[House Hearing, 117 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
APPROPRIATIONS FOR 2022
_______________________________________________________________________
HEARINGS
BEFORE A
SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE
COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
______________
SUBCOMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY
LUCILLE ROYBAL-ALLARD, California, Chairwoman
HENRY CUELLAR, Texas CHUCK FLEISCHMANN, Tennessee
LAUREN UNDERWOOD, Illinois STEVEN M. PALAZZO, Mississippi
DAVID E. PRICE, North Carolina JOHN H. RUTHERFORD, Florida
C. A. DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER, Maryland ASHLEY HINSON, Iowa
MIKE QUIGLEY, Illinois
PETE AGUILAR, California
NOTE: Under committee rules, Ms. DeLauro, as chair of the full
committee, and Ms. Granger, as ranking minority member of the full
committee, are authorized to sit as members of all subcommittees.
Darek Newby, Kris Mallard, Karyn Richmond, Bob Joachim,
Mike Herman, and Elizabeth Lapham
Subcommittee Staff
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PART 2
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
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Printed for th euse of the Committee on Appropriations
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
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COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS
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ROSA L. DeLAURO, Connecticut, Chair
MARCY KAPTUR, Ohio
DAVID E. PRICE, North Carolina
LUCILLE ROYBAL-ALLARD, California
SANFORD D. BISHOP, Jr., Georgia
BARBARA LEE, California
BETTY McCOLLUM, Minnesota
TIM RYAN, Ohio
C. A. DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER, Maryland
DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ, Florida
HENRY CUELLAR, Texas
CHELLIE PINGREE, Maine
MIKE QUIGLEY, Illinois
DEREK KILMER, Washington
MATT CARTWRIGHT, Pennsylvania
GRACE MENG, New York
MARK POCAN, Wisconsin
KATHERINE M. CLARK, Massachusetts
PETE AGUILAR, California
LOIS FRANKEL, Florida
CHERI BUSTOS, Illinois
BONNIE WATSON COLEMAN, New Jersey
BRENDA L. LAWRENCE, Michigan
NORMA J. TORRES, California
CHARLIE CRIST, Florida
ANN KIRKPATRICK, Arizona
ED CASE, Hawaii
ADRIANO ESPAILLAT, New York
JOSH HARDER, California
JENNIFER WEXTON, Virginia
DAVID J. TRONE, Maryland
LAUREN UNDERWOOD, Illinois
SUSIE LEE, Nevada
KAY GRANGER, Texas
HAROLD ROGERS, Kentucky
ROBERT B. ADERHOLT, Alabama
MICHAEL K. SIMPSON, Idaho
JOHN R. CARTER, Texas
KEN CALVERT, California
TOM COLE, Oklahoma
MARIO DIAZ-BALART, Florida
STEVE WOMACK, Arkansas
JEFF FORTENBERRY, Nebraska
CHUCK FLEISCHMANN, Tennessee
JAIME HERRERA BEUTLER, Washington
DAVID P. JOYCE, Ohio
ANDY HARRIS, Maryland
MARK E. AMODEI, Nevada
CHRIS STEWART, Utah
STEVEN M. PALAZZO, Mississippi
DAVID G. VALADAO, California
DAN NEWHOUSE, Washington
JOHN R. MOOLENAAR, Michigan
JOHN H. RUTHERFORD, Florida
BEN CLINE, Virginia
GUY RESCHENTHALER, Pennsylvania
MIKE GARCIA, California
ASHLEY HINSON, Iowa
TONY GONZALES, Texas
Robin Juliano, Clerk and Staff Director
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
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Hearings Held
Page
March 10, 2021
MODERNIZING THE FEDERAL CIVILIAN APPROACH TO CYBERSECURITY....... 1
Witnesses
Goldstein, Eric, executive assistant director for Cybersecurity,
CISA........................................................... 3
Wales, Brandon, acting director, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
Security Agency (CISA)......................................... 12
March 16, 2021
THE ROLE OF FEMA AND EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT IN COVID-19 RESPONSE... 41
Witnesses
Brown, Curtis, State coordinator and co-founder, Virginia
Department of Emergency Management and Institute for Diversity
and Inclusion in Emergency Management.......................... 84
Fenton, Bob, senior official performing the duties of FEMA
Administrator, Federal Emergency Management Agency............. 43
Ghilarducci, Mark, director, California Governor's Office of
Emergency Services............................................. 70
McGowan, Kevin, director, Los Angeles County Office of Emergency
Management..................................................... 93
Sheehan, Patrick, director, Tennessee Emergency Management Agency 85
March 17, 2021
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES............ 127
Witnesses
Cherthoff, Hon, Michael, former Secretary, Department of Homeland
Security....................................................... 129
Johnson, Hon. Jeh, former Secretary, Department of Homeland
Security....................................................... 136
March 24, 2021
TARGETED VIOLENCE AND TERRORISM PREVENTION....................... 167
Witnesses
Aborn, Richard, president, Citizens Crime Commission of New Your
City........................................................... 208
Cohen, John, assistant secretary, Counterterrorism and Emerging
Threats, Department of Homeland Security....................... 175
Cote, Tyler, director and co-founder, Operation250............... 214
Picarelli, John, director, Office of Targeted Violence and
Terrorism Prevention, Department of Homeland Security.......... 187
Rangel, Sammy, executive director and co-founder, Life After Hate 220
April 28, 2021
COAST GUARD READINESS............................................ 253
Witness
Schultz, Admiral Karl L., commandant, U.S. Coast Guard........... 255
May 6, 2021
U.S. SECRET SERVICE FISCAL YEAR 2022 BUDGET REQUEST.............. 303
Witness
Murray, James, director, U.S. Secret Service..................... 305
May 13, 2021
U.S. IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND
OPERATIONAL PRIORITIES......................................... 331
Witness
Johnson, Tae D., acting director, U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement.................................................... 353
May 19, 2021
U.S. CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND
OPERATIONAL PRIORITIES......................................... 397
Witness
Miller, Troy, senior official performing the duties of the
commissioner, U.S. Customs and Border Protection............... 400
May 20, 2021
MEMBERS' DAY..................................................... 457
Witnesses
Fallon, Hon. Pat, a Representative in Congress from the State of
Texas.......................................................... 463
Jackson Lee, Hon. Sheila, a Representative in Congress from the
State of Texas, submitted statement............................ 467
Van Drew, Hon. Jefferson, a Representative in Congress from the
State of New Jersey............................................ 458
May 26, 2021
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND
OPERATIONAL PRIORITIES......................................... 471
Witness
Mayorkas, Hon. Alejandro, Secretary, Department of Homeland
Security.......................................................
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY APPROPRIATIONS FOR 2022
----------
Wednesday, March 10, 2021.
MODERNIZING THE FEDERAL CIVILIAN APPROACH TO CYBERSECURITY DEPARTMENT
OF HOMELAND SECURITY APPROPRIATIONS FOR 2022
WITNESSES
ERIC GOLDSTEIN, EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT DIRECTOR FOR CYBERSECURITY, CISA
BRANDON WALES, ACTING DIRECTOR, CYBERSECURITY AND INFRASTRUCTURE
SECURITY AGENCY (CISA)
Ms. Roybal-Allard. The Subcommittee on Homeland Security
will come to order.
As this hearing is being conducted virtually, we must
address a few housekeeping matters. Members are responsible for
muting and unmuting themselves. When you are recognized to
speak, if I notice that you have not unmuted yourself, I will
ask you if you would like the staff to unmute you. If you
indicate approval by nodding, staff will unmute your
microphone. To avoid inadvertent background noise, the chair or
staff designated by the chair may mute participants'
microphones when they are not recognized to speak.
I remind all members and witnesses that the 5-minute clock
still applies.
If there is a technology issue during a member's speaking
time, we will move to the next member until the issue is
resolved, and you will retain the balance of your time.
You will notice a clock on your screen showing your
remaining time. At 1 minute remaining, the clock will turn
yellow. At 30 seconds remaining, I will gently tap the gavel to
remind the member speaking that their time is almost expired.
When your time has expired, the clock will turn red and I will
begin to recognize the next member.
We will follow the speaking order set forth in the House
rules beginning with the chair and ranking member, followed by
members present at the time the hearing is called to order, in
order of seniority, and we will alternate by party. Next, we
will go to members who were not present when the hearing was
called to order until every member present has had a first
round.
Finally, House rules require me to remind you that we have
set up an email address to which members can submit information
in writing at any of our hearings or markups. That email
address has been provided in advance to your staff.
Now, with that business out of the way, I will welcome
everyone to the first Department of Homeland Security
Subcommittee hearing of the 117th Congress. I particularly want
to welcome our new members: Ms. Underwood, Mr. Quigley, and
Mrs. Hinson.
Welcome also to today's witnesses, Acting Director Wales
and Executive Assistant Director Goldstein of the Cybersecurity
and Infrastructure Security Agency.
I will make my opening statement brief to maximize time
for questions.
Acting Director Wales, you have been asked to step into an
interim role as acting director, and we very much appreciate
your service in this capacity. We have spoken about some of the
recent challenges you and CISA face, and I want to reaffirm my
commitment to helping you address them.
The SolarWinds incident, a water treatment facility
attacked in Florida, and, most recently, the compromise of
Microsoft Exchange servers demonstrate that cybersecurity
breaches are no longer isolated incidents. Networks are an
emerging battlefield for both the public and private sectors.
In the case of the SolarWinds incident, it took far too
long to become aware that a foreign adversary had infiltrated
Federal civilian agency networks, and, if infiltrated,
sensitive data. I am deeply concerned about how long it will
take to learn the full extent of that compromise, and we are
just beginning to learn about the impact of the Microsoft
Exchange Server intrusion.
It is also unnerving how easy it was for a hacker to
manipulate the control systems of the Florida treatment plant,
increasing the amount of lye to levels that could have led to
tragedy if a watchful supervisor at the plant hadn't noticed it
in time.
It is clear that we need to be investing much more in
preventing, mitigating, and responding to cyber intrusions and
attacks. The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan includes
significant funding to quickly improve the Federal civilian
cybersecurity posture, including $650 million for CISA.
I look forward to hearing more from you on that topic
today and on CISA's overall vision for modernizing our approach
to cybersecurity.
I would now like to turn to the distinguished gentleman
from Tennessee, Ranking Member Fleischmann, for his opening
comments.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chair. And as always, it
is a pleasure to work with you and yours in this subcommittee,
and on the full committee as well.
Welcome, Acting Director Wales and Executive Assistant
Director Goldstein, and thank you for joining us today as we
look into ways to help modernize Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency.
First off, I know that we are here to identify problems,
and, hopefully, to come to an agreement on some recommended
areas for improvement in the government's protection of and
response to cyber attacks.
But first, let me take this opportunity to address that
the scope of this hearing is not just to critique the work that
you and the men and women at CISA have done to this point. With
limited resources at your disposal, you have done a tremendous
job, and I thank you.
It is unfortunate that the world of cybersecurity is
almost a thankless job where, in a best-case scenario, all of
your work allows government operations and agencies to continue
unhindered, and that all of your hard work goes almost
completely unnoticed, and, at worst, only your shortcomings are
brought up after a major attack occurs. So please pass on our
thanks to your workforce and let them know that we appreciate
their efforts.
Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, Nation State
actors with access to significant funds and resources have
found a way to thwart our best protections and exploit our
vulnerabilities as we have seen from the Russian-backed
SolarWinds attack, and the much more recent China attack based
on Microsoft Exchange servers.
We have learned from these attacks that our adversaries
are not only aware of our capabilities, but they are shrewd and
cunning enough to go around them, exploiting our weaknesses and
taking advantage of our vulnerabilities in real time almost
completely undetected.
The cyber world is certainly a challenging one whose
vulnerabilities and shortcomings are not always readily
apparent. Given the speed at which technology advances and the
skills and abilities of bad actors with it, we must ensure that
we are doing everything we can to keep up with new
advancements, allowing ourselves the ability to both better
recognize our shortcomings, and better protect, identify, and
respond to any future attacks.
I look forward to your testimony on CISA's recommendations
for improvements, and ensuing conversation on how to best
protect our cyber infrastructure moving forward.
Thank you for being here. I look forward to your
testimony.
Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Acting Director Wales, we will submit
the full text of your official statement for the hearing
record.
Please begin your oral summary.
Mr. Wales. Thank you.
And good morning, Chairman DeLauro, Chairwoman Roybal-
Allard, and Ranking Member Fleischmann, and members of the
committee. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today
regarding the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency's perspectives on modernizing the Federal civilian
approach to cybersecurity.
If we needed any reminder of the significance of the cyber
threats we face to our national and economic security, the last
3 months, and, indeed, the last week, should serve as a
warning. We must invest in and focus on modernizing our
cybersecurity network infrastructure in order to truly defend
today and secure tomorrow.
CISA leads the Nation's efforts to advance the
cybersecurity, physical security, and resilience of our
critical infrastructure. We share information and enable
operational collaboration between the Federal Government, State
and local governments, the private sector, international
partners, and law enforcement, intelligence, and defense
communities. This role has proven invaluable in managing recent
cyber incidents, and I cannot understate how important
collective defense is for cybersecurity; but we also know that
there is a lot more work that needs to be done.
Today, we will focus on two recent significant
cybersecurity incidents: first, the exploitation of Microsoft
Exchange vulnerabilities disclosed last week and, second, the
supply chain compromise the Federal Government was alerted to
in December of 2020.
Starting with the Exchange vulnerabilities. On March 2,
CISA, the NSA, Microsoft, and Volexity disclosed previously
unknown vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange products. Through
CISA's coordinated vulnerability disclosure process, our
organization helped all partners ensure that vulnerability
information and mitigation actions were quickly shared broadly.
On March 3, CISA issued Executive Emergency Directive 21-
02 requiring Federal civilian departments and agencies to
investigate, patch, and, if necessary, disconnect vulnerable
products from their network. This directive reflects our
determination that these vulnerabilities pose unacceptable
risks to Federal networks and require emergency action.
CISA is already aware of widespread exploitation of the
vulnerabilities, and trusted partners have observed malicious
actors using these vulnerabilities to gain access to targeted
organizations in the United States and globally. Importantly,
once an adversary gains access to a Microsoft Exchange Server,
they can access and control an enterprise network, even after
the vulnerabilities are patched. A malicious exploitation could
be conducted by actors with various motivations, from stealing
information to executing ransomware attacks, or physically
damaging connected infrastructure.
CISA has stood up, CISA.gov/ed21-02, as a consolidated
resource and a mechanism for all of our information on this
vulnerability, and we are using all of our forums to share this
information quickly and broadly with our partners.
Switching to the supply chain compromise, late last year
CISA became aware of a broad cyber intrusion campaign largely
associated with the supply chain compromise of SolarWinds Orion
Network Management software. Nearly 18,000 entities were
potentially exposed to the malicious SolarWinds software. CISA
estimates that a much smaller number were compromised when the
threat actor activated a malicious backdoor they had installed
in the SolarWinds product and moved into an exposed network.
Once inside the network, the actor was able to use their
privileged access to abuse the authentication mechanisms, the
systems that control trust and manage identities, ultimately
allowing them to access and exfiltrate email and other data
from compromised networks and Microsoft Office 365 cloud
environments.
The primary objective of the threat actor in this campaign
appears to be gaining access to sensitive unclassified
communications and to identify additional opportunities to
compromise IT supply chains.
CISA's work, in response to this campaign, falls under
four primary lines of effort: one, scoping the campaign; two,
sharing information and detections; three, supporting short-
term remediation; and, four, providing guidance and assistance
in long-term network recovery. These lines of effort are the
framework around which we think about our response to any cyber
incident.
We continue to work this campaign aggressively. Just
yesterday, we rolled out a new website that consolidates
information and resources on best practices for remediating
compromised systems, and preparing Federal departments and
agencies for long-term actions to build more secure, resilient
networks.
Before I close, I want to address a more fundamental
question: What does this all mean? Both the Microsoft Exchange
vulnerabilities and the SolarWinds campaign highlight the
lengths to which sophisticated adversaries will go to
compromise our networks. They will use never seen before
techniques, exquisite trade craft, zero-trust vulnerabilities
to defeat our current cybersecurity architecture. Knowing that,
we must raise our game. We need modern cybersecurity governance
and capabilities. We need cybersecurity tools and services that
provide us a better chance of detecting the most sophisticated
attacks, and we need to rethink our approach to managing
cybersecurity across 101 Federal civilian executive branch
agencies.
Thank you, again, for the opportunity to testify on this
important subject, and I will now turn the discussion over to
CISA's newly appointed Cybersecurity Division Executive
Assistant Director, Eric Goldstein, to talk about the direction
we are headed, the capabilities we urgently need, and what you
can do to help.
[The information follows:]******** COMMITTEE INSERT
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Mr. Goldstein. Thank you, Acting Director.
Chairman DeLauro, Chairman Roybal-Allard, Ranking Member
Fleischmann, thank you for the chance to speak with you and the
committee today. This is my first hearing before the committee
in my new capacity as Executive Assistant Director for
Cybersecurity within CISA. I would like to commend the
committee, first and foremost, for focusing on this urgent
national security threat. I look forward to partnering with the
committee to ensure that our Nation has the capabilities and
resources to address rapidly increasing cybersecurity risks.
Acting Director Wales provided an overview of recent
incidents affecting public and private entities of all types.
These incidents reflect a need to strengthen our Nation's cyber
defenses, invest in new capabilities, and begin to
fundamentally change how we think about cybersecurity. Even as
CISA responds to and mitigates the impact of these immediate
incidents, we are looking ahead to ensure that CISA is
appropriately postured to defend today and secure tomorrow.
To this end, we are focused on urgent improvements across
four areas of strategic growth:
First, we must increase CISA's visibility into
cybersecurity risks across the Federal civilian executive
branch, and, where feasible, across non Federal entities.
Second, we must expand CISA's incident response capacity.
Third, we must improve our ability to analyze large
volumes of cybersecurity information to rapidly identify
emerging threats and direct timely mitigation.
And, fourth, but perhaps strategically most importantly,
we must drive adoption of defensible networks, including
progressing towards zero-trust environments, where we assume
that networks are compromised and we focus on protecting the
users and assets therein.
Turning to our key priority of operational visibility, we
must increase and improve our insight into Federal agency's
cloud environments, and to end points, the servers and
computers that agencies use to conduct their daily business.
This is critically important during COVID-19, as the Federal
workforce has moved to increase remote work, a trend that we
expect to continue and concomitant increase in the use of cloud
computers. To achieve this goal, we must provide agencies with
detection tools and build our ability to analyze data deriving
therefrom.
While no organization can prevent every cyber intrusion,
increased visibility will let us detect and respond to
incidents more quickly, thereby limiting harm to victim
organizations.
As we expand our visibility, we will also inherently
detect more cybersecurity incidents. To this end, we must
further develop our incident response capacity, to hunt for
threats on Federal networks, and provide urgent assistance to
compromised entities. While we are effectively responding to
incidents today, our resources must be fortified to ensure that
we can meet demand in the future.
Going forward, we must shift to a persistent threat
hunting model in which CISA continuously searches for malicious
activity across partner networks as authorized by the fiscal
year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act.
