Office Of Legislative Affairs (ola); Public Affairs (opa); Partnership And Engagement (ope)

DHS’s external communications function should be consolidated and reformed so that the President’s agenda can be implemented more effectively. The Office of Partnership and Engagement should be merged into the Office of Public Affairs. In many Cabinet agencies, outreach to companies and partner organizations is similarly performed by the Office of Public Affairs. This would also accomplish a needed DHS organizational and management reform to decrease the number of direct reports to the Secretary.

Both public and legislative affairs staff in the components should report directly to their respective headquarters equivalent. This would help to avoid a failure by the department to speak with one voice. It would also allow the component staff to perform more efficiently, overseen by expert managers in their trade. This would also allow DHS to respond to crises effectively by shifting staff as needed to the most pressing issues and better use underutilized staff at less active components. Only political appointees in OLA should interact directly with congressional staff on all inquiries, including budget and appropriations matters. To prevent congres- sional staff from answer shopping among HQ OLA, the DHS OCFO, and components, DHS legislative affairs appropriations staff should be moved from MGMT OCFO into OLA. Regarding components, budget/appropriations staff should move from component budget offices into component legislative affairs offices. Because dozens of congressional committees and subcommittees either have or claim to have jurisdiction over some DHS function, DHS staff from the Secretary on down spend so much time responding to congressional hearing and briefing requests, letters, and questions for the record that they are left with little time to do their assigned job of protecting the homeland. The next President should reach an agreement with congressional leadership to limit committee jurisdiction to one authorizing committee and one appropriations committee in each cham- ber. If congressional leadership will not limit their committees’ jurisdiction over DHS, DHS should identify one authorizing and appropriations committee in each chamber and answer only to it.

To focus more precisely on the DHS mission, OLA staff should also identify outdated and needless congressional reporting requirements and notify Congress that DHS will cease reporting on such matters. For other congressional reports, OLA should implement a sunset date so that Congress must regularly demonstrate the need for specific data.

In both OPA and OLA, a change in mission and culture is needed. The clients of both components are the President and the Secretary, not the media, external organizations, or Congress. OPA and OLA should change from being compliance correspondents for outside entities airing grievances to serving as messengers and advocates for the President and the Secretary.

OFFICE OF OPERATIONS COORDINATION (OPS)

OPS was originally conceived by then-Secretary Jeh Johnson as an entity tasked with coordinating cross-DHS assets on an as-needed basis using a joint operations approach. This role is particularly challenging because of the disparate nature of mission sets across DHS. OPS should absorb a very small number of tactical intelligence professionals from I&A as the rest of I&A is shut down. Such intelligence officers would be a subordinate element within OPS placed within the National Operations Center. The intelligence officers would provide tactical intelligence support for upcoming or ongoing opera- tions in addition to liaising with their agency/component counterparts. There would be no strategic intelligence analysis done as part of OPS or its new I&A sub-element. In addition to facilitating all-of-DHS coordination on a task-by-task basis, OPS would be responsible for ongoing situational awareness for the Secretary and Deputy Secretary.

In addition to long-term staffing, OPS would have cycling billets from each of the major agencies and components to facilitate its most effective working rela- tionships across DHS.

OFFICE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES (CRCL) AND PRIVACY OFFICE (PRIV)

The Homeland Security Act established only an Officer of CRCL, not an office. The only substantive function Congress then assigned to the officer was to review and assess information alleging abuses of civil rights. Since then, Congress and CRCL itself have significantly expanded CRCL’s scope and size well beyond its original intent or helpful purpose. CRCL now operates and views itself as a quasi-­ DHS Office of Inspector General. This results in a considerable waste of limited component resources, which are routinely tasked to address redundant, overly burdensome, and uninformed demands from CRCL. It is therefore important to recalibrate CRCL’s scope and reach.

The organizational structure of both CRCL and the Privacy Office should be changed to ensure proper alignment with the department’s mission. The Office of General Counsel should absorb both CRCL’s and PRIV’s necessary functions

OFFICE OF THE IMMIGRATION DETENTION OMBUDSMAN (OIDO) AND OFFICE OF THE CITIZENSHIP AND IMMIGRATION SERVICES OMBUDSMAN (CISOMB)

OIDO. The Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman should be eliminated. This requires a statutory change in Section 106 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2020.18

OIDO was designed to create another impediment to detention through an additional layer of so-called oversight. Several agencies already perform detention oversight. ICE conducts internal audits of facilities and investigates complaints against ICE agents through the Office of Professional Responsibility. Similarly, CBP accepts individual complaints regarding facilities through the Joint Intake Center and staff. Although the CRCL Officer and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Officer/Privacy Officer are statutory, their offices are not mandatory. CRCL and PRIV Officers and employees should report to a Deputy General Counsel, who would be a political appointee.

