and Videowith significant contributions from Sofia Carratala, Lauren Vicary, Jasmine Hardy, Hai-Lam Phan, and Chester Hawkins. He began his career as a district adjudications officer before transitioning to deportation officer with the former U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and he was a member of one of ICE's first fugitive operations teams and an instructor at the ICE Academy. What Is an Organizational Structure? 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. At the national level, DHSs attention and political emphasis is out of balance with many of todays most serious threats. In too many instances, DHS has pursued policies absent an articulated legal foundation, with disastrous results, including: DHS personnel acting as domestic law enforcement in response to peaceful protests in Portland, Oregon; ICE arresting a survivor of domestic abuse seeking a protective order in a courthouse; and the U.S. Border Patrol stopping a 10-year-old girl in an ambulance on her way to emergency surgery.33 Others, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have documented serious abuses and overreach by DHS officials, particularly at U.S. borders and in immigration enforcement operations.34 It is difficult to overstate the harm that the Border Patrol and ICE have caused to relationships with communities and local officials across the country.35, About 90 committees and subcommittees have jurisdiction over DHSs planning, policies, and budgetseach focused on a small piece of the department rather than the entire homeland security operational matrix. 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. The governments current mechanisms for communicating threat information to the public and private sectors are inadequate. Tackling Climate Change and Environmental Injustice, A New Framework for DHS To Meet Todays Challenges, The positions of American Progress, and our policy experts, are independent, and the findings and conclusions presented are those of American Progress alone. Observers across the political spectrum have argued that, in the rush to stand up a new department, disparate components of the federal bureaucracy were shoe-horned into DHS, with mixed results.6 Todays DHS claims a role in most national security issuesand a number of issues that fall outside of national securitybut there are few areas where DHS leads the governments response and even fewer where it does so well and without controversy. Though the independence of the DOJ and FBI has been tested in the pastduring the J. Edgar Hoover era at the FBI, for example, and across the DOJ during the past four yearsrich institutional memory supported by decades of oversight at these other law enforcement agencies has resulted in unambiguous statutory authorities and well-established norms that have helped these institutions withstand politicization and guide department behavior. Citizenship and Immigration Services and also held positions at Women Lawyers Association of Los Angeles, Pepperdine University, Department of Homeland Security - Customs and Border Protection, The San Diego County District Attorney's Office, Christian Legal Aid of Los Angeles, Bentley, GRID . DHS could become the lead for communicating threat information to the public, such as intelligence on threats to critical infrastructure, and could expand its capacity to work with law enforcement and intelligence agencies to appropriately protect sensitive intelligence while disclosing information necessary to enlist the private sector and the American people in protecting the nation. Without clear and streamlined oversight responsibilities, Congress lacks the ability to act in its appropriate legislative role to set and guide the departments priorities and activities. Who we are The Minnesota Department of Human Services is an organization of individuals with a commitment to bettering the lives of Minnesotans. The mission of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) is to equip the Homeland Security Enterprise with the timely intelligence and information it needs to keep the homeland safe, secure, and resilient. At the same time, there is a clear need for strengthened protections and safeguards for civil liberties and privacy to prevent abusessuch as those DHS has committed in the pastwhereby religious, racial, ethnic, and migrant communities are disproportionately affected or targeted by such threat-sharing. 2825, the Department of Homeland Security Authorization Act of 2017, which sought to reauthorize DHS for the first time since its creation.18 More recently in 2020, several House Democrats introduced H.R. Whether leading the federal response or coordinating other federal players, local governments, and nongovernmental organizations, the United States needs an agency charged with emergency preparedness and response capabilities that serves as the lead coordinator of U.S. government emergency preparedness and response efforts on the wide range of emergencies that affect the country. The Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services provides leadership, coordination, and support to prevent, protect against, prepare for, respond to, recover from, and mitigate disasters and other emergencies. DHS lacks those bureaucratic guardrails, and the consequences of weak constraints on DHS became particularly clear during the Trump administration. Abolishing DHS and returning its components to where they came from is neither politically feasible nor wise, and giving DHS more resources and responsibility without substantive changes will do little to fix the departments underlying problems. A list of senior leaders at the Department. Eleven days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, then-Pennsylvania