In addition to increasing our incident response capacity,
we must also develop and refine our analytic capabilities so
that we can analyze cybersecurity data and more rapidly
identify risks across the executive branch.
And, lastly, over the long term, we must facilitate
adoption of more defensible networks, including by offering
shared services to Federal agencies, to raise the baseline of
cybersecurity across the executive branch, and providing
agencies with tools and guidance to move to zero-trust
principles where, again, we presume that network perimeters can
be compromised and we focus on protecting the critical assets
within each network.
We deeply appreciate Congress' consideration of additional
funding to address these priorities, which are urgently needed
for CISA to provide foundational capabilities across the
Federal civilian executive branch. These investments critically
should be considered a downpayment for the sustained effort
required to improve and modernize Federal civilian
cybersecurity over the long term. It is now more critical than
ever to urgently focus on securing the Federal civilian
government and responding quickly when a compromise occurs. By
enhancing our visibility into agency networks, moving towards a
posture of proactive hunting, and deploying more defensible
network architectures, we can most effectively ensure that the
Federal Government can provide the critical services upon which
the American people depend.
Thank you, again, for the chance to speak with you. We
look forward to taking your questions.
[The information follows:]******** COMMITTEE INSERT
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Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you.
Before we go to questions, I understand that the
chairwoman of the full committee is here, and would like to ask
if she has any opening comments that she would like to make
before we go to questions.
The Chair. What I will do, Madam Chair, thank you very,
very much, but I will submit my opening remarks for the record,
and then we will move to questions. But thank you, thank you
very, very much for the opportunity. I appreciate it.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. So SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange
servers is what I would like to talk about right now. It has
been 3 months since we first learned about the significant
supply chain cyber incident involving SolarWinds Orion
software, but many questions still remain. And I know that you
and your team have been working tirelessly to address this
problem and that you share this responsibility with the FBI,
ODNI, the NSA, USCYBERCOM, and your private sector partners and
the impacted agencies and companies.
Unfortunately, as was mentioned, just last week, we
learned about another set of compromises associated with
vulnerabilities in on-premises Microsoft Exchange servers. In
the case of SolarWinds incident, please describe how the
adversary was able to access our networks and infiltrate data
and information for months, if not longer, without being
detected. And also, what information was removed from Federal
civilian networks? And do we know whether the adversary did
anything other than steal information, attempt to manipulate or
delete information, or otherwise alter our systems and
networks?
Mr. Wales. Sure. Thank you, Chairwoman.
What I would say is that the actor in this case used
extremely sophisticated techniques to bypass the security that
is in place at agencies, as well as the significant number of
private sector companies that were compromised as part of the
campaign.
By executing a supply chain attack, by compromising the
SolarWinds product, and putting the backdoor inside of one of
their legitimate patches, that bypasses all of the normal,
traditional perimeter security that is deployed to protect
agencies. And so, it was a trusted patch. It was installed by
network operators. And because of the nature of SolarWinds'
products, that they have broad administrative rights, they
usually are configured to have broad administrative rights, the
networks, that gave the actor access to the network and allowed
them to escalate their privileges in ways that we could not
see.
I think that, as Eric highlighted, this really--this
highlights the need for us to have better insights and
visibility inside of networks. Conducting security at the edge
on the perimeter increasingly lacks the ability to detect the
more sophisticated types of attacks, which are only going to
take place on individual workstations, on individual servers.
And that is why we are pushing for this increase in visibility
down inside of networks.
But to your larger question on what they stole and whether
they did anything else, we continue to believe this was largely
an espionage operation where they were collecting information,
largely based on Microsoft Office 365 email for agency
personnel. In many cases, that was extremely targeted. There
was usually only a couple of dozen individuals at an agency
that were targeted as part of this campaign, and we have no
evidence at this time that the actor did anything except steal
information.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. In the case of the more recent
Microsoft Exchange Server compromises, were Federal agencies
compromised? And, if so, what is the impact, and what steps is
CISA taking to help agencies recover?
Mr. Goldstein. So we are still in the early days of the
investigation of exploitation of Microsoft Exchange Server. As
the Acting Director noted, CISA issued an emergency directive
which required all Federal civilian agencies to both analyze
their networks or indications of compromise, and to immediately
patch. We have seen outstanding responses to that directive;
and now, the vast majority of Microsoft Exchange servers have
been mitigated across the Federal civilian executive branch. We
are working with individual agencies to assess the results of
their forensic analysis.
At this point in time, there are no Federal civilian
agencies that are confirmed to be compromised by this campaign.
However, CISA is working with individual agencies to assess the
results of their analysis, and this is an evolving campaign
with new information coming in by the hour.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Fleischmann.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chair. And I also wanted
to acknowledge and thank the full committee chair, Chair
DeLauro, for joining us today. Thank you, Madam Chair, for
being with us today as well.
In the supply chain attack by Russian state actors, we
first learned about the compromise in early December, but have
since determined that the compromise itself began many months
prior to that. Without getting into why it took so long for us
to learn what we had compromised, I want to get to another
underlying issue.
Two questions: Assuming we knew that a supply chain attack
was a significant vulnerability, how long have we known this,
and what was done previously, if anything, to address this
concern?
And my other question would be, more importantly, how can
we better understand where our vulnerabilities are, and, once
identified, ensure we are addressing them?
Thank you.
Mr. Wales. Sure. Thank you, Ranking Member.
I will take the first part of that question and then allow
Executive Assistant Director Goldstein to take on the second.
I would say that there was a substantial amount of work
done on supply chain security over the last several years,
including several executive orders focused on improving
information and communication technology, supply chains. There
was the passage of the Federal Acquisition Security, the FASC,
that was stood up for Federal agencies at the civilian in the
national security systems, in the intelligence community to
work together to assess supply chain risks and take action to
remove supply chain--potential dangerous supply chains out of
Federal networks.
But there is still more work to be done, and I think the
SolarWinds campaign highlights where trusted patches from
otherwise companies that have a strong business are in need
of--we need different approaches to work with them. How do we
ensure that when the Federal Government takes on software from
a supplier, that that software is free of malicious backdoors?
And that is going to take more work.
It is also, as EAD Goldstein said, one of the key
principles we need to put in place is the zero-trust mindset,
where even if something comes into your network that might be
compromised, you have built enough protections around it, you
have segmented your network properly, where the introduction of
that piece of compromised code will have minimal impacts.
So, we are working this on a number of fronts, but supply
chain attacks are one of the most challenging to address, and
it is going to take a lot more creative thinking to fully solve
it.
Eric.
Mr. Goldstein. Thank you.
And I would just add to that very thorough answer, we need
to confront this challenge on any number of fronts, and so, the
supply chain compromise that we saw with the SolarWinds
incident is one way that we know that sophisticated adversaries
can compromise victim networks, and we need to urgently work
through entities, like the Federal Acquisition Security Council
that I think the Director mentioned, to make sure we are
raising the bar for software assurance and supply chain
integrity across the civilian executive branch, and there is
more work that we can surely do there.
At the same time, it is important to appreciate that, as
the Acting Director noted, this was truly an exquisite attack
perpetrated by a sophisticated actor that took significant
amounts of time and resources. And, so, we need to adopt a
principle that in cybersecurity is called the kill chain, in
which we are trying to prevent an intrusion at multiple phases.
So even if we are unable to prevent the supply chain
compromise, we are detecting the lateral movement across the
network, or we are detecting the escalation of privileges where
the adversary attempts to compromise the authentication systems
that are used to gain access to different assets within a
network, and on down the line.
And, so, we need robust layers of defense within each
Federal civilian executive branch network with data from those
layers coming back to CISA, so we can identify and correlate
security trends across the executive branch and identify these
sorts of deeply mature intrusions before they are able to
endure for months on end and cause lasting damage.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, gentlemen.
Mindful of my limited time, I will be brief with this and
ask for a brief response.
In regards to the existing vulnerabilities and finding
ways to mitigate them, can you describe, in layman's terms, the
vulnerabilities of the Microsoft Exchange attack along with how
long we have known about this weakness? Very quickly. Thank
you.
Mr. Goldstein. Yes, sir. I will do my best to move
quickly.
So CISA was made aware of this vulnerability, along with
Microsoft, on March 2, last Tuesday. As noted, we moved
urgently to issue a directive and direct remediation of the
vulnerability. This was a previously unknown flaw in Microsoft
Exchange Server that allows an adversary to use a combination
of vulnerabilities to gain remote access to the server, and
execute remote commands, potentially exfiltrate data. We are
now seeing adversaries deploy what are known as web shells,
which is a very small bit of code that the adversary can use
the vulnerability to deploy on a Microsoft Exchange Server.
These web shells can be very hard to detect and allow the
adversary to execute additional commands, or take further
actions to steal information or launch more destructive types
of attacks. So this was a previously unknown flaw in Microsoft
Exchange Server that was identified to CISA and to Microsoft
last week, and urgently directed to be remediated immediately
thereafter.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Director Goldstein. And I
yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Chair DeLauro.
The Chair. Thank you very much.
A great deal of effort and resources have gone into
developing the National Cyber Security Protection System, also
known as Einstein. This is perimeter defense tool for Federal
civilian networks. Yet, our adversaries do not appear to be
deterred by it. Why is Einstein not more effective at keeping
our adversaries off of Federal networks?
And a follow-up question would be, with the changing
technology landscape, and the increasing sophistication of our
adversaries' techniques, how does CISA cybersecurity strategy
need to change, and what particularly does the future of
Einstein look like? Why is it not more effective at keeping our
adversaries off the Federal networks?
Mr. Goldstein. Thank you, ma'am, for that question. It is
a very important one.
It is a truism of cybersecurity that our defensive
technologies need to adapt as the threat environment changes
and the way that we use technology changes. Einstein was
originally designed, as the Acting Director noted, as a
perimeter defense program, meaning that it provides intrusion
detection and prevention at the point where agency networks
meet the open internet. Over time, what we have found is
largely because of the increased use of encryption for traffic
entering and exiting Federal networks, which, of course, has
its own privacy and security benefits, the Einstein technology
that was reasonably designed to address risks in technology a
decade ago has grown somewhat stale over time, and now does not
provide the visibility that CISA needs.
For this reason, CISA is urgently moving our detecting
capabilities from that perimeter layer into agency networks to
focus on these end points, the servers and workstations where
we are seeing adversary activity today. This is consistent with
leading trends in the cybersecurity industry, as adopted by
public and private organizations of all types. We already have
pilots in place to precipitate this important transition, and
with funding under consideration by Congress will rapidly
accelerate this transition from a perimeter defense construct
to a construct where we are, in real time, identifying threat
activity within agency networks, which is where the lack
visibility still remains.
The Chair. What is your timing on this transition?
Mr. Goldstein. So the transition is underway now. We
have--these tools are called end points detection and response.
We have pilots underway with certain agencies at this point.
With funding requested from Congress, we will be able to
rapidly accelerate those pilots and deploy this kind of
internal detection and prevention tooling with the agency
network in a much faster time frame.
The Chair. Well, but what I am saying, is it a year? Is it
2 years? Is it 6 months? Is it--do you know?
Mr. Goldstein. So it will be iterative. We will be
deployed over time. Certainly, each month that goes by, we will
cover more agencies. We can certainly come back with a
conclusory date of when we think we will have full coverage,
but this is a scalable process where every month that goes by,
there will be more agencies protected, which is, of course, why
this funding is so urgent so we can get started on this
acceleration today.
Mr. Wales. Let me just add that the $650 million that is
currently under consideration in the relief package is a
downpayment. It accelerates some of these efforts. But this is
going to require sustained investment for both CISA, as well as
the agencies themselves. We want to ensure that as we increase
this visibility, it is going to provide increased visibility to
CISA to look across the entire .gov, and it will also increase
the visibility for the agencies themselves, and those agencies
themselves are going to need additional resources to make sure
they can fully leverage the improved capabilities that we will
be deploying.
We want to make sure that their cybersecurity posture
increases with ours so that the layers of defense that Eric
talked about are solid.
The Chair. Well, it is going to be important for us to
know what the overall--you know, I understand the relief
package; but when you talk about sustained investment, it would
be very good to get to the committee, to the chair, the ranking
member, et cetera. What you anticipate is the cost for this?
And, again, how quickly? Because every month that goes by, we
are at risk for, you know, like the last two events that we are
talking about. One is March 2 of last week, so it is
imperative.
Maybe I can ask a quick question here. This is about the
impact of election security on Federal cybersecurity, because
there has been some conversation about this election security
in 2020 may have distracted the agency's focus away from
cybersecurity.
Did CISA's election security efforts and focus contribute
to a lack of resources or situational awareness that made us
more vulnerable to cybersecurity breaches? Were those efforts a
factor in allowing the SolarWinds' intrusion to go undetected
for so long?
My time ran out. Madam Chair, if I could beg your
indulgence for this.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Madam Chair, you can take all the time
you want.
The Chair. Thank you.
Mr. Wales. Let me address that first by saying that the
work that we did in concert with our interagency partners to
protect our Democratic institutions is not a distraction. It is
a core mission of the agency, a priority work, work that
continues to this day.
And let me address it, secondly, by saying our agency has
a broad mission. As I covered in my opening remarks, we work
across cyber physical communications. We are building
resilience and heightening and enhancing security. We have to
have the ability to work multiple problems.
Even in the midst of the election season, we were still
dealing with other cybersecurity incidents in the Federal
Government, at State and local governments, in the private
sector.
I do not believe that the election distracted us. If
anything, it has further honed our capabilities, it has
improved our coordination within the interagency, and it has
made the U.S. Government cybersecurity mission more efficient
and more effective. And we are just going to try to build on
that going forward.
The Chairwoman. Thank you. Thank you, and I yield back,
and I thank the gentlewoman for indulging the time. Appreciate
it.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Rutherford.
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Director Wales, the Continuous Diagnostic and Mitigation
program, which is a government-wide, cybersecurity program,
aims to provide capability to identify cybersecurity risks,
prioritize those risks based upon potential impact, and to
mitigate the most significant problems.
Now, the program was designed for phases, as I understand.
Phase 1 was basically asset management; phase 2 was to identify
and assess that management, access management; and then phase 3
was, let's see, a data protection phase, and then phase 4 was
agencies were going to be--different agencies were going to be
synthesized to adopt CDM capabilities, which we would fund for
up to--DHS would fund a base year and then one optional year.
And CISA said that this was foundational. Now, that tells me it
is pretty darn important.
Can you tell me how many agencies are now actively moving
through the Continuous Diagnostic and Mitigation Program? How
many are phase 1 and how many are requesting phase 1 level?
Mr. Wales. So I will give you a little bit of a high-level
answer, and then I am going to ask Eric to talk about kind of
how we envision the program moving forward since CDM is going
to be critical for a number of the capabilities that EAD
Goldstein outlined we will be deploying, including the end
point detection and response tools.
CDM provides, and every agency is currently--every Federal
civilian executive branch agency is participating in CDM, and
has--and I would say phase 1 is almost fully deployed. There is
a couple of parts of a couple of agencies that continue to
deploy asset management tools, but we need that--agencies need
to understand what is on their network. They need to understand
who is on their network. They need to understand what is the
current patch level, where are current vulnerabilities in their
network, because the more sophisticated techniques, the end
point detection, the zero-trust architectures, assume you have
a comprehensive understanding of what your network looks like,
and the potential vulnerabilities on it. So we could not move
to these more sophisticated tools and capabilities without
getting that foundation in place.
CDM has built that foundation. The reason why agencies
today can respond so quickly to our emergency directives is
that CDM has provided them that level of insight into their
network, and the ability to look at the individual objects on
their network and know where they are, what patch level they
are, and where they need to take remediative action.
So I would ask Eric to just give you a little bit of
highlight about what the next steps are there as we move into
phases 3 and 4.
Mr. Rutherford. OK. So--but if I could, so, Director, you
are telling me that all executive branch agencies are in CDM at
least to phase 2? Is that correct?
Mr. Wales. I would say that every agency has largely
completed phase 1. Like I said, there is a couple of places.
Most agencies are in phase 2, or completing phase 2, and then
we are actually--some of the funding for fiscal year 2022 and
2023 begin to fund phase 3 and phase 4 efforts across the
civilian executive branch.
Mr. Rutherford. OK. I would like to hear from Eric.
Mr. Goldstein. Yes, sir, of course. We sort of think of
CDM as providing three foundational capabilities for Federal
civilian cybersecurity. The first is it is a mechanism for CISA
to provide fundamental security tools to all Federal civilian
agencies. And as the Acting Director noted, as we moved to
provision of the next generation of cybersecurity tools,
including end point detection and response tools, including
tools that allow adoption of these zero-trust principles that
focus on--
Mr. Rutherford. OK. Can I interrupt you just 1 minute?
Mr. Goldstein. Yes, sir.
Mr. Rutherford. So these fundamental detection tools, are
these also those--you know, we mentioned Einstein is kind of a
border security. The interior security tools to look inside the
systems, not at the portals, not at the intrusion points, are
those tools--have they been developed, and is CDM moving that
forward?
Mr. Goldstein. Yes, sir. So they have absolutely been
developed. And I do think it is useful to think of the National
Cybersecurity Protection System, or Einstein, and the CDM
program not as separate offerings, but really as part of CISA's
cohesive and holistic strategy to protect Federal civilian
agencies.
So NCPS and CDM really work hand in glove to protect all
levels of the network against cybersecurity risks. And, again,
both of those programs must transition to address changes in
the risk and technology environment.
Now, moving to CDM for a moment, along with providing the
mechanism to provide agencies with many of these modern
security tools that we need for layered defense, CDM is also
the mechanism through which agencies are able to get visibility
into their own risks, which is critically important for agency
CIOs to understand their environment and the risks they are in,
and then for CISA to get cross-government visibility into risk
trends which will then--the emergency directive that we just
issued is a canonical example, when we issue these kinds of
directives, CDM, particularly as it matures, gives us the
ability to look into agency networks and understand the
pervasiveness of the given risk, and then drive very focused
timely remediation.
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you. Very good answer.
With that, Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. OK. Mr. Ruppersberger.
Mr. Ruppersberger. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
The first thing I want to talk about is just a macro
issue, and that is where we are in cybersecurity. When I was on
the Intelligence Committee, and I represent NSA also, so I
focused a lot in cybersecurity. And NSA is very good as it
relates to Russia, China, and those issues. But we moved to
CISA. I think CISA has been given a task that they just can't
do the job that they need to do because of lack of resources,
and lack of personnel. But I do want to say this: The personnel
that is there is doing a great job, and they just can't do it
all. And I really was upset when you had a small team that was
working well, and our former President fired Chris Krebs, the
director, because he spoke truth to power. We can't have any
politics involved in this issue. It is very serious.
I authored section 1745 of the fiscal year 2021 National
Defense Authorization Act, and that requires CISA to conduct a
force structure assessment, very important. This assessment is,
in part, intended to address whether CISA has the personnel,
materiel, and facilities to achieve its mission. I strongly
support this review, which is particularly timely as press
reports highlight the cyber defenders are stretched thin to
deal with the combination of the SolarWinds-related malware and
the newly released Microsoft Exchange Server vulnerabilities.
