The Department of Homeland Security’s starring role in President-elect Donald Trump’s planned immigration crackdown raises questions about the fate of the rest of its sprawling portfolio.
Former government officials worry a border security and immigration enforcement emphasis will short-change the department’s other obligations. Meanwhile, some conservative critics of DHS already have agency offices and programs in their crosshairs.
“Hopefully the policy focus on it will not come at the expense of all of the other critical missions that the department performs,” said Carrie Cordero, a former national security official who’s now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security research group.
With varied missions including cybersecurity, counterterrorism, and disaster response merged in a 250,000-person department, DHS has been criticized as bloated and dysfunctional since its inception after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
South Dakota Gov.
Some homeland security professionals are skeptical the shift will go far enough to reset the troubled department, while others worry it’ll leave it less stable and less publicly accountable. The focus on immigration enforcement threatens to pull attention and money from the rest of the agency’s functions.
‘Do It All’
Transition officials didn’t comment about future agency priorities but touted Noem’s experience deploying state resources to help at the southern border.
Noem’s limited background in homeland security matters — responding to natural disasters and building up South Dakota’s cybersecurity industry — offers few other clues about how she may seek to mold the department.
Conservatives are pushing an array of big ideas.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proposes a full-scale dismantling of DHS that would combine border and immigration enforcement offices from across the federal government, privatize the Transportation Security Administration, and move the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the Interior Department. It would also shuffle or downsize other offices.
Ken Cuccinelli, a top DHS official during Trump’s first term, penned the section, which called for “shifting significant resources away from several supporting components to the essential operational components.” Trump disavowed Project 2025 during his campaign but has since begun stocking his incoming administration with the plan’s authors.
Such a sweeping reorganization is highly unlikely, as it would require a long legislative battle involving committees with competing jurisdictions.
“It took a 9/11 terror attack to create this in the first place,” said Lora Ries, who leads the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center. “I’m not optimistic.”
The incoming administration has the opportunity to address more discrete problems the department has faced from the start, said Oklahoma Sen.
Trump’s team could tackle questions about whether the Secret Service would function better in its original home agency of the Treasury Department and address concerns about Homeland Security Investigations’ overlap with the Justice Department’s Drug Enforcement Administration, Lankford said.
“DHS is a 20-year-old agency that’s struggled,” Lankford said, adding, “there are some of those questions that just need to be answered.”
Lawmakers will also have to grapple with resource needs to figure out how to surge funding for immigration enforcement without undermining the rest of DHS’s work, said Rep.
“We have to do it all,” he said.
Political Influence
Former DHS officials are concerned the Trump administration’s focus on border and immigration enforcement — along with other actions he might take at DHS — will leave the department more politically charged than ever.
“You’re going to see a politicization of DHS in a way that I think is counterproductive to the department’s mission,” said Nixon Peabody partner John Sandweg, who was acting DHS general counsel and acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during former President Barack Obama’s administration.
DHS regularly landed in the national spotlight during Trump’s first term, facing public outcry over separating migrant children from their parents, barring travel from several Muslim-majority countries to the US, and aggressively policing protesters and surveilling journalists in Portland, Ore., in 2020, among other divisive moves.
Spencer Reynolds, a former agency official now at the Brennan Center for Justice, argued DHS is “primed to lead a crackdown on dissent” under Trump because the Biden administration hasn’t created adequate guardrails on its intelligence and law enforcement practices.
Public opinion shifts favoring stricter border policies may give Trump more room to carry out his immigration enforcement and deportation plans without widespread public backlash, at least initially, said former DHS official Tom Warrick, now at the nonpartisan Atlantic Council. The department will have to craft policies carefully and cooperate with any court interventions to maintain public trust, he added.
‘Driven Out’
The department’s prospective political fights could disturb its workforce morale, which has only recently begun climbing from the bottom of federal rankings.
Some DHS agencies, including the Border Patrol and ICE, may see boosts after many agents and officers spent years complaining about President Joe Biden’s approach to immigration policy. Other parts of the department may feel they’re getting short shrift, Cordero said.
One longtime career employee, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, said he’s been doing impromptu counseling sessions with junior and mid-level employees concerned about the incoming administration’s views of the workforce.
Trump has pledged to reinstate his first-term “Schedule F” proposal to reclassify certain civil servant positions as political, making those individuals easier to fire. And allies Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are working to slash the size of government.
Career officials are also on edge about a Heritage-linked website aiming to expose “deep state” employees deemed likely to undermine Trump’s immigration agenda.
There are “big open questions about how many people will be driven out of by the incoming administration,” Nixon Peabody partner Joseph Maher, a 20-year agency veteran and its former acting general counsel, said.
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