Gov. To maximize its value and effectiveness in todays environment, DHS should organizeand articulate its missionaround connecting, communicating, facilitating, welcoming, and helping, in addition to protecting, securing, preventing, and enforcing. Sign Up By fully realizing the role envisioned for the secretary of DHS in Homeland Security Presidential Directive 5enhancing the ability of the United States to manage domestic incidents by establishing a single comprehensive national incident management system68as the principal federal official for domestic incident management, DHS can serve as a force multiplier for the rest of the federal government and use its institutional memory to improve Americas resilience to anything that humankind or nature throws its way. CAP recommends that DHS components that are primarily or exclusively focused on enforcing federal laws should be transferred to other federal departments. Executive Office of Health and Human Services Department of Public Health Senior Managers February 23, 2023 Assistant Commissioner Administrator X (Vacant) Director, Staff Training & Development Program Manager VI Elena Nuciforo Chief Operating Officer Administrator XI Eileen Sullivan Deputy Chief Operating Family Health & Director . endstream endobj 697 0 obj <>/Metadata 35 0 R/OCProperties<>/OCGs[702 0 R]>>/PageLabels 692 0 R/PageLayout/OneColumn/Pages 694 0 R/PieceInfo<>>>/StructTreeRoot 49 0 R/Type/Catalog>> endobj 698 0 obj <>/Font<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text]>>/Rotate 0/StructParents 0/Tabs/S/Type/Page>> endobj 699 0 obj <>stream 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. DHS must recognize that many serious challenges to Americas safety and security originate at home or are largely borderless by nature. An official website of the United States government. } Recent steps announced by Speaker Pelosis office toward centralizing authority under the House Committee on Homeland Security by the current Congress are a welcome step but need to be further developed and have not been taken up by the Senate.85 Congress and the Biden administration should build on these important reforms to further consolidate and centralize oversight responsibilities and work toward passing an annual authorization for the department. dataLayer.push({"event": "signup_submit", "form_detail":"enSubscribeSlideUp"}); Meanwhile, the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) office, housed within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has ballooned to 7,100 agents in 225 cities nationwide and is now one of the largest federal investigative agencies within the U.S. government.24 HSI claims broad legal authority to investigate a wide range of domestic and international criminal activities arising from the illegal movement of people, goods, money, and contraband into and within the United States and has access to the information stored in the CIRS database. I&A reportedly compiled dossiers on journalists covering the 2020 protests in Oregon, under a theory of expanded intelligence activities that DHS lawyers argued were necessary to mitigate the significant threat to homeland security that such activites posed.21 DHS has also ramped up the collection and retention of expanded categories of records during customs and immigration processing, including the collection of data on U.S. persons. In line with this new vision, CAP recommends that purely investigative and detention functions be moved out of DHS and transferred to other agencies, such as the FBI and the Bureau of Prisons, which are the federal lead for those functions. Successive reform efforts and the use of DHS to advance partisan political objectives have led to sharp swings in the departments headquarters-level focus. Our aim is not just to change the conversation, but to change the country. ET, Twitter, available at, These sectors include the chemical sector; commercial facilities; communications; critical manufacturing; dams; defense industrial base; emergency services; energy; financial services; food and agriculture; government facilities; health care and public health; information technology; nuclear records; materials and waste; transportation systems; and water and wastewater systems. Organizational Structure Click on any block to visit that program office's web page. Another challenge that has affected DHS from the outsetand grew increasingly problematic during the Trump administrationis that it was given broad and at times unclear legal authorities that it has used in ways that have harmed the public it is supposed to serve. An organizational structure is a hierarchical outline of a company's roles, teams, and employees. , an advocacy organization dedicated to improving the lives of all Americans. Contract Administration - Brian Bond, Director. But it is time for DHS to focus on the missions and activities that it is uniquely capable of carrying out, and for which it, rather than other agencies, is the natural lead. DHS should maintain its core objective of securely, efficiently, humanely managing our air, land, and maritime borders. The organizational structure of, for example, a company is a system used to define its hierarchy. We at U.S. HSI, within ICE, investigates transnational crime and threats and claims a role in nearly all criminal activity, even those only tangentially related to DHSs mission. 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. 