I am deeply disturbed that when I hear that State and
local governments, school systems, even hospitals, may have had
bad actors on their networks for months as they wait for a
scarce incident response team to help them clean up the
networks.
Now, other than nuclear weapons, I believe that the cyber
issue is going to really be maybe the next war, if we have one,
that and space, and I think it is time that we really have this
assessment and that we have to really look at where we are and
what we are doing.
Now, NSA is very good, but we are all concerned about the
defense issues that have occurred. And because NSA has no
jurisdiction in the United States, and there are a lot of
privacy issues, which we need to adhere to, but I think we have
to look at the whole big picture about what we are going to do
to protect our country from the cyber attacks that we have had
now, and this is going to continue. It is going to get worse
before it gets better.
And it is unfortunate. I think in this area of
cybersecurity, there are maybe 15 members that I know that
really focus on cybersecurity. That is a lot.
So, I really hope we can make this a priority with the
help of our leadership in the Appropriations Committee to move
forward with this assessment, and decide where we need to go,
give the money to where we need to go, because the people that
exist in leadership right now on this committee, Mr. Goldstein,
I mean, Mr. Wales, they are working hard, but they sure need a
lot of help and a lot of resources.
Two real quick questions. Do you believe there is a need
for more inherent incident response capability at CISA to
assist Federal and State and local partners?
And the second question, how does the American Rescue Plan
request support expanding this capability?
Mr. Wales. Sure. So let me just say at the outset that
this agency has benefited tremendously from strong support in
Congress, both parties, both Houses, and we want to make sure
that we maintain that support by our openness, our
transparency, and the work of our agency.
I would say, without a doubt, to accomplish the scale of
the mission that we have, we need more resources. As EAD
Goldstein laid out during his opening, we are asking for it, in
particular in the area of expanding our incident response
capabilities, to allow us to offer more persistent hunt
capabilities for the .gov and free up our incident response
resources to deal with the wide array of cyber incidents that
we face on a routine basis. But the money in the ARA is, again,
a downpayment on the scale of capabilities, tools, and
resources we need.
Sir, the workforce assessment is already underway, and we
look forward to briefing you later this year on the outcomes of
that.
Eric, anything else you want to add?
Mr. Goldstein. No. I would just reiterate that we do see
the need for incident response capacity again in those two
areas, both to meet demand from Federal and non Federal
partners, and also critically to move to this model where we
are not only reactively responding to that that already
occurred, but moving into this more persistent threat hunting
model where we continuously search for adversaries that may
have compromised American networks.
Mr. Ruppersberger. Yield back. Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mrs. Hinson.
Mrs. Hinson. Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you,
Director Wales and Executive Assistant Director Goldstein, both
of you for joining us today. I appreciate the opportunity to
ask you a few questions about this as a new member to the
committee.
So as we look at this, you have used words like this was
an exquisite attack, an espionage operation. How confident are
you that you understand the trade craft and what was actually
employed in this attack, this cyber attack on us, and how we
can use that for work for preventing future attacks? That would
be my first question then.
The second is, you referenced specifically the patching
procedure and how they were able to access data even after
patched. Are you confident--does that data have any
vulnerability now? Can it still be accessed or can we patch
that on our end so we can make sure that vulnerability no
longer exists?
Mr. Wales. Sure. So, I will take the first question, and
then I will let Eric handle the portion on the Microsoft
Exchange.
So for SolarWinds, we understand the tactics that the
adversary used to compromise most networks. Part of what CISA
does is it takes information in, it looks to identify the
tactics and the techniques that the adversary used. We then
push out that information, either in the form of alerts so that
broader cybersecurity can look for that activity. In some
cases, we deploy tools that actually allow--that agencies or
private companies can use to look for evidence on their
networks.
We had our cloud forensics team working on Christmas Eve
to deploy a tool to look for evidence of a compromise of the
Microsoft cloud environment. Just this week, we released a new
tool starting with Federal agencies to look through evidence in
the SolarWinds compromise of the adversary moving laterally off
of the SolarWinds device into the network.
So we are constantly looking for ways in which we can push
out that kind of detection techniques to the benefit of all
network defenders, and that is a learning process. Every new
incident we see could be a slightly new tactic that the
adversary uses, but we have multiple ways of getting that
information out. All of the current tactics and techniques that
we are aware of have been shared broadly with our public and
private sector partners.
Eric, do you want to talk about the exchange?
Mr. Goldstein. Certainly. As to the second question
regarding the Microsoft Exchange Server vulnerability, we are
driving urgent progress across the Federal civilian agencies to
patch that vulnerability. As noted, nearly 90 percent of said
instances have already been mitigated. Microsoft has also
helpfully released a tool that allows victim organizations to
assess if they have been compromised as part of this campaign,
and we have put out accompanying alerts and guidance for
network defenders to understand their risks, identify if they
have been both exposed and compromised, and then take urgent
remediation action as necessary.
We are further providing ongoing consultative assistance
to agencies to help them understand their risks and make sure
they have taken the appropriate steps to minimize their
vulnerability to this campaign.
Mrs. Hinson. And then one other question I would have as a
follow-up to that. You talked about our adversaries, and in
this case, you keep mentioning the actor. Who is the actor that
is responsible for this attack, if you can say that for the
record? Because, obviously, when we are talking about a major
espionage operation and preventing them in the future, these
bad actors all over the world are not going to pause. They
continue to assault us every day. So who is this actor that we
are referring to?
Mr. Wales. So in the SolarWinds case, the U.S. Government
has said that this campaign is likely of Russian origin, but
the U.S. Government continues to assess that situation and will
provide additional information to Congress and the American
people soon.
On the Microsoft Exchange vulnerability, the U.S.
Government has not attributed that to an actor yet. Microsoft
did, in its blog, tie it back to Chinese State actors. That
being said, we are already seeing multiple actors now utilize
those vulnerabilities, so it is no longer just a single actor
exploiting the Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities. There are
multiple threat actors who are going to use that vulnerability
to steal information or conduct more significant and
potentially damaging and disruptive cyber incidents.
And so, we are at a race against that threat actor
community to make sure that we patch and secure as many systems
as possible before more disruptive attacks begin to emerge.
Mrs. Hinson. And you talk about the persistent threat
model in going forward and dealing with these. Can you
elaborate just very quickly--I know I am running out of time,
but just on what that is going to look like, you know, as you
are planning, you know, for the next year, the next 3 to 5
years? Just a quick perspective on that would be great.
Mr. Goldstein. Sure, absolutely. So, the way that incident
response threat hunting works historically is that we would
begin the response hunting phase only when triggered by a
compromise, by a possible breach. What we want to move to is a
paradigm where CISA is able to continuously assess security
data from agencies on an ongoing basis for evidence of
compromise, utilizing both known and potential indicators of
compromise, including advanced analytic techniques, so that we
can get ahead of the adversary, and the moment that they
intrude, we have a higher likelihood of catching them versus
waiting until, for example, the adversary makes a mistake, and
then we trigger it in response. So our goal is to move left
ward in our ability to rapidly detect intrusions that do occur.
Mrs. Hinson. Thank you, Madam Chair. I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Ms. Underwood.
Ms. Underwood. Well, thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you
for calling today's hearing on this important topic.
The vulnerabilities in our networks, our Federal networks
that we have been discussing today are urgent, and I am
grateful that the President has prioritized funding for CISA to
address these and other pressing needs through the American
Rescue Plan. But our State and local governments have also been
targeted by attackers who have only grown bolder during the
pandemic, and they lack the expertise and resources of Federal
agencies.
Like my colleague, Mr. Price, and perhaps others on this
committee, I represent constituents who have been directly
impacted by such attacks on more than one occasion. In 2016,
the personal information of 76,000 Illinoisans was accessed by
Russian hackers who targeted the State's election
infrastructure. And just last year, a school district in
Crystal Lake, Illinois, was hit by a ransomware attack.
Mr. Wales, can you elaborate on how the funding included
in the American Rescue Plan will expand CISA's capacity to
support organizations outside of the Federal Government, and
particularly, how State and local governments will benefit from
these investments?
Mr. Wales. Sure. So the majority of the funding in the
American Rescue Act is focused on improving Federal
cybersecurity. That being said, the expansion in incident
response resources for CISA will free up necessary capabilities
to allow us to support more State, local, and private sector
entities that are coming to us for support, and I think that
that is critical.
I would just add two other quick points. We completely
agree with you, State and locals absolutely need more support.
Secretary Mayorkas has talked about this. We need more
investment in State and local cybersecurity, and we are eager
to work with Congress on the right way of ensuring that kind of
continued investment to bring State and locals up to a stronger
baseline.
I know from our work over the last 4 years on election
security that we can make a lot of progress with the focused
effort from the Federal Government, with our State and local
partners, and I think with congressional support, we will be
able to have that level of impact more broadly on State and
local information infrastructure.
Ms. Underwood. Great. Thank you.
Are the lessons--I am sorry, did you have something else?
Mr. Wales. No.
Ms. Underwood. OK. One of the lessons I took away from the
attack on the Illinois Board of Elections is that when our
Federal, State, and local infrastructure is so interconnected,
we are only as strong as our weakest link. And that is why I
think it is important to take a whole of government approach to
modernizing our Nation's cybersecurity.
Mr. Wales, as we continue advancing and strengthening our
Federal network security, what steps should Congress take to
ensure that our State and local governments don't get left
behind?
Mr. Wales. Yes. You know what, I don't think we have a
specific proposal today. Already, the Department has taken
action, for example, increasing the amount of money, the
percentage of our homeland security grants that need to go to
cybersecurity investments for our States and State and local
communities. CISA is working closely with FEMA on the
implementation of that.
But, in addition, we think that we need to identify
additional mechanisms by which we can provide that level of
support. And, again, we are eager to work with Congress. We
know there are proposals and drafts of legislation that we have
seen that focus on that, including by provisioning grants or
others, and we are eager to work with you on what that looks
like.
Ms. Underwood. Thank you.
I want to shift gears and discuss how CISA is modernizing
not only its work, but its workforce. We need the best and
brightest minds tackling challenges facing our Nation, and our
success is going to rest on the ability to attract top talent
who can bring diverse experiences and perspectives to bear on
our biggest and toughest security problems.
Mr. Wales, what percentage of CISA employees are women?
Mr. Wales. I believe, currently, roughly, 35 percent of
our workforce is women.
Ms. Underwood. And what percentage of your employees
identify as Black, indigenous, or people of color?
Mr. Wales. I do not actually have that statistic off the
top of my head.
Ms. Underwood. Can you get back to me?
Mr. Wales. Yes, absolutely, I will get back to you on
that.
Ms. Underwood. And what steps are you taking to diversify
the agency workforce and what resources do you need to do that?
Mr. Wales. Sure. This was a major focus of our deputy
director during 2020, which we had dubbed our kind of year of
diversity and inclusion. And we are looking at--we have taken a
number of steps to increase our ability to recruit a diverse--a
diverse workforce. This includes expanding recruitment in high
schools, in minority-serving institutions, women-focused
events, and other groups where we thought we could increase our
capacity to hire a diverse workforce. COVID introduced some
challenges to that and slowed down our hiring across the board,
but we are hoping, as we move into 2021, with the ending of the
pandemic, that we will be able to accelerate a number of these
efforts, and really look forward to working with you on that.
I think we are happy to come and provide a more detailed
briefing on our workforce recruitment efforts, including our
efforts on improving diversity.
Mr. Goldstein. Ma'am, if I may just add briefly add, as
the newly-appointed head of cybersecurity, this is
unequivocally one of my top priorities. Diversity inclusion is
a national security issue, and it is an urgent imperative for
us to have a cyber security workforce that reflects diversity
of this country. And you have my commitment that this will be
one of my top priorities in the months and years to come.
Ms. Underwood. Well, thank you both. Recruiting,
retaining, and advancing diverse talent, all three are
critically important. Thank you, Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Palazzo.
Mr. Palazzo. Well, thank you, Madam Chair. It is great to
be back to doing the people's business. I think the Homeland
Security Subcommittee is one of the most important committees
out of the full committee. We are tasked with protecting our
homeland. There is many missions, there is many functions,
there is many agencies that we have to deal with.
Before coming to Approps, I had the pleasure and
opportunity to serve on the House Armed Services Committee. You
know, we had commandants, generals, Secretaries of Defense, and
so on. And a popular question we always would ask them would
be, You know, what keeps you up at night? You know, what allows
a four-star general not to be able to sleep because he is
worried about what is next? What is that next threat? Where is
it going to come from? And how are we going to defend America?
And, you know, we have heard varying responses over the
years. With China, it has been one that is pretty consistent,
and, obviously, that is not going away. Russia, ISIS. Even
cyber, you know, cyber is very important to the defense of our
homeland and the protection of our troops abroad. But the one
thing that really stood out, and this was Admiral Mullens. He
said our national debt. He said the greatest threat to America
is our national debt. And as appropriators, I think we need to
take that to heart, and we need to take that very seriously,
because we have limited resources but unlimited wants.
And the threats to America, they are not diminishing, they
are growing. And they are getting bolder, because they see in
America, and American people, that is fighting amongst
ourselves. And they only have to watch C-SPAN or the nightly
news to see that we are putting politics over the American
people, over the defense of our homeland, and our national
security, and over sound and solid policies. So, I will stop
with that. I just wanted to--and that was on my heart this
morning.
But to Mr. Wales and Mr. Goldstein, the number of
attacks--if you can address, what are the number of attacks or
engagements that we are seeing, especially in regards to
critical infrastructure, for either state or non-state actors,
and to whatever amount you can reveal in an unclassified
setting?
Mr. Goldstein. So, it is a challenging question to answer,
sir, because we know that our adversaries, nation states, and
criminal groups are continuously attempting to compromise
public and private entities of all types. What we have seen
over the past few days, and report in the media, around this
Microsoft Exchange Server campaign is an exemplar to this,
where as soon as the vulnerability was revealed, we saw
countless adversaries, sophisticated and not, attempting to
compromise vulnerable entities.
And, so, our focus really needs to be raising the bar of
cybersecurity across this country, and then doing that in a
risk-based way where additional protections are deployed based
upon the criticality of a given organization.
So at CISA, we are deeply focused on ensuring that all
organizations understand the basic protections they should
adopt, and those were critical organizations, whether Federal
agencies or private companies understand that they are at
increased risk, and need to adopt a higher bar for
cybersecurity controls.
Mr. Wales. Let me just add one point to that. One of the
challenges in answering your question with more specificity,
is that we are entirely dependent upon the private sector of
voluntarily sharing information with us about compromises, or
potential compromises, or attempts to compromise their
networks. And I think we can see in the SolarWinds campaign, in
the Microsoft Exchange vulnerability exploitation campaign, we
don't know that at scale. We don't get that kind of information
provided to us in a comprehensive way where we can see the
picture of what the cyber risk we are facing.
And in order for us to be as effective as possible, it
requires us to understand what the adversary is doing, so that
we can protect everyone by sharing that information, by
providing detections, by providing information on what the
adversary's tactics are.
And so, the more that information is held by compromised
private sector entities, the less we are able to protect
everyone else. And so, I think that is something that we are
eager to work with Congress to see how that can be addressed.
Mr. Palazzo. Well, thank you, both. I see my time is
ticking down fairly quick. I do want to just leave with--and I
agree with Dutch. I think any external threat that we are going
to be witnessing in the future is going to be precluded by
cyber, and possibly something happening in our space domain,
and then, just maybe a little more conventional, probably not
on the homeland, but where our allies and where our interests
reside abroad.
So listen, I appreciate the both of you. Tell your staff
we appreciate them. You have a huge responsibility to be a part
of a group protecting our homeland, and continue to let us know
how we can source you to make sure that you are efficient and
effective.
And, lastly, Madam Chair, if we could, maybe in the near
future and maybe do a follow-up in a classified setting. I
think that would be very beneficial, and eye-opening for our
members. So thank you both. Keep up the great work.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Price?
Mr. Price. Thank you, Madam Chairman. Thank you for
holding this hearing. I appreciate the Assistant Director for
appearing today. I appreciate the good work you are doing. You
have led the Nation through the most secure election in
American history. You are continuing to respond to the
SolarWinds' incident with multiple--on multiple government
fronts, and you are collaborating with government and private
sector partners who are experiencing more and more frequent
malicious activity.
I want to ask you something about your intra homeland
security department efforts with FEMA, with their expanded
responsibilities to this area. But I first want to quickly
revisit the topic my colleague, Ms. Underwood, raised, because
North Carolina, too, has been home to some shocking intrusions
of--at the local government level, something we have not
experienced and didn't expect to experience.
Chatham County, in my district, was hit with the
ransomware attack that encrypted much of the county's network
infrastructure, associated business systems, an ongoing
problem.
Just a few weeks ago, the county discovered sensitive
files posted on the dark web, including employee personnel
records, eviction notices, law enforcement investigative
documents. A pretty serious breach, and quite serious, quite
sensitive information. Chatham County is admirably working
through this attack. But as you indicated, many State and local
governments don't have anything like the resources they need to
deal with this.
So, if you could just elaborate on your answer to Ms.
Underwood, what kind of assistance do you perceive is most
important for government at this level? What kind of resources,
technical assistance, help in assessing the security situation?
And are there specific funding implications for this aspect of
your mission?
Mr. Goldstein. Yes, we, again, deeply recognize the grave
risk that we are facing. Our State, local, Tribal governments
suffer from cybersecurity threats. Particularly, ransomware, as
you notice, sir, is an epidemic currently affecting far too
many municipalities and other jurisdictions in this country. So
we initially initiated a ransomware awareness campaign to drive
adoption of best practices among public and private
organizations to reduce the risk of ransomware-affecting
entities. And we encourage all organizations to look at the
ransomware materials on the CISA.gov web page, and avail
themselves of the recommendations therein.
It is also the case that CISA is available to provide
assessment, guidance, consulative assistance, and as-needed
incident response services to State, local, Tribal territorial
entities who are impacted by a damaging cyber attack. I would
encourage any such entities to contact CISA and acquire both
about our proactive resources to help assess an organization's
capacity and maturity. And, then, if an incident does occur, to
request help then as well.
And I would just note that CISA also has regional
personnel with cybersecurity expertise deployed across the
country who are available to assist our State, local, Tribal,
and territorial partners onsite to work through concerns and
help figure out how those organizations can be more secure.
Mr. Price. Good. Thank you. That is very helpful. Let me
move to the FEMA question. We are going to follow this State
and local support situation very closely. Let me move to the
Secretary's announcement last month, that the required minimum
spend on cybersecurity for FEMA grant awards will increase from
5 to 7.5 percent. That is a $25 million increase, a crucial
step toward accelerating improvements in State and local
cybersecurity.
Can you detail the support you plan to give, that you are
being asked to give, and that you will give to FEMA as they
increase their cyber portfolio? In his announcement, the
Secretary also announced that the syncing of implementing a new
grant program in CISA to support state and local governments,
including to combat the epidemic of ransomware, what about
those possible new grant opportunities?
Mr. Goldstein. Yes. The first question on CISA today
provides robust subject-matter expertise to FEMA to support the
evaluation of grant proposals for cybersecurity expenditures.