The CRCL Officer should focus on equal employment opportunity (EEO) compliance and the civil liberties function and investigate matters only within Headquarters or support components. Operational components’ civil liberties offi- cers should investigate incidents regarding their own agencies. The CRCL Officer should ensure that all civil liberties or civil rights complaints are sent to the Office of Inspector General (OIG) for review. If the OIG chooses not to investigate, the CRCL Officer should only provide supportive information on possible courses of action for complainants.

The PRIV Officer and FOIA Officer should focus on FOIA, Privacy Compliance Policy, and Privacy Incident Response. The Deputy General Counsel should provide guidance to DHS leadership regarding Privacy Compliance and Privacy Incident Response. To ensure that only U.S. persons and Lawful Permanent Residents are provided protections as required by the Privacy Act, all DHS issuances should be updated to reflect that DHS protects the privacy of individuals as required by the Privacy Act (U.S. persons and lawful permanent residents);16 the Judicial Redress Act of 2015;17 and any U.S.–European Union Data Protection and Privacy Agreement. Because of the lack of public trust in the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, CRCL and PRIV staff should no longer review intelligence products or provide guidance on any intelligence products or reports.

A consistent, clear, and singular message is necessary for DHS’s mission. Therefore, all communications and/or meetings with any federal, state, local, or nongovernment groups should be limited to the Deputy General Counsel. In addi- tion, given the narrower scope of work, OGC should disband the outside advisory boards and the more than 50 working groups in which CRCL and PRIV currently participate. Finally, CRCL and PRIV should no longer issue bulletins or periodicals.

and manages complaints against agents through the OPR. In addition, CRCL, OIG, GAO, and Congress all perform detention oversight. These multiple bodies place unmanageable and unreasonable burdens on ICE to manage several sometimes inconsistent audits/inspections at the same time.

If OIDO remains a DHS component, the Secretary should immediately issue a direc- tive stripping CRCL of its immigration portfolio. OIDO is in a better position with dedicated resources and immigration experts to perform this function than CRCL is. Allowing both offices to conduct detention oversight is duplicative and wasteful. The Secretary should conduct a thorough review of the effectiveness of Direc- tive 0810.1,19 which is widely interpreted as requiring a wholesale referral of cases to OIG. In reality, OIG investigates only a small fraction of them and often sits on cases for longer than the five-day window specified in the directive. Meanwhile, the other agencies wait in limbo to execute their duties.

CISOMB. The Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman should be eliminated. The DHS bureaucracy is too large, and the Secretary has too many direct reports. CISOMB’s policy functions can be performed (and sometimes already are) by OIG and GAO. The specialized case work can be moved into USCIS as a special unit, much like the IRS Taxpayer Advocate. This would require a stat- utory change to Section 452 of the Homeland Security Act of 2002.20 If CISOMB continues as a DHS component, a policy should be issued that prohibits CISOMB from assisting illegal aliens to obtain benefits. Currently, approximately 15 percent–20 percent of CISOMB’s workload consists of helping DACA applicants obtain and renew benefits, including work authorization. This is not the role of an ombudsman. In addition, the government should be a neutral adjudicator, not an advocate for illegal aliens.

AGENCY RELATIONSHIPS

All agencies and departments touching immigration policy should work in sync with one another.

While there are numerous areas in which such cooperation is critical, immigration has proven to be the most difficult. Accordingly, several objectives will be necessary for each of the following departments.

Department of Health and Human Services: Agree to move the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) to DHS or, alternatively, implement an aggressive and regular effort by the Secretary of HHS to ensure that ORR is fully pursuing presidential objectives in support of DHS.

Department of Defense: Assist in aggressively building the border wall system on America’s southern border. Additionally, explicitly acknowledge and adjust personnel and priorities to participate actively in the defense of America’s borders, including using military personnel and hardware to prevent illegal crossings between ports of entry and channel all cross-border traffic to legal ports of entry.

Department of Justice: Agree to move the Executive Office for Immigration Review and the Office of Immigration Litigation to DHS and/or, alternatively, to treat the administrative law judges (immigration judges and Board of Immigration Appeals) as national security personnel, decertify their union, and move to increase hiring significantly to enable the processing of more immigration cases.

Department of State: Allow DHS to lead international engagement in the Western Hemisphere on issues of security and migration. Additionally, quickly and aggressively address recalcitrant countries’ failure to accept deportees by imposing stiff sanctions until deportees are in fact accepted for return (not just promised to be taken). Department of Housing and Urban Development: Ensure that only U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents utilize or occupy federally subsidized housing.

Department of Education: Deny loan access to those who are not U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents, and deny loan access to students at schools that provide in-state tuition to illegal aliens. Department of Labor: Eliminate the two (of four) lowest wage levels for foreign workers.

Department of the Treasury: Implement all necessary regulations both to equalize taxes between American citizens and working visa holders and to provide DHS with all tax information of illegal aliens as expeditiously as possible. Intelligence Community: Cooperate in the shrinking or elimination of the I&A role in the IC while replacing it with CBP and HSI representation to the IC.