Former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson offered a sharp rebuke this week of the federal agencies he once led, telling a packed Harvard audience that immigration enforcement has become “toxic” and unrecognizable under the Trump administration.
Johnson spoke at the Harvard Kennedy School Tuesday evening, amid a growing national backlash against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), whose officers have been using aggressive and often violent tactics in cities across the country. Last month agents shot and killed two protesters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, incidents that were caught on camera and viewed by millions of people, further galvanizing the opposition.
“When I look at the videos of the killing of Alex Pretti and the videos of the killing of Renee Good, I see a force—ICE and CBP—that I don’t recognize,” said Johnson, who led the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from 2013-2017. “I see an angry, ill-trained, undisciplined force that looks like they’ve come for a fight, and that they have lost their way.”
He criticized federal agents’ frequent practice of escalating confrontations with residents and protesters, rather than defusing them. He also said that the combative approach to immigration enforcement undermines public safety, by drawing officers away from the southern border where they are needed, and by making it more difficult to apprehend the “worst of the worst” undocumented criminals that the Trump administration claimed to be focused on. “When ICE becomes an occupying force that is toxic in a community, the locals don’t want to work with them anymore,” he said. “So you can’t get at the worst of the worst, who are sitting in jails for their sentence or pre-trial.”
Johnson also expressed dismay at the DHS social media posts and recruitment advertisements that, as multiple news outlets have reported, mimic white nationalist slogans and rhetoric. “I am very disturbed to see online from my old department, recruitment tools and recruitment messages that say, ‘Defend your culture,’” Johnson said. “Imagine if you saw a recruitment brochure for the Mississippi state police in 1963 that said, ‘Defend your culture.’ I think you’d know what that means.”
During the discussion, Johnson answered questions from moderator Juliette Kayyem, the Belfer senior lecturer in international security at HKS. In 2009-2010, Kayyem was DHS assistant secretary for governmental affairs, and she asked Johnson about the growing calls to “abolish ICE,” an idea that has been gaining public support since federal immigration agents began their campaign in Minnesota. Late last month, a YouGov poll found that more Americans now support abolishing ICE (46 percent) than oppose it (41 percent).
Johnson, like Kayyem, was skeptical of the idea. “A secure border is a legitimate government objective,” he said. “Americans are entitled to know who’s coming into our country.” When Kayyem pressed, he added, “We can’t abolish the agency responsible for enforcing our immigration laws in the interior.”
Instead, he advocated for a root-and-branch overhaul of DHS. “I haven’t said this too many times publicly, but I think the whole Department of Homeland Security is outdated,” he said. The department was created by Congress after the 9/11 attacks, at a time when counterterrorism was the government’s most urgent focus. DHS was intended to bring under one roof the various federal agencies involved in regulating “all the different ways,” as Johnson put it, “that bad guys can enter this country.” (Other agencies, on cybersecurity, federal emergency management, and the Secret Service, were also lumped in.) But increasingly, terrorism in the United States is not only foreign but also home-grown, and what’s needed now, he argued, is a federal department of public safety, which would include a reformed ICE and CBP more narrowly focused on law enforcement and criminals.
To deal with the estimated 14 million immigrants who are in the country illegally but otherwise law-abiding (72 percent of the people deported during the second Trump administration fall into this category), Johnson called for legislative immigration reform. “There are a whole lot of people in this country,” he said, “who’ve been here for five, 10, 20 years, who entered illegally, have committed no crimes, have U.S. citizen kids, and who are de facto Americans who want to be accountable, who want to get on the books and pay taxes. … It makes no sense at this point to send them back to Mexico.”
During the audience Q&A, listeners—including international students and immigrants—challenged Johnson on his prescription for the way forward and on his assessment of pre-Trump U.S. immigration. A first-year Harvard undergraduate, who volunteers for immigrant-rights organizations, recited a catalog of injustices in asylum policy and immigrant detention during the Obama administration, in which Johnson served. “Do you recognize these as systemic moral failings of the DHS that extend beyond Trump?” she asked.
“To a large degree, yes,” Johnson replied. “I do. I’m not going to kid you about that.”
In response to a question about persuading big businesses to pressure the federal government on issues like ICE, he returned to the potency of videos. “The turning point, first of all, is images,” he said. “Video images are really powerful and have the ability to change the public mood,” which in turn can alter the behavior of other sectors of society, including the political sphere. “I may be an optimist in that regard.”