0 Many of todays most serious threats to Americas safety and prosperitynatural disasters, pandemic disease, cyberattacks, and violent white supremacyoriginate at home or are borderless by nature. In 2017 and with overwhelming bipartisan support, the House of Representatives passed H.R. Rob Ries is the Health and Human Services Commission's deputy executive commissioner of Compliance and Quality Control. The combination of DHSs hasty founding, its expansive authorities, and its at once decentralized nature and yet lack of institutional independence from the executive branch has left the department susceptible to presidents using DHS and its expansive authorities for political purposes. FEMA is comprised of: Headquarters in Washington, D.C. where the Office of the Administrator and various program offices are located. Rudy deLeon is a senior fellow with the National Security and International Policy team at the Center. 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. The organization of DHS is in accordance with the Homeland Security Act, as modified by previous notices to Congress under Section 872 of the Homeland Security Act and by future legislative enactments. The Office of the Secretary oversees DHSs work to enhance security, protect cyberspace, administer immigration and respond to disasters. 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. endstream endobj 700 0 obj <>stream DHS could also develop better warning and prediction systems that enable a more proactive federal response and assistance presence. The department has five divisions: Behavioral Health, Children and Family Services, Developmental Disabilities, Medicaid and Long-Term Care and Public Health. Operational and Support Components A list of all Operational and Support Components that make up DHS. Advancing Racial Equity and Justice, Building an Economy for All, Restoring Social Trust in Democracy, Biden Administration, Foreign Policy, Immigration, National Security+4More. DHS has a responsibility to safeguard the information it acquires and to protect the civil liberties and privacy of U.S. personsand all personswhen permitting the use of that information for other purposes. Recent examples include DHSs yearslong battle with the DOJ over which agency has the lead for transnational organized crime; tensions with the FBI and the IC over foreign influence and election interference roles and responsibilities;57 turf battles over cybersecurity jurisdiction between DHSs CISA and the National Security Agency;58 and persistent questions about the focus and utility of DHSs intelligence unit. A. DHS could also play an important role in countering disinformation in partnership with the State Departments Global Engagement Center. In cases where special expertise is required, DHS can serve as an emergency response quarterback, identifying resources and making them available to the departments and agencies that need them. The . An official website of the United States government. DHS already plays a pivotal role in connecting nonfederal officials with their counterparts in the federal system and serves as the primary connection between state, local, tribal, and territorial officials and the federal government and its resources, as well as between the private and public sectors, including civil society organizations. Pandemics can uproot daily life and economic security when border-screening measures fail to halt early transmission. Successive administrations have continued to interpret DHSs mission as primarily focused on protecting the homeland from threats from abroad. DHSs development of programs that facilitate customer interactionssuch as TSA Precheck and Global Entry, which facilitate quicker screening at airports for U.S. domestic and international flightsare innovations that provide better services and security.64 The department must also clearly delimit its own power over travelers, visitors, and residents by prohibiting implementation of past problematic programs such as the NSEERS and Secure Communities.65, 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. Johan Hassel, Kate Donald, Laura Kilbury, 1 More Despite consensus among policymakers that the department could be far more effective,1 there is little agreement on how to fix it. With the State Department focused on messaging abroad, DHS could play the lead for countering disinformation domestically. Learn about our sister organization, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, an advocacy organization dedicated to improving the lives of all Americans. Elisa Massimino is a senior fellow with the National Security and International Policy team at at the Center. Or it might mean partnering with technology companies to thwart domestic extremist messaging on online platforms. DHS should reduce its TOC efforts and transfer investigative leads and other TOC activities to the DOJ. As DHS approaches its 20-year mark, the United States has an opportunity to redefine the departments value proposition for the future and to better align DHSs structure and activities with its mission. Since no part of Congress authorizes the entire departmentwide functions, DHSs appropriators have largely become the subcommittees of de facto jurisdiction over the department. %%EOF Since the creation of DHS, challenges related to the foundations of the department and its operations have inhibited its performance. CBP would still retain its law enforcement functions, but it would operate with a better understanding of the broader agendaas well as the border communitiesit serves. This approach should apply for other national incidents and emergencies as well. Necessary safeguards would need to be put in place to ensure that what immigration detention remains does not become wrapped up in the overall criminal carceral system. In doing so, DHS can uniquely enlist the private sector and the American people in protecting the nation. 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