We were delighted by the Secretary's decision to expand the
mandatory cost allocation to cybersecurity investments. I think
that the $25 million that will result from that decision will
significantly improve cybersecurity maturity across recipient
organizations. And CISA will continue serving in our subject-
matter expert role to ensure that grant applicants are making
best use of those resources to improve their cybersecurity
maturity.
As to the second question, I would certainly agree, sir,
both with you and Ms. Underwood, that the level of investment
in cybersecurity across our State and local entities must
improve. And I look forward to working with this committee and
others on determining how CISA can help provide that much
needed investment going forward.
Mr. Price. Thank you. Thank you. Madam Chairman.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Aguilar.
Mr. Aguilar. Thank you so much, Madam Chair, and I
appreciate the opportunity to be here. And I want to thank both
gentlemen for their testimony.
Assistant Director Goldstein, in your testimony, you talk
a little bit about NDAA authorities and the visibility issue.
Section 1705 of the fiscal year 2021 NDAA allows CISA to threat
hunt on other agency networks. In other words, it empowers to
CISA to proactively search through security logs and other data
for evidence of compromise by sophisticated actors. While I
support this authority and understand it, I know that there is
other approaches to implementing this language. CISA can either
use an instrument on networks of sister agencies to collect the
data, or the departments can give CISA the access, as you
indicated, on those logs.
Can you talk a little bit about the approach that CISA is
considering to implement this language? And of the approaches
mentioned, which one would CISA prefer and why?
Mr. Goldstein. Yes, sir. Thank you for that question. You
know, we--we deeply appreciate this authority provided in the
NDAA with just the reason you note. That it gives CISA the
flexibility in execution to determine which model makes the
most sense for Federal cybersecurity, or even which combination
of models makes the most sense for Federal cybersecurity. And
so, we are not seeing this as an either/or proposition, but
exactly as you noted, we are planning to deploy additional end
point detection and response tools on Federal networks that
will allow us to continuously analyze for further activity.
We are also working with our Federal partners to encourage
agencies to aggregate security information in such a way that
CISA is able to conduct continuous analytics on that sort of
log data derived both from on premises and cloud environments.
And so, our goal with this authority is to interpret it in
the way that best advances our cybersecurity goal across the
Federal civilian enterprise. As noted, several of the other
members, our execution model of this authority will likely
change over time as technology changes and as risks change. And
so, our goal is to be able to detect adversary activity
wherever it occurs. The model that we do so will undoubtedly
change as required.
Mr. Aguilar. How would the funding requests for each of
these approaches differ as you talk through that evolution and
how it could change? What should we be mindful of when it comes
to the funding requests that we could receive?
Mr. Goldstein. So, I think there are three variables in
the funding requests along these lines that I think are applied
to each of these models, but may differ in degree.
So, the first will be the people, the trained expert
security practitioners who understand the practice of threat
hunting, which is a very specific expert discipline.
And CISA has an extraordinary group of individuals who do
this work today, and we need more of those individuals. The
second will be the tooling. The provision of tools and sensors
to agencies that will allow us to collect this data, wherever
it may be, whether it is at the endpoint or in the cloud. And
the third will be the analytic infrastructure to allow CISA to
either run queries on data at the agency level, or analyze that
data, wherever it may be, and derive learning therefrom that
allow us to do the support and work of identifying adversary
activity. And, so, I think those three areas of investment
[inaudible].
Mr. Aguilar. Thank you so much, gentlemen. I appreciate
that. Building off of Ms. Underwood and Mr. Price, in their
discussion about local coordination as well, can you just, you
know, elaborate a little bit on that coordination level, you
know, with FEMA? What could we--what could we--I understand
that subject-matter experts and, you know, being available to
localities, but how can we embed some of that coordination
between--between you folks and FEMA?
Mr. Wales. Let me just clarify, when we talk about subject
matter experts are part of the review, it is not kind of ad
hoc, it is a part of the review process. So all of the
cybersecurity investment justifications that were submitted by
States to support the cybersecurity under cybersecurity
investment umbrella were reviewed by subject-matter experts
within CISA in concert with FEMA to make sure that that was a
true partnership to review the investments in the cybersecurity
domain. But in addition, we also put out information upfront
and worked with a number of States who wanted our assistance,
as they were initially thinking through and beginning to craft
investment justifications that were going to be submitted to
FEMA as part of the grants process. That since we are now in
year two of the cycle with these cybersecurity investment
requirements, that process is getting even stronger with our
embedded field-based personnel in States and cities across the
country providing that assistance to state administrative
agencies and other cybersecurity experts at the State and local
level who are involved in the investment justification grant-
writing process.
Mr. Aguilar. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you, Madam
Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. I believe we have time to have a round
two. So, I would like to begin by going back to our funding
response to SolarWinds. As been mentioned, the American Rescue
Plan includes a substantial funding infusion or Federal IT team
of modernization in cybersecurity, including the $650 million
for CISA.
One of the things that is concerning to me is that many
Federal Office 365 email accounts have only the most
rudimentary security logging capabilities, which is necessary
for cybersecurity defenders to track malicious activity. It is
also concerning that a significant portion of CISA's American
Rescue Plan at funding is slated to go to upgrading these
licenses. Why isn't advanced security logging enabled by
default on any of the Federal cloud accounts that the
government procures, and how much of that $650 million
supplemental funding is currently planned for licensed upgrades
to support logging?
And I just want to add one more point to that question.
Will CISA be issuing a directive to require agencies to procure
licenses that require advanced security logging on cloud
contracts, and if not, how do we fix this problem?
Mr. Goldstein. So CISA's strategic goal broadly, and with
this funding, is to ensure that agency IT environments, whether
on premises or in the cloud, have the security built in that
the American people would expect of their Federal Government.
Now, in aspect to that, ma'am, as you note, is ensuring that
cloud computing environments have logging retention and
security controls that can reasonably be expected to detect
adversary activity, and that CISA can use to understand events
when they do occur and respond accordingly.
As part of our funding request, we do intend to develop a
process to improve the level of cloud security across the
Federal Government. One option that could be considered is the
improvement of licenses with existing vendors. There are other
options that could achieve a similar goal.
So, our goal is strategically to ensure that Federal
agency data is secure wherever it sets on prem and in the
cloud, and we are planning to take any possible course of
action to achieve that goal, working, of course, with our
partners and each agency designated in a budget and other
entities across government.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. I guess my next question has to do with
is, how is CISA working to ensure that emergency funding is not
needed for something as basic as logging?
Mr. Goldstein. So it is important to think of security
funding, ma'am, along two paths. The first is the funding that
CISA needs to provide a foundation of security across the
executive branch, and a second is the funding that each agency
requests to modernize and further mature their old IT
structures. And so, certainly as Executive Director mentioned,
we do consider the funding in the ARA to be a downpayment to
modernize Federal cybersecurity and drive further progress. It
is reasonable to anticipate that other Federal agencies will
request similar investments to improve their own enterprise
cybersecurity.
Now, certainly, we do hope that these sorts of investments
will be built into baseline requests going forward, but we do
recognize that this will be a long journey.
It will be a long path to get Federal cybersecurity to the
point where it needs to be. Given the sophistication of the
adversaries targeting our networks, I will look forward to
working with your committee in a deeper transparent way to
understand that funding path and the end state that we are
trying to collectively reach.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. OK. One of the major features of the
Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation Program has been to
improve visibility into agency networks. Yet, we continue to
rely on data calls with agencies to answer the most basic
questions, such as which agencies are still using Microsoft
Exchange servers? How do we address this problem if the current
CDM suite of tools does not provide enough visibility? Do we
need to change our strategy, and will any of the $650 million
on its way to CISA be used, at least in part, to improve this
visibility?
Mr. Goldstein. Thank you, ma'am. So you will recall from a
prior question that CDM provides transparency at two levels: At
the agency level, and at the level of CISA. Even where we issue
a directive, or a data call today, agencies are still able to
use their CDM tools and the transparency that they get at the
agency level to respond to CISA.
We are working with individual agencies to improve the
fidelity of information that CISA is able to derive. And,
ma'am, to the second part of your question, investments through
the ARA request will additionally improve both the coverage of
more advanced tools through the CDM program and an additional
infrastructure to help CISA analyze CDM data and derive
information that we can use to get better fidelity into
cybersecurity risks across Federal civilian agencies.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you. Mr. Fleischmann?
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chair. And, gentlemen,
thank you for a very insightful hearing. This has been
extremely helpful to me, and I know to the other members of the
subcommittee.
With the impending passage of the next COVID relief bill,
$1 billion is carved out for cybersecurity, with $650 million
of that going towards CISA to help advance cyber protections.
Do you feel this will have a demonstrable impact, or are we
just barely buying down the risk? Or put another way, how much
of a funding deficit are we in with respect to cyber
protections, and what percentage of that is addressed with the
supplemental funding? Thank you.
Mr. Goldstein. This investment will absolutely make a
demonstrable impact in Federal cybersecurity. At the same time,
it is an incremental step. This will be a multiyear process,
assuredly, across the 101 agencies in the Federal civilian
executive branch, to ensure that we are able to provide the
level of security that the American people expect.
Now, CISA, of course, plays a core role in this, not only
in detecting and responding to incidents, but, also, in
providing shared services that agencies can increasingly use to
raise their baseline of cybersecurity. And, again, this will be
a journey, both for CISA, and for the other 100 Federal
civilian agencies to move to a model where we are more quickly
detecting adversary events, and where we are moving to a more
shared service, even centralized model where CISA is raising
the baseline across the Federal civilian executive branch.
I look forward to the ongoing dialogue with this committee
to understand that long-term funding profile over time.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you for that answer. By the way,
Mr. Goldstein, I am also a former Fighting Illini. I see you
went to Urbana-Champaign. I am a lot older than you. I
graduated in 1983. I just noticed that your credentials. So I
thank you.
The SolarWinds attack exploited a supply chain
vulnerability, but what else do you currently see as the
biggest risk, or vulnerability, to cybersecurity? And as a
follow-up, what are the specific tactics or resources that CISA
needs to have at its disposal to best combat this particular
risk?
Mr. Goldstein. Sure. So, I think the gravest risk that
CISA sees from a national standpoint is the risk of an
adversary compromising industrial control system that could
cause life-safety impact. You know, it is--it is deeply
damaging and concerning when an adversary steals data, or
exposes the privacy of Americans or Federal agencies. That is,
of course, a grave concern, but it is a different degree of
concern when an adversary could compromise the control system
that could actually cause loss of life for our fellow
Americans.
The chairwoman mentioned in her opening statement the
intrusion to a water facility in Oldsmar, Florida. I think that
incident, although not resulting in immediate harm, should be a
clarion call for this country for the risk that can we face
from cyber intrusions in these critical systems.
And CISA, in our role as the Nation's lead agency for
cybersecurity, are deeply focused on working with the
industrial control system security to ensure--community, pardon
me, to ensure that we are both understanding vulnerabilities in
that community. Where applicable, we are helping the ICS
community identify sophisticated threats, including CISA's
cyber century program, and we are working to incentivize,
increasing the baseline of cybersecurity across industrial
control systems' owners and operators so that we are seeing the
use of modern technology to reasonably protect these critical
systems.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you very much. And again, Acting
Director Wales and Director Goldstein, thank you for your
testimony today. Madam Chair, thank you for holding this
hearing. With that, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Rutherford? Oh, I am sorry. Mr.
Ruppersberger.
Mr. Ruppersberger. Two names like that.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. OK.
Mr. Ruppersberger. OK. I just didn't have a chance to ask
my question about the incident--how does the American Rescue
Plan request supporting spanning the capability of what you
need to do? Basically, bottom line, that is short-term. You
said that all the way through. What, in more detail, if you
can, where is the money, the $650 million? Where is that going
to be used by you? What is your priority to take that money
forward? Because I believe this, very strongly, that this is a
serious issue of lack of funding and resources, and what you
all do. And you can't do it all, and we are going to--it is
going to get worse instead of better. We.
Have to accept the fact that cybersecurity is a major
issue. And we, other than people who specialize and work in it,
don't understand that. And there is no question. We have got
to--we have got to deal with the issue of COVID. We still have
to move forward.
So what are you going to do with the short-term money
where you are probably going to go? And what ideas do you have
as far as moving forward in this big massive issue you that you
are going to try to work with, but you just don't have the
resources?
Mr. Goldstein. Yes, sir. Thank you for that question. So
there are four key areas that we will be able to make real
progress in with the money requested in the ARA. The first is
the deployment of detection sensors within Federal agencies to
increase our visibility into cybersecurity threats with the
agency environments, and figure out adversary activity much
quicker to minimize these kind of prolonged compromises that we
have recently seen. The second, sir, to your point, is
expanding ourcapacity for incident response and threat hunting,
including moving to that proactive hunting model that I
mentioned previously.
The third is improving our capacity to conduct analysis of
cybersecurity information coming into CISA to understand risk
and threats across the executive branch. And then the fourth
and the longest-term imperative, is progressing Federal
agencies to a more defensive network architecture, for example,
using these zero-trust principals where we are assuming that
the network is permeable and focusing on protecting assets and
accounts therein. Now, that is a longer-term effort.
To your broader question, sir, none of these activities
will be fully actualized by the money in the ARA. So we are
going to need longer-term investment, both by CISA and by
individual agencies across all four of these paths, as well as
continuously reevaluating the risk and technology environment
to make sure that our ongoing resources are commensurate with
critical changes. As you noted, sir, it is a deep and complex
space.
Mr. Ruppersberger. Do you have a dollar amount there?
Mr. Goldstein. Sir, it is--it is highly [inaudible] To
estimate the final dollar amount for just the reason that you
know.
Mr. Ruppersberger. And that amount will knock our socks
off, there is no question.
Mr. Goldstein. Yes, sir.
Mr. Ruppersberger. And the last thing, I still have a
little time. I believe that we really have to look at
cybersecurity as even maybe independent of this committee, and
have a direct line to the President. This is so serious. Just
like we did with the new space force. But the threat we have,
and it is--what happened is indicative of what is going to
happen in the future with Russia and China, and we have Iran,
and we have had attacks with North Korea. And if we don't start
taking this seriously, we are going to put all of our citizens
in this country at severe risk. And so far, it has just been
stealing information.
But if we have a destructive attack, which is starting to
happen, and the threats, you know, of shutting us down, we are
going to be in a bad position, as far as national security in
our country, especially as it relates to the countries that are
more involved in cybersecurity.
Mr. Wales. Sir, let me just add on that, and following up
on Eric's point. We want to make sure that CISA and the entire
whole of Nation is prepared for significant cyber incidents. In
many respects, the fact that the SolarWinds campaign targeted
Federal agencies, and larger, more well-capitalized private
sector companies, you know, generally, was somewhat beneficial.
If this had been a broad campaign targeting State and local
governments, or small and medium-sized businesses, like the
Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities we are facing, the
challenges of them being able to sufficiently have the
resources, skills, and abilities to remediate these problems
would be magnified.
So we need to look at additional ideas for how we provide
support to State and local governments and small businesses as
they look to recover from significant cyber incidents. There
are ideas out there like those pushed by the Cyber Solarium
Commission for cyber response and recovery fund. But we need
additional approaches to make sure that whole of Nation can
come together around significant cyber incidents and ensure we
have the right capabilities in the right places to take the
mitigative steps and build back networks even stronger.
Mr. Ruppersberger. Excellent point. I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Rutherford?
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you, Madam Chair. I have to tell
you, Director, that was exactly where I wanted to go was this
whole of Nation aspect that you were just speaking of. And to
follow up on my colleague, Mr. Ruppersberger's point about--and
your response concern being the industrial control systems,
that is where I see something--the greatest potential for loss
of life.
We have loss of security through some of the Federal
systems. And one of the things that kind of--I understand your
priority is going to be the Federal agency's. And that is why
when you answered concerning the $650 million in RAR, American
Rescue Act--ARA, I should say--when you answered, you focused
on all the Federal responses in, like, detection systems,
expanding the response capabilities, the analytics. So--and I
understand that.
But I would really like to know, currently, what is the--
the requests that are coming to CISA from State, local, and
private industry, those industrial control systems that we
spoke of, because that is where I see the greatest threat to
loss of life. You know, dropping planes out of the sky, running
trains into each other, poisoning water systems like we saw in
Oldsmar. Those are the kind of things that, that equally
concern--I don't want to say one is more important than the
other, but they equally concern me.
And, and I wonder, you know, Dutch said it so well. I
wonder how many people back home understand what he just said.
That is what concerns me. And so, are they reaching out for
that assistance?
Now, I can tell you, I just spoke with a Florida League of
Cities yesterday, and this Oldsmar water plant was primary--
well, not primary, but it was one of the major topics on their
list to discuss. And we talked about community development
block grants, and those sorts of things. That because they
understand now that they need to tighten up these, these cyber
systems. Can you tell me that we have as much focus on what
Dutch just spoke about as we do the Federal side as well?
Mr. Wales. Yes, sir. Let me just answer a high level, and
I will turn it over to Eric to give you some of the details. So
CISA has a lot of authority and responsibility to protect the
Federal civilian executive branch. And, so, SolarWinds has
highlighted key gaps and vulnerabilities in our
cybersecurity.gov, and we needed to take aggressive action to
address that.
And that is why the ARA has dedicated funding to make sure
that we enhance our capacity to deal with vulnerabilities in an
area where we have substantial responsibilities and
authorities. That being said, we have a broad mission in
cybersecurity, and industrial control systems is among our
highest priorities for our broad cybersecurity mission. We
released our strategic plan for addressing ICS cybersecurity
last year, a unified plan that we worked across the interagency
with. And this is certainly a significant thrust of our effort.
It is also a significant competency.
We have a lot of deep expertise in the industrial control
system cybersecurity, which is a rare and precious talent that
we have developed over time. But I want Eric to talk a little
bit about some of the initiatives and ideas we have in this
space.
Mr. Rutherford. OK. Mr. Wales, if you could tell me, does
that plan have a name? You mentioned it.
Mr. Wales. Oh, it was called, like, the no--I think it was
Industrial Control System Cybersecurity Unified Initiative, I
believe, is the title of the plan.
Mr. Rutherford. OK. Thank you.
Mr. Goldstein. And I would just add, just to reiterate the
core point, CISA is the most critical national cybersecurity
risk. And it is unequivocally the case that risks through the
control systems are paramount among our concerns. And, so,
there are really two main thrusts there that I would offer. The
first is how CISA can directly support the community of
entities that own and operate control systems. And this is
through service aids like vulnerability assessment, proactive
guidance, incident response, or even, in some cases, the
deployment of active-sensing technologies across control
systems to understand adversary threats.
The second area, though, under one where we hope to work
with your committee and others, is how the U.S. Government can
help raise the baseline of cybersecurity across entities that
own and operate control systems, recognizing that many control
systems may be operated by municipalities, or public utilities,
that may not be able to afford the best in class cybersecurity
solutions that other private companies can.
Mr. Goldstein. And we also want to think creatively,
working with Congress, on how we can collectively raise the bar
for ICS cyber security across this country.
Mr. Rutherford. So I look forward to working with you on
those efforts. And thank you for all you all do. With that,
Madam Chair, I see my time has run out. I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Price.
