Let's get first to a bit of administrivia, for those who don't know: the secretary and deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are referred to, respectively, by employees as "S-1" and "S-2". I'm not sure how this cutesy bit of shorthand took root but it's been the case pretty much since DHS was formed.
S-1, that is to say, Secretary Jeh Johnson, testified before the House Judiciary Committee a few days ago, as Jon Feere noted in his blog commenting on one portion of that testimony, relating to the failure of DHS to ask the Secretary of State to suspend visa issuance to countries that are failing to issue travel documents to accept back their citizens being deported from the United States.
The Secretary's prepared testimony shows that he is a skilled apparatchik capable of "staying on message" by saying as little as possible on anything substantive, and where something of import is mentioned, it is in the kind of off-hand, tip-of-the-iceberg fashion perfected by his boss the president, calculated to inoculate in case the lid blows off later. In the president's case, I refer to his almost sotto voce reference to "terror" in Benghazi even as his U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice was saying the attack was simply a demonstration gone awry. In Johnson's case, it is the reference to the surge of thousands of minors flooding across our southwest border in the past several weeks: "We are concerned and closely monitoring a substantial increase in the numbers of unaccompanied children, who are some of the most vulnerable individuals who interact with our immigration system."
Many of the themes in the Secretary's written testimony mirror, word-for-word, his remarks when recently interviewed on the PBS News Hour — another sadly non-substantive and unimpressive appearance.
During the extraordinarily long hearing, lasting several hours, one rarely gets any sense of the man himself, even in the face of direct questions about a number of troubling issues, such as DACA and the Secure Communities program, even the shocking rise in the number of minors now pouring across the border.
Only once, when pressed hard on the duty of executive branch officials to faithfully execute the laws, does one see the public persona drop. Johnson responded that while his political loyalty is to the president, his higher loyalty is to the Constitution and laws of the United States. Unfortunately, when asked to make clear his thoughts on when a boundary is inappropriately crossed by the executive, he appeared to describe a course of action exactly like what this administration has pursued in instituting programs such as DACA, and when confronted on that dichotomy, he had no satisfactory answers.
In fact, on a number of occasions, the secretary seems incapable of responding substantively. One senses that despite having been on the job six months, he does not yet really understand the underpinnings of immigration law and policy in any number of extremely critical and sensitive areas; areas on which he had to have known he would be grilled by both the right and the left.
Some of his responses appear, at least to me, to be downright fatuous. When asked what could be done to dry up the flow of minors being smuggled across the border, his response was that DHS would undertake a series of public service commercials and advertisements, not only in the United States, but in countries south of the border as well. I cannot for the life of me imagine how or why such a campaign would make even the slightest dent in a crisis that has been created by the administration's own inept handling of the cases of minors, accompanied or unaccompanied.
It will be singularly ineffective for children who are being smuggled to join parents already illegally in the United States, because those parents know that the government will actually complete the smuggling venture for them, if the child is apprehended.
Older unaccompanied minors, who may or may not be traveling north to unite with family — those in the mid- to late-teens — will be equally unimpressed by such commercials, knowing that if apprehended, they will be turned over to social service agencies and released —and, if not caught, that they can cheaply purchase documents fabricating an identity, and date and time of entry, that will assist them to seek future extensions of DACA or other such programs that the administration may choose to create out of whole cloth, and meanwhile join the legion of other illegal aliens working and living in the United States who constitute "no priority" for the government to apprehend.
Another area in which the secretary's remarks fall seriously short is with regard to the Secure Communities program, designed to locate, take custody of, and remove alien criminals. Judiciary Chairman Goodlatte had particularly expressed his concern about the continued viability of the program in his own opening statement for the hearing.
Johnson responded that he did not intend to do away with Secure Communities, but believed that it had suffered from communication problems with state and local officials that he hoped to overcome so that the program could benefit from a "fresh start". I cannot imagine what kind of fresh start can resuscitate a program that is on life support, again because of administration-inflicted wounds. It was DHS and its subordinate Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency that initially accepted the refusal of a number of jurisdictions to honor detainers, which is the lifeblood of the program. It was DHS and ICE that have consistently settled lawsuits filed by the ACLU and other interest groups suing on behalf of individuals against whom detainers were placed — leaving their state and local "partners" in the lurch to fend for themselves as remaining named defendants in the suits — declining in some cases to even provide amicus briefs when invited by the presiding judge. And it most recently was Johnson's subordinate, Acting ICE Director Dan Ragsdale, who put the final nail in the coffin by asserting publicly that the honoring of detainers was entirely voluntary. So exactly what message can Secretary Johnson send under these circumstances that changes the tenor of the dialogue, or persuades state and local law enforcement that honoring immigration detainers isn't at their peril when confronted by litigious and deep-pocketed organizations whose aim is to dismantle effective interior immigration enforcement?
Or does he intend to persuade them that this time, DHS and ICE are serious — really, really serious — about taking felons into custody despite public proof that they have actually released them by the tens of thousands?
Seems to me that Secretary Johnson's honeymoon period — his window of opportunity to actually understand the programs he supervises — will soon draw to a close. He needs to do better than staying on script, or mouthing platitudes about messaging and communications, because the problems have become nearly intractable.
The administration, the department, and its subordinate agencies have dug a substantial trench. It's time to drop the shovels and begin figuring out how to carve footholds which lead them back out of the trench in a way that doesn't bring the whole muddy structure down on them.