Mr. Price. Thank you, Madam Chairman. Let me ask our
guests to turn our focus to healthcare. In 2003, the Federal
Government established the healthcare and public health sector
as one of 16 critical infrastructure sectors in the U.S.,
recognizing that its security is essential to the economy, the
national security public health and safety of the country.
As our healthcare systems become more digitized from
electronic health records to connected medical devices, we have
seen hacking and IT security incidents on the rise in
healthcare as in other sectors. It is particularly worrisome
during a pandemic, of course. Much of our healthcare--and
healthcare information has been shifted online, including
vaccine distribution management and other critical functions.
So healthcare organizations, like lots of others, are
struggling to defend their networks from data breaches. And I
wonder if you could give us some--give us an update on your
assessment of this sector, and your efforts in this regard?
Could you elaborate on some of the work that DHS, or for that
matter, other partners are doing to secure the healthcare
system? How are you keeping up with numerous emerging
technologies in the medical sector? And then can you give us an
estimate of the degree to which best practices and procedures
are now known, publicized in place, or insurance plans,
healthcare providers payers to review the best--to review how
to best protect patient data? Are best practices--what degree
is there, a consensus to what degree is a publicly available
and easily accessible to these--
Mr. Wales. Sure. So I will start, and I will say without
question, over the past year, since the early days of COVID, we
very quickly recognized the importance of surging resources to
the healthcare sector and related parts of the economy, because
of the criticality and fragility of these infrastructures in
the midst of a global pandemic. We actually brought together a
team, used some of the hiring authority in one of the early
COVID supplemental packages to bring on additional capacity,
additional expertise in the healthcare industry, and sent them
to work to improve the uptake on the cyber security service
that we offer and to come at them and offer all the capability
that CISA has to bring, whether it is in our cyber domain,
physical security, supply chain security, and so on.
We have worked hard over the past year to increase the
cyber security profile of this industry. We have seen, through
our efforts, the speed at which this sector is patching
vulnerabilities that we can see through external scans improve
dramatically last year. And beginning--when Operation Warp
Speed stood up, we began to work very closely with that
organization to provide the cyber security services that we
have to the companies involved in the manufacture and
distribution of the vaccine supply chain.
That work continues today. We are still working. We are
doing assessments. We are providing sensors on networks. We are
providing overwatch of their IT space, working with the
intelligence community. There is a lot of work designed to help
provide an increased security posture around the healthcare
sector. We think that this will pay long-term dividends beyond
the pandemic in forming our relationship with the sector, their
ability to utilize our resources, and their overall cyber
security baseline. That being said, the healthcare industry is
large, it is diverse. You have got small municipal hospitals
that are not as well-capitalized, and we are trying to find
additional resources that can be provided.
One good example, the organization that operates what we
call the multistate ISAC that helps provide support to state
and local governments. It operates on a cooperative grant from
CISA. It operates on a cooperative grant from CISA. It operates
a sensor network similar to our Einstein system for State and
locals who sign up for it. But they made available for free to
critical healthcare companies, usually for municipal
authorities, to provide malicious domain-blocking service
quickly to companies at risk, and because of their criticality
as a part of the COVID response.
And so, we think there is a whole community effort to
address this problem, but it is one that is going to take a lot
of work over a lot of years, given its size, its complexity,
and the amount of help they may require.
Mr. Price. What would you say about that whole community
concept, the extent to which some of these smaller, and maybe
less connected healthcare institutions, practitioners are fully
aware of it? Can we at least say now that the wake-up call has
occurred, there is a fuller awareness, a desire to adopt best
practices, or do we still have some distance to go in that
regard?
Mr. Wales. I would say that given the number of ransomware
attacks that have hit hospitals, even in the midst of the
pandemic, which is a deplorable--which is just deplorable on
the case of these criminal organizations has been a wake-up
call. That being said, if you are a small hospital, and you are
not as well-capitalized, you may not have the option, you may
not have the resources to invest in the dedicated cybersecurity
team and information security practices that are required for
the threat that you may face.
And, so, we need to think creativity about how do we give
them the tools and capabilities they require to provide the
level of security that is needed when you are protecting
America's health and safety.
Mr. Price. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Palazzo.
Mr. Palazzo. Thank you, Madam Chair, and again, I just
want to thank you for all the work that you do on this
committee, as well as Ranking Member Fleischmann. This is the
one committee that I enjoy attending and participating in.
Well, and my other one, my [inaudible]. The two best committees
out of the Appropriations Committee.
But again, I just wanted to thank Chairman Wales and Mr.
Goldstein for being on today. There is so much to talk about.
And I wanted to ask them, because I didn't and I should have,
you know, I talked about what keeps up, you know, the Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense,
what--what causes you to have sleepless nights? Gentlemen, if
you don't mind sharing, if you can share a scenario, or an
example of a sleepless night because of a threat facing the
homeland?
Mr. Goldstein. So I will just turn back to a line that we
were just on which is the possibility of a cyber attack
impacting a critical service or function that results in loss
of life, or harm to the American people. This could be via
control system, it could be a ransomware attack to a hospital
that results in the unavailability of critical services, as we
have seen in other countries. And, so, it is really this
transition of cyber attacks moving from a focus on stealing or
accessing data, which is deeply concerning, but towards a cyber
attack impacting the provision of a critical service: water,
electricity, healthcare, upon which people depend. It is that
transition that is deeply concerning and presents an urgent and
emerging national risk.
Mr. Palazzo. So, basically, you described what happened in
Texas and other cities in and around the Midwest because of
weather last week. But what we are talking about instead of
weather and natural disaster-type scenario that we have no
control over at all. There is probably a bad actor out there
that could hit a keyboard and make something like this happen,
or could make something like this happen if we don't safeguard
and firewall our critical infrastructure.
Mr. Goldstein. That is certainly the risk that we must act
urgently to address, correct.
Mr. Palazzo. And you kind of tie that in with not only the
cyber intrusions, but the stuff that is happening in the space
domain where, a lot of our, you know, let's say, economically,
we compete, but there are also possibly our adversaries in
space creating a bunch of ASAT technologies. And we know we are
becoming even more dependent upon, you know, satellites for our
day-in and day-out life, our financial systems, our phones,
everything.
Do you work with those other agencies to--to, I mean, map
out a plan? Because, you know, if you go to the bank and you
have no bank in your account, money in your account and your
phone doesn't work, I mean, we have seen--we have seen over
time that, you know, your fear and paranoia, it could cause a
lot of trouble here in America.
Are you--are you concerned about something like that
happening? How--how are we--how are we, I guess, jointly
working together, not having silos as we have had in the past
in Federal agencies, but sharing communication that protect,
you know, protect all of us?
Mr. Goldstein. Yes, sir. So, certainly, CISA works very
closely with the Defense Department, private industry, other
government partners on issues like space-based technologies,
that as you note, are inherently reliant upon networking and
the integrity of communication and present an increasingly
fundamental dependency to all manner of critical
infrastructure. And so, certainly, we are deeply attuned to
these sort of technological trends that are either emerging, or
have already been affected, how those technologies can be
undermined by cyber intrusion, and, then, working with the
companies that developing, manufacturing, and deploying these
technologies, making sure that wherever possible, securities
built in by design on the front end.
Mr. Wales. And, so, let me just add, we have been meeting
with the newly-formed Space ISAC, so it is our conglomeration
of companies involved in the space industry have formed
information-sharing analysis center as a means to share
critical information related to cyber security threats that
could impact space systems or their related ground-based
infrastructure. That is, as I say, a new focus area. The last
administration kicked it off. They had a space cyber security
effort. And we think that it is, it is critical that we
continue to focus on these additional functions, that we
recognize are both vulnerability, but absolutely essential to
our way of life. And we have a lot of work, historical work in
the GPS and PNT world that we will call upon as we embark upon
additional activities to support the companies involved in the
space-based industry.
Mr. Palazzo. Thank you for that. I know my time is ticking
down. Again, I just want to say I appreciate everything you are
talking about. And I know instead just as we have been focused
in space, instead of having one big satellite that could be
taken out, we are trying to deaggregate our space footprint, so
we have multiple satellites. I am assuming there are some
conversations about that on how we do our electrical grids and
things in the aftermath of our winter storm.
But I will just leave with this. One of my colleagues
mentioned, like, you know, why aren't we taking this seriously?
Obviously, this committee and the members on this committee are
taking cyber very seriously. And I think a large number of the
American people, if they weren't so distracted by the
shenanigans and the games that, basically, their politicians
are doing, you know, how can we expect them to take, you know,
this seriously when they don't even take us seriously? And I
think that starts with other members of Congress, you know,
putting politics aside and focusing on the American people.
And, again, we have unlimited wants and unlimited resources.
And this committee has a big responsibility. Thank you,
gentlemen. And thank you, team, for the work that you do. Madam
Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. OK. Thank you. I just want to make a
point with regards to the industrial systems. Now, CISA really
does need to put together a very comprehensive strategy fund
estimates and schedules to help the Nation address the ICS
risk, because we really would like to move very quickly in
addressing this issue. So I just want to make that, make that
point.
And I just have one more question that I would like to
ask. The reconciliation bill also includes funding to help
address Federal agency IT modernization efforts through the
General Services Administration's Technology Modernizing Fund,
or TMF. As a member of the TMF board, CISA will play a role in
overseeing the execution of those funds. Can you speak to the
current state of the Federal Government IT infrastructure and
how it impacts our cyber security capabilities?
Mr. Goldstein. Certainly. Modernization and security are
inherently interlinked, but they--that must be intentional. And
so CISA plays a key role on the Technology Modernization Fund
to ensure that critical new investments to ensure that Federal
IT is state of the art are conducted with security top of line.
So even as the Federal enterprise modernizes technology to make
sure that the Federal workforce and the American people have
access to the technology that they expect for the critical
services delivered by each of our Federal agencies, that those
modernization efforts are conducted with security built in to
some of the prior questions to ensure that years from now, we
don't look back and realize that we invested in technology that
didn't have the appropriate security control, or the
appropriate logging on down the line, although to make sure
that as we modernize, we modernize securely so we are building
in defenses from the ground up.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you. I believe there are no more
questions. So we are going to conclude this hearing. Acting
Director Wales and Executive Assistant Director Goldstein,
thank you so very much for your time and helping us to think
through these very, very difficult challenges. And we certainly
appreciate your agency's transparency in working with the
subcommittee, and the interagency cooperation of the Cyber
Unified Coordination Group. This has been a very, very
informative hearing. I very much appreciate your being here.
The Subcommittee on Homeland Security now stands adjourned.
RPTR WARREN EDTR ROSEN DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
APPROPRIATIONS FOR 2022 Tuesday, March 16, 2021 THE ROLE OF
FEMA AND EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT IN COVID-19 RESPONSE DEPARTMENT
OF HOMELAND SECURITY APPROPRIATIONS FOR 2022 Tuesday, March 16,
2021 THE ROLE OF FEMA AND EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT IN COVID-19
RESPONSE WITNESSES CURTIS BROWN, STATE COORDINATOR AND CO-
FOUNDER, VIRGINIA DEPARTMENT OF EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AND
INSTITUTE FOR DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION IN EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
BOB FENTON, SENIOR OFFICIAL PERFORMING THE DUTIES OF FEMA
ADMINISTRATOR, FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY MARK
GHILARDUCCI, DIRECTOR, CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR'S OFFICE OF
EMERGENCY SERVICES KEVIN MCGOWAN, DIRECTOR, LOS ANGELES COUNTY
OFFICE OF EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT PATRICK SHEEHAN, DIRECTOR,
TENNESSEE EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY
Ms. Roybal-Allard. The Subcommittee on Homeland Security
will come to order.
As this hearing is being conducted virtually, we must
address a few housekeeping matters.
Members are responsible for muting and unmuting themselves.
When you are recognized to speak, if I notice that you have not
unmuted yourself, I will ask you if you would like the staff to
unmute you. If you indicate approval by nodding, staff will
unmute your microphone. To avoid inadvertent background noise,
the chair or staff designated by the chair may mute participant
microphones when they are not recognized to speak.
We will be using the 5-minute clock, but if there is a
technology issue during a member's speaking time, we will move
to the next member until the issue is resolved, and you will
retain the balance of your time. You will notice a clock on
your screen showing your remaining time. At 1 minute remaining,
the clock will turn yellow. At 30 seconds remaining, I will
gently tap the gavel to remind the member speaking that their
time has almost expired. When your time has expired, the clock
will turn red. I will begin to recognize the next member.
We will follow the speaking order set forth in the House
rules, beginning with the chair and ranking member, followed by
members present at the time the hearing is called to order in
order of seniority, and we will alternate by party. Next, we
will go to members who were not present when the hearing was
called to order until every member present has had a first
round.
Finally, House rules require me to remind you that we have
set up an email address to which members can submit information
in writing at any of our hearings or markups. That email
address has been provided in advance to your staffs.
Now, with the business at hand, I welcome everyone to
today's hearing, particularly our witnesses. One hearing will
consist of two panels. The first panel will be with Bob Fenton,
the Acting Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management
Agency. Our second panel will be include representatives from
State and local emergency management agencies, who I will
introduce later.
Today's hearing can be summed up in the answer to one
question: What must emergency managers do to effectively
respond to an emergency and pandemic? Since about the middle of
the last century, we have called upon emergency managers when
our Nation faces a critical or complex humanitarian crisis--a
natural disaster, power outages, pandemics, or the need for
civil defense. These roles are codified in Federal law, policy,
and doctrine, such as the national response framework.
A year ago at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, my
staff and I asked FEMA what response role it would play. The
expectation was that FEMA and its partners, at all levels of
government, would play a large and visible role. However,
inconsistent with people's historical and statutory role, it
was not given a role because the pandemic was seen by the
previous administration as strictly a public health emergency,
and not an event requiring emergency management. The last
administration's stance eventually changed as it became clear
that responding to public health crises required emergency
management expertise.
The administration finally called on FEMA and its State,
local, Tribal, and territorial partners, to help deploy
hospital ships, get critical supplies into the United States,
and to establish field hospitals and other operations for
overwhelmed medical systems including setting up testing and
vaccination sites around the country.
The intent of today's hearing is to look towards the future
using the valuable lessons learned during the pandemic to help
us to better be prepared for the next emergency or disaster.
Today's witnesses represent emergency management personnel at
the local, State, and Federal levels, who, for more than a
year, have worked tirelessly under difficult conditions to
defeat the pandemic.
We, the Members of Congress, and our constituents, are
extremely grateful for your efforts. Please extend our most
sincere gratitude to your colleagues across the country.
I now turn to the distinguished gentleman from Tennessee,
Ranking Member Fleischmann, for his opening remarks.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chair.
It is a pleasure to be back to work with you and the
committee's business this morning. I would like to welcome our
new members, Ms. Underwood and Mrs. Hinson, to our
subcommittee. I look forward to working with you and the
veterans of this subcommittee on some of the hardest issues we
face in government.
Acting Administrator Fenton, welcome, and thank you for
being here today. I am a huge fan of former Administrator
Gaynor. We worked well together. I know you and the chairwoman
have worked together a lot in California, and I, too, am
looking forward to working with you.
This has been a year like no other. In fact, about 1 year
ago today it was that the committee moved to a virtual work
format from home due to the COVID pandemic. And, unfortunately,
sir, FEMA's job was just getting started as the floods,
tornadoes, fires, and hurricanes came on top of COVID.
I offer my sincere gratitude to the people at FEMA, who
have been on the job in some of the worst of times. We saw FEMA
teams in my own State responding after deadly and record-
setting tornadoes, helping the COVID response coordination, and
being there to help pick up the pieces after a bombing in
downtown Nashville. Thank you to everyone at FEMA for their
amazing work and cooperation with our States.
To date, FEMA has obligated $63.8 billion from the Disaster
Relief Fund in support of COVID efforts, in addition to
hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to firefighters,
emergency managers, and emergency food and shelter programs. I
am hopeful that with successful vaccine programs, we will be
able to turn the corner on this terrible pandemic.
I will keep my opening statement short this morning, as we
have two panels, and I thank all of the witnesses in that
regard. I thank you, and I look forward to your testimony.
Madam Chair, I yield back. Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. I thank you.
Mr. Fenton, welcome to the subcommittee. I know you from
your day job as the administrator for FEMA Region 9, which
includes my home State of California. Since January, however,
you have been the senior official, performing the duties of the
FEMA administrator. I look forward to hearing your perspective
from your experiences in both roles. We will submit the full
text of your official statement for the hearing record. Please
begin your oral summary which I would ask you keep to 5
minutes.
Mr. Fenton. Thank you, and good morning, Chairwoman Roybal-
Allard, Ranking Member Fleischmann, and members of the
subcommittee. I appreciate the opportunity to be here today and
discuss FEMA's role in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is an unprecedented challenge that has claimed the
lives of over 540,000 of our neighbors, friends, family members
across the country, and has caused grave damage to the global
economy and put a spotlight on inequities through our Nation.
I began my career in FEMA 25 years ago as a Reservist. From
the first deployment in 1996 to my current role as the acting
administrator, I have the honor of helping people across the
country before, during, and after disasters. During my tenure,
I have learned that FEMA and, therefore, the Nation, succeeds
when our State partners are in the lead. Emergency management
at its best is a coalition between Federal, State, local,
Tribal, and territorial governments, the private sector and
nonprofit sectors, faith-based organizations, and individual
Americans.
At FEMA, we are committed to ensuring that everyone has
access to a vaccination. This is our highest priority, and
success is dependent upon the whole committee being unified to
achieve this goal. Our current work can be grouped into three
broad categories in support of the President's strategy to
respond to COVID-19 and ensure everyone is vaccinated.
First, at the President's direction, FEMA is reimbursing
100 percent of the cost for Title 32 National Guard forces, as
well as 100 percent of eligible emergency protective measures
incurred by State, local, Tribal, and territorial partners in
response to COVID-19. This includes reimbursement for
vaccination efforts, COVID-19 screening, and personal
protective equipment.
Further, on February 2, the President directed FEMA to make
reimbursements for expenses incurred retroactive to the
beginning of the disaster. Taken together, these measures
represent a substantial increase in assistance to our partners.
Second, FEMA is working to support State, local, Tribal,
and territory-led Community Vaccination Centers, also known as
CVCs, through the development and deployment of Federal
personnel, the provision of equipment, supplies, and technical
assistance in awarding expedited financial assistance.
Third, FEMA has teamed up with the Health and Human
Services, the Department of Defense, and other agencies to
establish State-led, federally-supported community vaccination
centers. These pilot sites are stood up in partnership with
State and local authorities to better reach underserved and
historically marginalized communities. These federally
supported CVC sites come with an additional vaccine allotment
that is above and beyond the normal State allocation, and can
administer up to 6,000 vaccines a day.
As of March 14, FEMA has obligated more than $4.42 billion
for CVCs at 100 percent Federal cost share. That has also been
834 federally supported vaccination sites, including 18 pilot
community vaccine centers with 29 mobile units attached to
them. As of March 14, 107.1 million vaccine doses have been
administered across the country, with nearly 90 million of
those taking place since President Biden was inaugurated.
Furthermore, the administration is able to provide States
and territories with a 3-week vaccine supply allocation. As of
now, this week, the allocations up to 15.8 million doses, which
is an 84 percent increase since the President took office.
In everything we are doing, we are striving to ensure
equity. President Biden has made it a cornerstone of this
administration's efforts. In FEMA, we established a civil
rights advisory group that is incorporated into all these
activities. Since its inception in January, the civil rights
advisory group has supported the development and the
methodology used to determine CVC site selections, and also,
worked with the 10 FEMA regions to collect and analyze
demographic data, identify underserved communities, and
collaborate with community-based organizations.
FEMA is working with other Federal agencies and our
partners to ensure that vaccinations can proceed quickly as
increased supplies allow, so that everyone who wants a vaccine
can get one.
Before I conclude, Madam Chairwoman, I would be remiss if I
didn't acknowledge the Herculean efforts of my friends and
colleagues from our mutual home of the State of California. As
you know, two initial pilot community vaccination centers were
set up in Oakland and Los Angeles last month, and currently
vaccinated 6,000 Californians at each site each day. We have a
long way to go, especially with reaching underserved
communities, but our success to date is due the efforts of the
men and women like Mark Ghilarducci, the Director of the
Governor's Office of Emergency Services, and Kevin McGowan, the
Director of the Los Angeles County Office of Emergency
Management and, most of all, the people whom they lead.
I know Mark and Kevin are appearing before your
subcommittee later this morning, alongside several other State
and local emergency management professionals. As I said in the
beginning of my testimony, FEMA succeeds when the whole
community succeeds. Professionals like Mark and Kevin make that
possible.
In closing, we greatly appreciate the subcommittee's
steadfast support for FEMA's efforts throughout the COVID
pandemic, and for appropriating the resources our agency has
needed to meet these historic mission requirements.
Thank you for this opportunity to testify. I look forward
to answering your questions today.
[The information follows:] ******** COMMITTEE INSERT
********
Mr. Roybal-Allard. Thank you.
Before I begin questions, I would like to turn to the
chairwoman of the full Appropriations Committee, Rosa DeLauro.
The Chairwoman. Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
I will be brief. I know we want to get on to questions, and
there is also a second panel. So, I want to say a thank you to
you and Ranking Member Fleischmann for holding what is a very
important hearing. Thanks to all of our witnesses for
testifying.
Since the Federal Emergency Management Agency's formation
in 1979, the hardworking and dedicated FEMA staff have helped
our Nation prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters
and emergencies of all kinds. They have answered the call to
serve, working under the most difficult circumstances, and
facing daunting logistical challenges, to provide assistance
and support those who are most in need.
When our Nation descended into the worst public health
crisis in generations, the men and women of FEMA came rushing
to the rescue. They have provided much-needed medical supplies,
personal protective equipment, and COVID-19 tests to our
communities. They have set up field hospitals, testing and
vaccination sites, and put their own health and safety in
jeopardy to help those in crisis.
Responding to this pandemic has not been easy for anyone.
It would have been so much more difficult without the
assistance and the support of FEMA. Now, the agency is facing
new and increasing challenges on multiple fronts, such as the
growing potential crisis at the United States-Mexican border,
where COVID-19 social distancing practices have increased the
need for more beds, as the chairwoman of the committee knows.
That is why it is more important than ever that we work to
ensure the agency is properly equipped with the funding and the
resources that it needs.
I am grateful that the American Rescue Plan provides $50
billion for the Disaster Relief Fund, as well as $510 million
for FEMA's Emergency Food and Shelter Program, another $200
million for staffing for adequate fire and emergency response
grants, as well as $100 million for assistance to firefighter
grants, and another $100 million for Emergency Management
Performance Grants.
Now that the money is getting out the door, we need to take
a look at the--a long-term look at the crisis that FEMA will
face in the future, understand how the agency can become more
proactive to future challenges.
Under the previous administration, FEMA had considerable
difficulty responding in a timely and effective manner to the
rising COVID-19 pandemic. That is why I and others wrote to
Administrator Gaynor and others on several occasions to voice
our concerns about the state of the Strategic National
Stockpile, and the need to increase the number of ventilators,
N95 masks, surgical masks, and other medical supplies.
Unfortunately, the response I received can only be
described as inadequate, which is why I thank Chairwoman
Roybal-Allard, Ranking Member Fleischmann, again, for holding
this crucial hearing, and why I am hopeful that under the
Biden-Harris administration, we can move forward, incorporate
the lessons we have learned from the pandemic, and
comprehensively prepare for the future with the consultation
with FEMA.
With that, Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you.
Mr. Fenton, through legislation and advocacy, many of my
colleagues and I pushed the last administration to increase the
Federal cost share for FEMA public assistance for COVID and to
broaden the scope of what was eligible for reimbursement. We
were pleased when President Biden announced he would
administratively make those changes.
Can you explain how FEMA has implemented these changes with
a particular focus on the expansion of reimbursement
eligibility?
Mr. Fenton. Yeah, so we have done two things so far. One,
we have gone back. Everything that happened prior to January
20, the President made 100 percent so we could assist those
with funding. Then going forward, we are now working with
States and local governments to draft a policy that
incorporates the expansion of our public assistance program to
include assistance to help with school reopening, to help with
transportation, to help with increased testing, and other
areas. So what we will do is work with them. We are about to
publish the expanded policy. In addition to that, the new
legislation also allows us to increase funeral benefits to
additional people through the next year.
So we are working on both of those, and, hopefully, the
policy will be out with that. Right now, we focus on going to
100 percent on the previous disaster, and working with State
and local governments to identify those costs and adjust our
system to calculate those new costs.
Mr. Roybal-Allard. In H.R. 1319, the American Rescue Plan,
provides $50 billion for the Disaster Relief Fund. Would that
infusion of supplemental funding, do you think the DRF is
sufficiently resourced through the end of the fiscal year?
Mr. Fenton. Well, we have what we need right now to
operate. We have provided $4 billion out already to vaccine
centers. As schools start to reopen, we will get a better idea
of the cost to reopen schools to include providing protective
equipment supplies, and to provide testing, but also, when we
work with transportation, public transportation organizations,
mass transit, on how we assist them. So we have enough to
operate now. We project those costs to be sufficient through
the end of the year, but we will communicate based on needs
throughout the United States if that changes.
Mr. Roybal-Allard. After the last administration refused to
provide funeral assistance to families who suffered a loss due
to COVID, Congress connected legislation in December, mandating
FEMA to provide assistance at 100 percent Federal cost share
for pandemic deaths occurring before the end of last year. The
American Rescue Plan continues this assistance into 2021.
Could you please explain what specific assistance FEMA
intends to provide? How it will be provided? And if the
assistance is not yet reaching families, when can you expect it
to begin?
Mr. Fenton. Thank you for that question.
Right now, our focus is empathy when we talk about
individuals that have lost loved ones. We want to make sure
that we do it in an empathetic way. While we have done funeral
assistance in disasters, we have never done anything at this
scale or scope.
So, the first thing we have got to do is bring in
additional resources to be able to meet the needs. The second
thing we have done is done a lot of listening sessions with
different organizations, funeral associations, and others and
then reach out to many different organizations to talk about
culturally unique needs for funerals, and to make sure that the
policy we develop for this and how we assist it covers to the
greatest need of those that have lost loved ones.
FEMA is on track to implement and start the funeral
assistance program in early April. We are currently focused on
training our call center staff and finalizing our policy. We
will do this through a 1-800 number versus doing it on an
online registration. We think that, again, with empathy being
the priority, we want to be able to case manage and have that
human-to-human interaction as we do this, and make sure that we
do it in a way that supports everyone's needs. So early April
is when we look to start the program.
Mr. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Fleischmann.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, again, Madam Chair, and
Director Fenton.
I also want to welcome the full committee chair, Ms.
DeLauro. Thank you for joining us today. I know you have got 12
subcommittees. It means a lot that you are on with us today.
Thank you.
I mentioned in my opening statement the incredible
challenges this year has been for FEMA employees. Not only did
we have the natural disasters that battered our States, but
FEMA had to roll out operations to support COVID declarations
in every State, plus territories and Tribes. On top of that,
the personal stressors of the school-age children learning from
home, or families struggling with job losses or illnesses, have
challenged almost everyone.
My question to you, sir, is: How is the morale at FEMA? How
is your workforce holding up, sir?
Mr. Fenton. I appreciate the question, Congressman.
I get the opportunity to lead the greatest group of civil
servants I know with the great mission to be able to help
people before, during, and after disasters. We have over 20,000
employees, about 20,000 employees at FEMA that have a wealth of
disaster experience, and, as you said, can be called upon at a
moment's notice to deploy and help in disasters.
Right now, about 75 percent of those that we send to
disasters, there is roughly just under 14,000 are deployed
right now to events across the country in response to COVID,
the disasters from the Texas freeze that has happened, plus
helping with the unaccompanied children issue and supporting
HHS.
We are doing well. I think our employees enjoy the work,
quite frankly. I just got a Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey
that shows a dramatic improvement with regard to morale, one of
the highest increases in the last 10 years. I think when our
employees are helping Americans, they are most satisfied. They
get to do what they came to FEMA to do, and they enjoy doing
that mission.
Mr. Fleischmann. Yes, sir. A couple of other questions. I
will ask both of them, because I want to make sure you have
time to answer. Have you been able to avoid major COVID
outbreaks, despite the constant in-person work requirements?
And then to follow this up, are you worried or concerned about
an increase in employee attrition as we go into the next cycle
of storms and weather that could impact FEMA's response
capabilities, sir?
Mr. Fenton. Yeah, so we take safety of our employees very
seriously. We have taken a number of precautionary measures to
do that. Like most of America, we have done a lot of stuff
remote, using Zoom and Teams and other chat functions to do
that. But as you said, part of our business requires us to be
in person.
So we have done that in a way that we have made sure that
people have the right protective equipment, that we do social
distancing, that we do testing, to limit the impact to our
workforce, and have been pretty successful in doing that. In
addition to that, we have started to vaccinate our workforce,
especially those that are out at the Community Vaccine Centers,
assisting Americans through those sites.
With regard to concerns about attrition, since 2017, we
brought on 3,000 employees at FEMA. My experience is in these
big events, whether it be Katrinas, the 9/11s, the Sandys, the
Marias, it is a great opportunity to bring on local hires. We
are hiring those right now at those community vaccine centers
in the hundreds. So as we do that, that will be an opportunity
for them to join our organization full-time. We usually see a
big uptake after these big events of people that join FEMA
because of being part of this mission.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, sir.
In the interest of time, Madam Chair, I will yield back.
Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Ms. DeLauro.
The Chairwoman. Thank you very much.
And thank you, Administrator. These questions come from
Connecticut, and I will ask them quickly so that you can
respond. You discussed the 100 percent cost share. Now some--by
the time President Biden took office, we were 10 months into
the pandemic. My understanding is that some of the States had
already used their Treasury coronavirus relief funds to cover
the non-Federal share of FEMA assistance. How will this work?
Will these States be reimbursed? That is a question.
Let me also ask you: In the prior administration, FEMA
issued the guidance that limited disinfection to facilities
where eligible emergency workers performed PPE to emergency
protective activities. Can you tell us what the new policy will
be for PPE, and when States and communities will see new
written guidance?
And just lastly, oftentimes, it is hard to understand the
roadmap seeking help from FEMA that States and communities have
to navigate what assistance is eligible, if you can talk very
briefly about the right sequence of asking for that assistance.
And can FEMA take on the task or direct us to the agency that
will?
Mr. Fenton. I appreciate the question, Congresswoman Rosa
DeLauro.
As far as--let me start with, first, the CARES Act. So they
will be able to--States that went ahead and used their CARES
Act funding for the 25 cost share, will be able to repurpose
that funding and use it for something else. In fact, Treasury
has extended the deadline to the end of 2021 to December 31,
2021, to allow them to repurpose and use that funding, since
now they won't have to use it for the cost share.
As far as written guidance and the public assistance
program, we are in the process of working with many different
organizations to incorporate the President's direction going
forward, and increasing the public assistance program to help
with the vaccination, to help with opening schools, to help
with transportation systems, and in other areas. I suspect that
those policies will be released very soon. In fact, one is
going out today with regard to medical care facilities. So, we
will be putting those out hopefully this month as we finish
those sessions and incorporate comments from our stakeholders.
With regard to the roadmap we are asking for, you know, not
only assistance through FEMA, but other Federal agencies, there
is a couple of things that we are doing. One is we are making
sure that--and we have had more new applicants than any
disaster ever for our public assistance program, applicants
that we normally don't service in disasters, especially for the
medical community.
So what we are doing is, we have brought in a bunch of
assistance from other Federal agencies in the private sector to
help us expedite the processing. And we are working within our
regions, to States and locals, to bring in long-term recovery
functions and other Federal authorities that are available, to
make sure that States understand the resources that are
available to them, and that we partner together from a funding
perspective and a roadmap perspective, to fund what we can
underneath our authority for the emergency protective measure,
so that we integrate that with other funding, like the
Department of Education and HHS and CDC, to link those together
so that they have a roadmap of what we will cover versus what
is available through other Federal agencies.
The Chairwoman. And you will be sending out guidelines with
regard to that effort?
Mr. Fenton. Yes, we will. For example, in Region 9, where I
am from, we actually keep a document that is available on the
internet to our State and local governments where we put in
those new funding resources and keep a compendium of what those
all are, so that States can go in there and look for them. Then
we try to, specifically if it is allocated by State, let them
know what the balance is within those States as they are
available.
The Chairwoman. Now when you say repurpose, help me for a
second. Are we going to reimburse the costs that the States
incurred in those 10 months that the 25 percent match was
still--so that is going to be reimbursed. I just want to be
clear.
Mr. Fenton. Yes, ma'am.
The Chairwoman. Because, you know, my State of Connecticut
is going to be asking. I am sure California is and other States
as well, and, again, just to be clear. So it is a much broader
range of disinfection, if you will, and protective services
beyond only where emergency work is being performed.
Mr. Fenton. So going back, it is the policy that was in
place going back now at 100 percent. So, we will pay all 100
percent of the costs going back. Going forward, the President's
direction going forward, it allows for a more expansive public
assistance program.
The Chairwoman. Fabulous. Thank you.
Thank you, Madam Chair. I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Rutherford.
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Mr. Fenton, first, let me say as a 12-year sheriff and a
41-year law enforcement officer, I really appreciate all the
work that FEMA has done for our State and local law enforcement
and others in our response. I am from north Florida,
Jacksonville, and, you know, I represent three coastal
counties, and I can tell you that you are a Godsend for us. So
pass that on to your folks. I really appreciate all you-all do,
and look forward to continue to work with you, as your mission
continues to grow, obviously.
So one of the questions that I have, Mr. Fenton, is we have
now got, I think, five different packages, about $700 billion
in discretionary money that has been, since the first, you
know, coronavirus preparedness response supplemental, CARES
Act, first came out. We wrote a letter recently to Mr.
Fairweather, the Acting Director at OMB, that would be asking:
Where are the--you know, how have these dollars been expended,
that $700 billion? Can you tell us a little bit about how much
of that money has been expended and how much is left?
Mr. Fenton. Yeah, I can speak to FEMA's funding that we
received so far. I can't speak to other Federal agencies.
Mr. Rutherford. Sure.
Mr. Fenton. But with regard to our funding, the majority of
it has been provided to State and local governments through a
number of programs, either our public assistance program, or
funding directly, Federal resources, like military or HHS that
sends doctors to hospitals or funding masks, protective
equipment. So we provided a significant amount of funding to do
those kind of activities.
Including that, we funded the program to help individuals
with regard to lost wages, and provide a significant amount of
money on lost wages.
Right now, prior to the supplemental that we received with
$50 billion, we had about $10 billion left from the funding
that has been provided to FEMA for disaster relief fund to
date.
Mr. Rutherford. I am sorry. There is about $10 billion left
now?
Mr. Fenton. We have about $10 billion dollars now prior to
the $50 billion we received from the current authority.
I project that, you know, as we go forward, that we will
use funding for the funeral program, both going backwards, you
know, for those who have passed away and those who
unfortunately will pass away going forwards. We will provide
funding for more PPE and testing to open our schools. We will
provide funding for vaccinated Americans, the $4 billion we
have already provided, plus there will be more as we continue
to vaccinate, especially as we expand that capability.
So I anticipate, between those and opening transportation
corridors and getting America and the economy going back, we
will heavily use our funding. Plus, as we all know, as we get
to the summer, we will be into hurricane and fire season. We
will have the normal activity that we will have to fund in
addition to those.
Mr. Rutherford. Let me ask you this, Mr. Fenton: We may
need to help you out with this, but I think one of the things
that we need to look at is the processing time for these claims
by State and local governments take so long that they
accumulate huge amounts of interest. So, we are giving them
millions of dollars, and then they are having to pay millions
of dollars in interest. I think we ought to include that
interest as part of their cost. If we are going to continue to
drag this out in response to paying these bills, the State and
local government shouldn't be held over the barrel for this
interest. What do you think about that?
Mr. Fenton. Well, we talked about what we have had to do at
FEMA. We have tried to reimburse people as quick as possible.
This is a unique event where we haven't had to do this type of
work, especially with medical costs, and new applicants,
especially the number of nonprofits that have entered
eligibility through our public assistance program. So this is
unique.
What I would say is, for example, in the community
vaccination center program, which we put out $4.4 billion, that
is less than 45 days. One of the things we are doing is
expediting that funding at 50 percent of the cost up front on
projected costs, and then as those come in, finalizing that.
So, I think there is a little bit of work to do on both
sides as far as having ready bills, but also things we are
doing to project the cost in front and give half of that up
front to offset some of those immediate requirements, so that
we can work together and reimburse the final cost at the back
end.
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you, Mr. Fenton. I believe my time
has expired.
Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Ms. Underwood.
Ms. Underwood. Well, thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you
for calling today's hearing on the ongoing pandemic response.
During the first year of this pandemic, we all witnessed a
colossal failure of leadership with fatal consequences. But in
the past few months we finally rounded a corner. With the
passage of the American Rescue Plan, help is on the way. And
after a year of grim milestones, including half a million dead,
we finally have some new milestones worth celebrating,
including over 100 million vaccine doses administered in the
United States. These developments are promising, but we are not
out of the woods yet. One of the most important and
logistically challenging steps on our path to normalcy is
vaccination. We have a long road ahead before we reach herd
immunity. I would like to ask a few questions about FEMA's road
in helping us get there.
Mr. Fenton, can you explain how FEMA plans to use funding
from the American Rescue Plan to accelerate COVID vaccine
rollout, and gets shots in arms?
Mr. Fenton. Yeah, so we are doing a number of things to
help with that. While CDC and the operation are funding the
vaccine supply, what we are doing is funding State and local
governments' capability to administer a vaccine. So the $4.4
billion we have already provided out in the last 50 days is
part of that. The second thing we are doing is we are sending
Federal personnel out there to help State and local
governments, so actually, people to administer vaccines. To
date, we have deployed roughly about 6,000 people out to help
in that mission, whether it is the Department of Defense, HHS,
FEMA, the Forest Service, you name the Federal agency; we have
them lined up to help us in that mission, including DHS as a
large is helping us out.
Then, lastly, what we are doing is setting up specific
sites to provide large amounts of vaccine in large population
areas where there is high social vulnerabilities to help to
ensure equity, and those most at risk are vaccinated.
Ms. Underwood. Thank you.
I am hearing from my constituents every day that there is
just not enough vaccine available in our community. I am
interested in seeing this change as quickly as possible. So I
am glad this administration has taken an all-hands-on-deck
approach. One component of FEMA's vaccine rollout support is
the operation of mass vaccination sites like the one at the
United Center in Chicago.
Mr. Fenton, what factors does FEMA consider, and what
stakeholders are consulted when selecting a site for mass
vaccination centers like this one?
Mr. Fenton. Well, we work very closely with CDC to look at
their Social Vulnerability Index score that looks at each
county. What we are looking at is a large population area. If
you take, for example, Illinois and Chicago specifically, the
number of--we are looking at the number of people within the
Chicago area, the social vulnerabilities there, but also
recognizing that Black and Brown people are being impacted by
COVID three times as much, hospitalized two times as much
death, and to ensure that we are working with faith-based
organizations, community-based organizations, and the State and
local governments, to target those areas and those individuals
to ensure that we vaccinate them first.
If you kind of look at Illinois's area, about 40 percent of
the people that have been COVID positive and been hospitalized
are from the Chicago area. About 45 percent that have died are
from the Chicago area. So, therefore, we are focused in on that
area, and trying to build relationships to the community to
ensure that if there is any vaccine hesitancy, we get them
vaccinated.
Ms. Underwood. There is a lot of confusion surrounding the
opening of the United Center vaccination site last week. The
site was originally supposed to open for all Illinois
residents, and then it was later restricted to Chicago
residents only. State, county, and local officials in Illinois
reported that this decision was made based on updated guidance
from FEMA. Can you briefly explain to the committee what
guidance you originally provided on eligibility for sites, and
what changed in your updated guidance?
Mr. Fenton. Yeah, so in all 18 sites that we have open
right now across the country, each one of them are focused only
on that county. The State gets an allocation for the whole
State, and we are focused just on the vulnerable populations
within each county.
What had happened in Illinois is the State started going
ahead and accepting registrations for the whole State. The
first 40,000 opened, and 87 percent of them were White,
Caucasians. It was not the focus and the intention of why we
set up that site. The site was set up for socially vulnerable
populations within the Chicago area to help those that have
been most at risk. So what we did is we stopped taking
registrations for that system and we got everyone together and
said, you know, let's focus on the most socially vulnerable,
the most at-risk populations, and let's come up with a way to
go ahead and do that.
The intent of that site has always been--and all 18 sites
we set up specifically for that--are for those vulnerable
populations, those people most at risk.
Ms. Underwood. Listen, I am a nurse. I cofounded the Black
Maternal Health Caucus. I am very concerned about deadly
disparities. Obviously, I am focused on doing a work with an
emphasis with equity. However, we need to be clear about who is
eligible for vaccine appointments at the outset, and the
availability of those appointments, and we shouldn't have
people facing unnecessary confusion as they try to get their
families vaccinated.
I certainly hope that we can work together to make sure
that folks in my district, which is suburban and rural, and
elsewhere have access to lifesaving vaccines, including from
FEMA-supported sites.
Thank you, Madam Chair.
And I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mrs. Hinson.
Mrs. Hinson. Thank you, Madam Chair. Can you hear me okay?
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you.
Mrs. Hinson. Thank you, Mr. Fenton, for coming before us
today to answer our questions and hear from us. In your
testimony, you aptly discuss, of course, FEMA's roles in
supporting our heroes, the National Guard, expanding vaccine
access. And these are, no doubt, some very important parts of
the work that you are doing. However, I am incredibly
disappointed that Iowa has yet again been forgotten in all of
this. There is no mention of the 2020 derecho that wiped out
much of my district. Your testimony specifically States,
"operating in overlapping disaster environments creates
additional challenges with an already complex mission
requirement."
So, in my mind, surely the massive weather event that
devastated Iowa in the middle of a pandemic deserves your
attention as well. The same farmers who were keeping our
country fed and fueled, keeping our domestic supply chains
operational during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic were
severely harmed by the derecho. It was like a one-two punch for
my district. Yet my constituents have nothing but difficulty in
getting FEMA's assistance.
In particular, when they, for example, asked for extensions
for relief applications, theyhave been denied, denied a simple
extension by a bureaucrat in the middle of their lives being
literally ripped apart. So it is incredibly insulting to the
people in my district. It is insulting to Iowans that you would
come before us today and claim that the agency responded
successfully to each of these natural disasters. You don't
mention the derecho. This is after my team informed yours that
I would be questioning you on that subject today.
So for scale, NOAA's, NOAA's official report which, Madam
Chairman, I would like to enter into the record.
Mr. Roybal-Allard. So be it.
[The information follows:] ******** COMMITTEE INSERT
********
Mrs. Hinson. NOAA's report States that approximately an
estimated 90 percent of structures in Cedar Rapids sustained
some sort of damage from the storm, and more than 1,000 homes
were destroyed. So it is in that report. And Iowans found
themselves quarantined during this public health crisis with
houses without power. They had holes in their roofs, no access
to medicine or local pharmacies. It was terrible and it is
still terrible, and Iowans need support during this pandemic.
They need it doubly so in the wake of the derecho. My district
still needs serious assistance and, again, this is all on top
of the strife brought by the pandemic, job losses, isolation,
extreme mental health stress and our kids included in that.
So now, many families are having to deal with deciding
whether or not they are going to put food on their family
tables, removing hazardous trees, or repairing their roofs. So
at this point, I see that to be completely unacceptable for my
district.
My first question to you, Mr. Fenton: Will you commit to me
today to stop forgetting Iowans and prioritize this relief for
my constituents back in Iowa?
Mr. Fenton. Thank you for that question, Congresswoman
Hinson.
Yeah, I think my testimony was focused at the time that I
had been Acting Administrator of FEMA, which was then a short
period. But I am glad to get with you and your team and look
into that event, and look at what else assistance we can
provide that we haven't provided. I know that we provided about
$47 million in individual assistance and public assistance so
far there, plus significant more money from the COVID disaster
that we funded. But I am glad to work with you and see what
areas, what gaps may exist.
Mrs. Hinson. I am glad to hear you are getting on board
with prioritizing relief for Iowans. The other thing I would
ask you here today is: Will you help commit to granting much-
needed extensions for Iowa's local governments on derecho
relief applications? As I mentioned, this is a one-two punch,
and we really need to make sure that they have the time
necessary, compounded by the pandemic in the middle of a
natural disaster. So will you commit to granting extensions for
our local governments?
Mr. Fenton. Yeah, I am committed to work with you and all
States that need assistance to disasters. We want to help
everyone equitably. So, I would need to see what the issues
are. I don't know specifically what grant application
extensions you are talking about. I am glad right after this to
work with you on those.
Mrs. Hinson. All right. Our office will be following up,
and thank you, again, for coming before us and the work that
you are doing.
I do want to note, as well, that many of the FEMA workers
on the ground have done an incredible job. You know, we talked
a little bit about morale earlier, and they have done an
incredible job on the ground. I think the frustration comes
from when our constituents are looking to Washington for
answers and they are not getting them from here. So I would ask
you to commit to that. Thank you so much for your time, Mr.
Fenton.
Madam Chair, I yield back.
Mr. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Price.
Mr. Price. Thank you, Madam Chair. I want to commend you
and the committee leadership for hitting the ground running
this session with some outstanding hearings, including this
one. We do, I think, benefit from this kind of look across the
whole DHS landscape. So thank you for the making this
opportunity available.
And thank you, Mr. Fenton, for appearing, for the work are
you are doing, picking up in a tough situation, carrying the
work of FEMA forward. I speak as a Representative from a State
that knows FEMA all too well for many, many years past with
disaster after disaster. We do, of course, value the agency. We
also want to see the agency perform at full strength. So this
is a new challenge, and you have done a good job today lining
out some of the ways you are dealing with it.
A lot of news about the vaccination centers and the big
push to get max vaccinations done, and to ensure equity and
outreach with underserved populations in that process. I
appreciate that perspective.
Like other Members, I have reached out to people in my
State who are responsible for vaccinations and other healthcare
functions, and finding some confusion and some uncertainty
about what is going to change. I want to invite you to say
whatever you want to say briefly for the record today about
that, particularly with respect to hospitals. We, of course,
will welcome more explicit guidance as to what these providers
can expect. I also want to ask you about the use of the FEMA
Corps and what use you might make of the national service
expansion, the AmeriCorps expansion that is in the pandemic
relief bill.
So those are my two subjects, if you could respond. The
hospitals, of course, wonder what kind of reimbursement they
are going to be subject to, vaccination efforts, other efforts,
what is going to change for them. What is the reimbursement
policy going to be going forward? Again, if you would just
briefly signal that.
But then, with the FEMA Corps and national service, you
have these vaccination centers. You have lots of public
outreach to do. You are going to need all hands on deck and
then some.
So I wonder what use the FEMA Corps might be and
implementing this? This is a fairly recent innovation to have a
branch of AmeriCorps devoted to disaster relief and recovery
activities. And then we have, in this bill, potential expansion
of AmeriCorps, and we are exploring what kind of pandemic-
related functions these new volunteers might perform. I wonder
if there is anything along those lines you have been thinking
about?
Mr. Fenton. Yeah, I appreciate the question, Congressman.
Let me start with reimbursement to hospitals. So for cost
related to assisting those with COVID, whether it is expanding
capacity or protective equipment that are uninsured costs, they
could go ahead and submit those to FEMA for reimbursement if it
is a eligible nonprofit hospital. Hospitals fall into a number
of areas. So it would be eligible nonprofits. It would also be
public hospitals that fall into those eligibility criteria. You
will be able to submit those costs to FEMA for reimbursement.
We will continue to expand and clarify our policy to help
hospitals. We just provided an update today for hospitals to
assist them with that.
We have also brought in a number of individuals to help us
with the insurance part as medical insurance is very complex,
and what we want to make sure is that we fund things that are
not already covered by medical insurance. So we are working
very closely and brought in a big team to help us get through
those issues.
Then with regard to FEMA Corps, AmeriCorps, I was actually
one of the individuals, when I worked in D.C. from 2009 to
2015, to help start FEMA Corps and it has been not only a great
effort to bring 18- to 24-year-olds into, start them in
emergency management, but their ideas, their thoughts are
invaluable. So they have also gone not only from FEMA Corps,
but a large amount of them have actually gone into FEMA. So it
helps to feed also into our organization to create new
employees for the future of FEMA that have service as part of
their core values.
So we will continue to grow FEMA Corps. We leverage
AmeriCorps already through agreements we have with them during
disasters. Right now, we are using them at the vaccine centers
to help register people, to help some of the logistics issues
in line. But we use them all over the place from people to do
logistics, to do IT, to do GIS mapping. So, we have brought
them in, in a number of various ways to our organization to not
only get them to help but to help them with skills for the
future as they go on in life.
Mr. Price. Thank you very much.
Mr. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Palazzo.
Then we will move on to Mr. Ruppersberger.
Mr. Ruppersberger. Madam Chairman, first, thank you.
And Mr. Fenton, I do want to acknowledge your mission and
your presence today. FEMA is a unique operation that our
country needs on a regular basis. We can't control a lot of
issues, the storms that we face. The most important thing is to
have good people and have people that are prepared. There will
be times when we are frustrated because of events that have
occurred, and all the more reason why it is so important that
Federal, State, and local work together.
Now, President Biden has set the goal of about 100 million
doses of the COVID-19 vaccination in the first 100 days of his
administration. This is a tall task, and I am glad to see FEMA
is now taking an expanded role. You are going to make a
difference.
Now, Mr. Fenton, we are pleased, were pleased when the
President quickly reversed some policies of the previous
administration including expanding the scope of what is
eligible for reimbursement for the COVID disaster declarations.
Now related to that, I have a question from a county in my home
State of Maryland. The question is: Is the cost of contact
tracing by State or local governments eligible under FEMA's
policy? And if not, is there another Federal agency who
provides funds for the cost of contact tracing?
Mr. Fenton. Let me go ahead and look at our--we are
expanding our policy right now, and I don't want to, you know,
give you an answer that is incorrect. So let me take that for
return and make sure I get that to you.
Mr. Ruppersberger. Yeah.
Mr. Fenton. I would be happy to get back with an answer.
Mr. Ruppersberger. If you could do that sometime maybe
today, I would appreciate it. That way we can stay on top of
it. There is a lot of issues going on. Okay.
Secondly, we need to make sure vaccines are distributed
equitably. We are facing some issues in Baltimore City. I
applaud FEMA taking an active role in the disaster response in
establishing pilot Community Vaccination Centers. Now how does
FEMA determine where to stand these up?
Mr. Fenton. Yeah, we have--well, first let me just say that
we have already funded, provided resources, equipment, or
personnel to over 700 sites across the United States. Then when
we talk about specifically the CVC sites, we have used
population and literally walked down the population numbers
from the largest population State and have set up 18 sites, and
will continue to do that, working down population.
As I said earlier, we are using the Socially Vulnerable
Index score for counties to drive where to focus those sites
at. So we are looking for a high population area of about 1
million people for a type 1 site, with a high social
vulnerability index score of .7 or greater.
Mr. Ruppersberger. Then who determines where mobile
vaccination centers are placed?
Mr. Fenton. We do that in coordination with the State and
local government, and working with faith-based organizations
and community-based organizations, so that we focus in on
equity. And one of the things that we have seen is, by using
mobile sites, people that have vaccine hesitancy are more
willing to go to those sites than maybe the larger sites.
Mr. Ruppersberger. We are appropriators for Homeland
Security. We have a lot of different missions. You have a lot
of missions helping people, and we really need your help. We
need to work together, as I said before, as a team. What would
you like our committee to focus on as it relates to your
mission in helping our citizens?
Mr. Fenton. Well, you provide us the resources that we
need.
But I think that just being in this business for 25 years,
we continue to see the risks and our mission grow as you have
alluded to. And, so, focus on programs that reduce risk,
whether that is through our flood insurance program or through
building resiliency, whether it is our mitigation program or
our new BRIC program that focuses on hardening, making more
resilient infrastructure is, really, I think, as we go forward
in the future, is looking at that risk and how to lessen that
risk and build smarter and build more resilient and go back and
harden infrastructure that needs to be hardened.
Mr. Ruppersberger. You know, our President has stated a
goal of where he wants to be with our country. It is a type of
goal we need to move forward to save people's lives and bring
our country out of this terrible pandemic that we are in right
now. Now with that new strategy, it is putting a lot more
pressure on you and your team. So it is important in order to
make your goal and the President's goal that if it looks like
you need more resources, you have got to let us know.
I yield back.
Mr. Fenton. I appreciate it. We are well-resourced, and
that is my priority right now is vaccinating everyone American.
Mr. Ruppersberger. I yield back. RPTR MARTIN EDTR HUMKE
[11:00 a.m.]
Mr. Fenton. I appreciate it.
We are well resourced, and that is my priority right now is
vaccinating every American.
Mr. Ruppersberger. Yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. I believe we have a little bit more time
for a second round.
Mr. Fenton, in addition to the funding for disaster relief,
the American Rescue Plan provides $510 million for the
emergency food and shelter program, including $110 for
humanitarian assistance to individuals and families released
from DHS custody, $100 million for assistance to firefighter
grants, $200 million for safer grants, and $100 million for
Emergency Management Performance Grants.
Can you tell us when FEMA expects those funds to be
obligated and dispersed to grant recipients?
Mr. Fenton. Yes. Right now we are working through the
process. As far as the emergency food and shelter programs, we
have $4 million that is left over that is not part of this
appropriation that the NOFO is going out today. As far as the
remaining $400 million, plus $110 million specifically for the
border, they are building the NOFOs for that in the next 30
days. Those will go out, and then the money will be provided in
probably the next 60 to 90 days.
As far as the other programs, we are looking at either
leveraging the existing notice of funding opportunity that is
out there and using that to incorporate the additional funding
or looking at whether we need to do something specific, and we
will work through each one of those to make that quick
decision.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. One final question.
What lessons have you learned during this pandemic that
will be useful in future disasters?
Mr. Fenton. Well, I think we have learned a lot more about
other Federal agencies' authorities and resources during this
event, and we have also learned a lot about the missions need
to be enduring, and we have learned a lot from technology and
data from this event. The data we have been able to leverage in
this event to make decisions and better make decisions has been
invaluable.
I give you one of the examples that we have learned from
this event that has already improved what we do. Just like
everyone else, we have been leveraging now Zoom and other
mobile platforms to work remotely. We actually used those in
Texas following the storm to do remote inspections of people's
houses.
So what took us 25 days before to get the first funds out,
we were able to do in 5 days following the freeze down there by
using a lot of remote platforms.
So I think technology and other Federal agencies'
capabilities that we don't traditionally work with and their
resources, we have learned a lot from that and will be able to
help Americans in future pandemics and also in future disasters
from that.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Fleischmann.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chair, Mr. Fenton, and to
all of our members. This has been a very insightful and helpful
hearing, so I appreciate round two.
I read with interest in your testimony, sir, the
information about mobile vaccination units. I think that is a
great way to reach populations who are unable to get to a
stationary vaccine site. I can't help but think about some DHS
frontline employees who are still struggling to get vaccinated
through their own State programs. I am thinking of TSA
officers, Border Patrol agents, Customs officers, for example.
I know DHS is trying to work with the Department of Veteran
Affairs to get these public-facing employees vaccinated; but I
am wondering, is there a way that FEMA could help. Are you in a
position, sir, to work with frontline DHS employees to help get
them vaccinated in a timelier manner?
Thank you.
Mr. Fenton. Yes. Thank you for the question.
And we are working with DHS. I sent one of my teams up to
DHS to help them with vaccinating the whole DHS workforce, so
they are working with the Department, and right now I am doing
that.
Another thing that I did is we have opened up these 18 CVC
sites. What we do is the first day, before we open live, we
bring through the Federal workforce and first responders, and
so what I am doing is vaccinating parts of the Department. So I
have vaccinated--for example, when I opened up the one in
California, I vaccinated some people from TSA and other Federal
personnel, plus the personnel working there at that site.
So I am looking at opportunities to expedite vaccinating
those DHS employees. I have also written a letter that gives
prioritization to all of the FEMA employees to be able to use
that to get vaccinated within the correct level within their
States. So there is a number of mechanisms, including work with
the VA, that we are doing.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, sir.
As part of the community vaccination centers are being
established in States, there is a requirement to distribute
them in jurisdictions with high Social Vulnerability Index
scores, SVI scores.
Did the Federal Government apply SVI in determining vaccine
allocations to the States or was a simple per capita allocation
used?
Mr. Fenton. Yeah. The CDC, I believe, is using a simple per
capita allocation in the State vaccination-- vaccinations that
will be provided to States. So that is the 15--over 15 million
doses per week that is being provided. Plus, there are another
couple million doses that are going to pharmacies across the
United States, 10,000 pharmacies.
In addition to that, we are vaccinating direct to skilled
nursing facilities and elderly care facilities. And then the
only place that I am aware of that we use the Social
Vulnerability Index score is the 18 sites that we have set up
to focus specifically on the equity issue.
Mr. Fleischmann. Would it be more cost effective, sir, and
efficient to support the State vaccination efforts by providing
an increase in dose allocations and personnel to support their
existing vaccination operations?
Mr. Fenton. I am sorry. Could you say that one more time,
sir?
Mr. Fleischmann. Yes, sir. Would it be more cost effective
and efficient to support State vaccination efforts by providing
an increase in dose allocations and personnel support to their
existing vaccination operations?
Mr. Fenton. So I think what they are doing now is
maximizing-- general product and the operation of the CDC are
maximizing the vaccine as it becomes available using the
Defense Production Act and everything else to make it available
and providing that out to States and basically what they have
available. And we have been able to give them a 3-week claim
factor that will go no less than that number, and so that gives
them confidence to be able to set up sites and to quickly
vaccinate.
I think as we go forward, continuing to use States'
capability, whether it be doctors, pharmacies, State vaccine
centers, will allow a sufficient throughput as vaccine
increases, and it will only increase as we go into April and
May.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, sir.
Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Ruppersberger.
Mr. Ruppersberger. Yeah. What was the question?
Yeah. Hello? Can you hear me now?
Mr. Ruppersberger. I can hear you, sir.
Okay. Did you ask me a question? I didn't hear.
Mr. Fenton. No. You are going to ask me the questions, sir.
I will stand by.
Mr. Ruppersberger. Okay. Well, first thing, are we having
another round? I might save the question for another round.
Mr. Fenton. Yes, you are in another round right now, sir.
Mr. Ruppersberger. The second round now, okay.
Getting shots in arms and crushing the virus requires a
tremendous amount of coordination with countless stakeholders
and ultimately county and municipal governments are where the
rubber meets the road.
Do you agree with that?
Mr. Fenton. Yes, sir, totally agree.
Mr. Ruppersberger. Okay. Now, my question for the entire
panel, are what challenges are State emergency management
agencies facing when communicating with local governments? Are
there recommendations that we could relay to local officials in
our districts regarding how to improve synergy, from your
perspective?
Mr. Fenton. Yes. I would just say that I don't believe
that, you know, there is any issues with communication or
coordination. We have now staff that work in every State
emergency management office across the country from each
regional office, so there is dedicated staff that are there 24/
7 every day of the week, whether there is a disaster or not,
working with them. We interact with our States and local
governments through planning and operations in a bunch of
different ways and continue to do that.
I think this is a dynamic and a complex event, and this has
changed over time, and we need to be agile and we need to stay
in front of this event and be able to leverage State and local
government, as you said, to the fullest extent possible, to get
shots in the arms.
They are most connected to the populations they serve, and
we need to be able to support them in that.
Mr. Ruppersberger. Okay. Thank you.
Yield back.
Mr. Fenton. Hey, sir, one last thing. I did get an answer.
HHS can fund the contact tracing. FEMA funds cannot be used for
contact tracing because it is in HHS's authority.
Mr. Ruppersberger. So any recommendations where to go?
Mr. Fenton. Yes. I am going to go ahead and give you that
to your team, specifically what part of HHS can fund that out.
I will send that to your team.
Mr. Ruppersberger. Okay. Thank you for that.
I Yield back.
Mr. Fenton. Yes.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Rutherford?
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Mr. Fenton, in Florida, the second most populous State in
the country now, we have made some pretty great progress in our
vaccine distribution under the great leadership of Governor Ron
DeSantis. And so far, in fact, over 4 million Floridians have
received at least one dose, including 60 percent of our seniors
over the age of 65, and that is significant, as you know, in
the mortality rates.
In northeast Florida, we have a FEMA-supported vaccine site
at Gateway Mall. This site is to vaccinate residents who are 60
years up, long-term care facility staff and residents, the
medically vulnerable, those you mentioned earlier, the
medically vulnerable, those you mentioned earlier, as well as
teachers and first responders.
You mentioned in your statement that these sites have the
capacity for 6,000 vaccines a day above and beyond the State
allocation. Is that correct? Did I hear that right?
Mr. Fenton. Yes, sir. What we did is when we went around
and looked at each State and the population of the county, we
adjusted the site to meet the need of those who are socially
vulnerable. And in Florida, rather than do two type 1, which is
6,000 a day, they elected for four type 2 and did Tampa,
Jackson, Miami-Dade, and Tampa.
So they each do 3,000 a day, plus they did mobiles from
there, so like a spoke-and-hub concept, and I think each one
has two mobiles that are going out to community based
organizations and targeting specific populations at risk.
Mr. Rutherford. Okay. So it can you tell me, for the site
at Gateway Mall, what is is their target?
Mr. Fenton. Their target is 3,000 per day. That is the one
in--is that the one in Hillsborough? Is that what that--
Mr. Rutherford. Jacksonville.
Mr. Fenton. Jacksonville. So I will have to look and see if
that is one of ours or not. I am looking at my list of the four
that I have, and it is Orange, Miami-Dade, Hillsborough, and
Duval are the four counties--
Mr. Rutherford. That is Duval.
Mr. Fenton. Yes. So the requirement is supposed to be 3,000
a day, and they also have a number of mobile sites go in there.
It looks like yesterday they did--I don't have the numbers from
yesterday, but it is supposed to be 3,000 a day. They did a
thousand at the mobile sites yesterday, I know that.
Mr. Rutherford. Okay. What is the average distribution bid
on that 3,000 a day?
Mr. Fenton. The average distribution?
Mr. Rutherford. Yes. They are allocated 3,000. How many are
they actually getting into arms every day?
Mr. Fenton. Yes, I will get you the specific numbers. I
do--it looks like Duval is a little bit less than the other
couple in the State of Florida, so it is a little less; but I
will get the numbers and get them over to your staff.
Mr. Rutherford. Yes, I am a little concerned about how we
get that information out to who is eligible.
But let me jump real quick to the border because we have a
humanitarian mess at the border, which is why FEMA is being
sent down there. And this administration has got to step up and
start addressing this, and I guess they are by sending FEMA.
Last month alone we had over a hundred thousand people try to
cross the border and 9,500 of those were unaccompanied minors.
So my question, what is being done to test immigrants or
migrants to isolate those with COVID-19? I know this has got to
be a massive challenge for you guys.
Mr. Fenton. Yes. So in all four States that are along the
border and, for that matter, anywhere in the United States,
anyone that is at risk can be tested by local or State
government and FEMA will reimburse those costs a hundred
percent.
In some cases we have sent teams down there from HHS to
assist with testing. I know that California has a very good
plan. I know that we are working with Arizona, and they have a
pretty good plan. Texas has actually sent testing kits that we
have given down to the border, 40,000 of them. So there is
testing happening. What we are seeing is less than 6 percent
positive right now coming across the border--
Mr. Rutherford. That was what I wanted to know. So it is 6
percent, less than 6 percent. I appreciate that.
And I have to tell you, I think the Stay in Mexico policy
needs to be reinstituted so that we can do this in a humane and
positive way to help these folks.
And with that, Madam Chair, I yield back. I see my time is
up.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Ms. Underwood.
Mrs. Hinson.
Mrs. Hinson. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you again,
Mr. Fenton.
So I just wanted to go back to something actually that
Congresswoman Underwood mentioned earlier about the vaccine
distribution site in Chicago, we heard about that, and some
challenges facing some of the big sites even. But, ultimately,
when it comes to a State like Iowa, big sites aren't really
accessible to millions of Americans living in rural
communities.
And so I guess my question would be, specifically, what is
FEMA doing to ensure that rural Americans, like my constituents
in Iowa, are given that same level of access and support by
FEMA as folks in big cities?
Mr. Fenton. Yes, and I appreciate that question.
And so across the country, in places like Iowa and other
rural areas, we are providing support to over 700 sites since
January 20. The $4.42 billion we provided to State and local
governments to help create capacity and support where there is
contracts, mutual aid, they are all forces to vaccinate is what
we have done.
But I think it is bigger than just the vaccine supply going
to the State. It is using the pharmacies. It is using also
other capabilities through going direct to skilled nursing
facilities and long-term care facilities to vaccinate those
most at risk. So we are doing that everywhere across the United
States.
In 18 locations, we targeted these large population cities
because we have seen such high COVID among different groups and
wanted to focus on those with these 18 sites. We will continue
to expand that; but I am providing people, personnel,
equipment, and supplies to all States, including Iowa.
Mrs. Hinson. Okay. So could you give some specific
examples? You mentioned, obviously, pharmacies and getting out
to that level. How are you really targeting down to that local
level? Is it community leader based? Is it the local public
health entities, local emergency management? How are you
getting that granular, so to speak, on the local level with
rural populations?
Mr. Fenton. Yes, communications. There is a national
strategy, a national communications that is going out,
especially with regard to vaccine hesitancy right now, to urge
individuals to get vaccinated; but we are supporting State and
local plans. They know their communities best. They know the
best way to reach them, to interact with them. Where to
vaccinate them, and we are really following that in providing
them the right resources. And there is a bunch of different
Federal agencies doing that.
So if it is a rural area and it is a small area, it may be
using a mobile capability to go there and maybe set up a 1-day
site. We have mobile capability, VA has mobile capability, and
there are other Federal agencies that have mobile capability.
So lending that capability with people that can vaccinate
your State may be one solution. They may have mobile capability
that we are funding.
And so everything is on the table. This is our biggest
priority. When they tell us what their plan is, what their
strategy is, we are supporting that with either people,
funding, equipment, or supplies.
Mrs. Hinson. So for a mobile aspect, for example, so for a
State like Iowa, you get an additional vaccine allotment for
the mobile distribution or would it be included in the State
vaccine distribution?
Mr. Fenton. It is in the State vaccine distribution, so
there is no additional for the mobile. The only additional
vaccine we provided was the pilot 18 sites that have been
turned on so far; but there is no additional vaccine. But the
pharmacy is additional vaccine, so the vaccine going directly
to pharmacies, the over 2 million to 10,000 pharmacies across
the United States is an addition. And then there may be--there
is vaccine going to VA. So if there is a VA location in your
State that is vaccinating veterans, that is an addition too,
and then there may be other Federal agencies vaccinating
Federal employees within your State. And so that would be in
addition to the State allocation.
Mrs. Hinson. Thank you, Mr. Fenton.
And Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. It is now time for our next panel.
Administrator Fenton, thank you again for your time, and please
stay in touch with us and our staff about how we can be helpful
in your efforts to respond to COVID and other emergencies and
disasters. And, again, please extend our most sincere gratitude
to your colleagues across the country.
We will now recess to prepare for our next panel, and we
will return shortly.
Mr. Fenton. I just wanted to thank everyone for the
opportunity today, and we will definitely work with your
offices as we go forward in the future, so thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you.
[Recess.]
Ms. Roybal-Allard. We will now go to the second hearing
panel, which includes Mark Ghilarducci, the director of the
California Governor's Office of Emergency Services; Curtis
Brown, the State coordinator for the Virginia Department of
Emergency Management and also the cofounder of the Institute
for Diversity and Inclusion in Emergency Management; Patrick
Sheehan, the director of Tennessee Emergency Management Agency;
and Kevin McGowan, the director of the Los Angeles County
Office of Emergency Management.
Gentlemen, we will submit the full text of your official
statements for the hearing record, and I would ask you each to
keep your oral testimony to 5 minutes.
Director Ghilarducci, let's begin with you.
Mr. Ghilarducci. --impacted California. As of March 11, the
State had a cumulative total of over 3.5 million cases and over
54,800 COVID-related deaths. Essential workers risked their
lives to keep our vital systems working while the majority of
the population were confined to their homes. Government and
businesses in California fundamentally changed the way they had
to operate.
This change extended to emergency management. The cascading
impacts of this virus forced us to pivot to reevaluate
standards, operating procedures, and to address shortages, and
lifesaving commodities and resources, and to implement plans to
respond to later surges, all the while managing concurrent
disasters that we were facing.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Cal OES has led the
State's response and coordination with our Health and Human
Services agency, our Department of Public Health, many other
State agencies and local governments and departments, and our
great partners at FEMA. This collaboration ensured for the
State's response efforts to remain centralized and unified
through the State Operation Center.
By applying our well-established emergency response
framework and adapting it to fit the pandemic, California
effected tremendous progress in flattening the curve and
limiting the spread of the virus. However, we faced
unprecedented challenges while also enduring multiple
multifaceted, multi-incident all hazard disaster response
operations amid the pandemic.
Additionally, COVID-19 further worsened the equity gaps and
disproportionately affected individuals. These extraordinary
challenges and new disasters led to unparalleled strategies
focused on achieving the equitable distribution of information,
resources, commodities, and vaccine administration.
While facing these challenges, California worked in close
partnership with FEMA to develop and implement a multitude of
innovative public assistance programs in the area of PPE,
emergency feeding, emergency housing, alternate care sites, and
medical/surg capability, testing, mega vaccination sites, and
mobile vaccination clinics.
In fact, California was the first in the Nation to develop
and implement specific programs, in partnership with FEMA, to
assist impacted populations, such as the Great Plates Delivered
program, which provides prepared meals through participating
restaurants for adults 65 and older and adults 60 to 64 who are
at high risk and unable to prepare meals or access food
resources while staying at home.
In addition, this program also supported local restaurants,
other food providers, agriculture workers, and food service
providers who have closed or who are struggling to remain open
during COVID-19.
Project Room Key, which provides safe isolation capacity
for tens of thousands of Californians experiencing
homelessness; Housing for the Harvest, which provides temporary
emergency noncongregate shelters for agriculture and field
workers and have played an essential role enduring the
continuity of our food supply.
Project Hope, which provides isolation and quarantine
housing for recently released inmates on parole and probation;
and Hotel for Healthcare Workers, which kept California
healthcare workers and other public personnel safe and healthy
by providing free or discounted hotel rooms for those working
to care for COVID patients, reducing the risk of them bringing
the virus home to their families.
And, lastly, Hospital Training Academy serving the
community, which used FEMA dollars in conjunction with UNITE
Here Local 11 in L.A. County and L.A. City to provide meals
prepared in industrial kitchens to homebound seniors and others
affected in the pandemic.
Lastly--or most recently, as of February 16, in partnership
with FEMA, California stood up two first in the Nation pilot
mass vaccination sites, part of President Biden's hundred sites
across the Nation. Focusing on underserved, high COVID risk
populations, these two sites were established in Oakland and
East Los Angeles. In addition to these two fixed sites and with
the focus on equity, each site working with community-based
organizations, faith-based organizations, and community
leaders, also deployed three mobile vaccination clinics to
penetrate into and better serve the community. To date over
350,000 vaccinations have been delivered through these two mega
sites with a metric representing over 60 percent people of
color or underserved.
As the State of this pandemic continues to evolve, so do
our efforts, in partnership with FEMA and under the leadership
of Bob Fenton both here as the regional administrator and now
as the acting FEMA administrator, which has been just an
incredible amount of leadership and partnership, to help
mitigate its effects to ensure that all Californians have the
resources needed to fight this pandemic.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today,
and thank you for your commitment to ensure a strong appearance
and response to this pandemic. We will look forward to
answering any of your questions.
[The statement of Mr. Ghilarducci follows:] ********
COMMITTEE INSERT ********
Ms. Roybal-Allard. State Coordinator Brown.
Mr. Brown. Good morning. And thank you, Madam Chairwoman
and Ranking Member and members of the subcommittee.
As the State coordinator of emergency management at the
Virginia Department of Emergency Management and cofounder of
the Institute for Diversity and Inclusion in Emergency
Management, I appreciate the opportunity to discuss the role of
FEMA in the emergency management community and the ongoing
response to COVID-19, including opportunities to address the
disproportionate impact of disasters on marginalized and
frontline communities.
As we have recently passed the 1-year mark in this
historically long response, we pause to recognize those who
have been lost from this disaster.
We also recognize the hard work and the resilience of
frontline essential workers, nurses, doctors, public health and
public safety community, including emergency managers, who have
been quite fiscally responding to this disaster. Those who have
been lost serve as our motivation to improve our response in
real-time and in preparation for future disasters.
In emergency management we try to learn lessons in order to
improve for the next disaster. Due to this long event, it is
important that we not wait until the end of this response but
have critical conversations and evaluations now. Three thousand
lives were lost during the tragic 9/11 terrorist attacks, over
1,800 deaths during Hurricane Katrina, and close to 4,000
deaths during the 2017 hurricane season. All of that lead to
new legislation, new policy changes, and additional resources
to support emergency management.
The historic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted
in over 500,000 American deaths, including 10,000 Virginians
which requires us to commit to taking bold and innovative
action to vastly improve our performance for the next pandemic
and disasters.
It is important to note that on top of the response to
COVID-19, FEMA, State, and local emergency management has also
responded to numerous other events over the last year,
including major flooding, storms, protests, hurricanes, which
have stressed resources.
So how do we learn from this catastrophic event and move
forward? We have seen, once again, the disportionate impact of
COVID-19 on communities of color, people with disabilities, and
marginalized communities, which require the urgent integration
of equity into emergency management.
This event has also demonstrated the important role of FEMA
and emergency management as a profession for coordinating
responses to disasters. Leveraging emergency management's all
hazards expertise and logistics, coordination and capacity
building is needed to move with speed to ensure a whole of
government response. Early in this response, FEMA was not fully
leveraged and empowered to do that. It hurt our response and
negatively impacted us working on the State level.
Improving our coordinated response to disasters will
require streamline processes, eliminating complexities,
prioritizing equity to support communities most at risk, and
increasing and diversifying staffing. We also need to build
diversity management capacity at the State and local level,
recognizing the new normal, more frequent and impactful
disasters and the growing impacts of climate change.
Despite the challenges of this response and issues to
address moving forward, I am hopeful, due to recent actions of
Congress and the Biden administration to support States and our
communities, new tools, and resources provided by Congress and
President Biden is enabling us to move forward with our
Vaccinate Virginia Campaign, while continuing to test, contact
trace, get our schools open, and support vulnerable Virginians.
We are working closely with FEMA to leverage funding and in
other resources to equitably open community vaccination centers
in our hardest hit communities. I am appreciative for Congress
passing and President Biden for signing the American Rescue
Plan which includes numerous support for emergency management,
including $100 million for the Emergency Management Performance
Grant program.
Having strong leadership at FEMA is essential to ensuring
the agency moves forward. That is why I look forward to working
with administrator nominee, Deanne Criswell, to further
resilience ability and address these issues. Administrator
Criswell is a topnotch and well respected emergency manager who
will bring a wealth of knowledge and bringing this to the
position and appreciate the leadership of interim
administrator, Mr. Fenton.
In closing, thank you, Madam Chairwoman, for convening this
important hearing and providing an opportunity for emergency
managers to offer recommendations. I am happy to answer any
questions from the subcommittee.
Thank you.
[The statement of Mr. Brown follows:] ******** COMMITTEE
INSERT ********
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Next we will go to Director Sheehan.
Mr. Sheehan. Thank you.
Good morning, Chairwoman Roybal-Allard and Ranking Member
Fleischmann and distinguished members of the committee. My name
is Patrick Sheehan. I am the director of the Tennessee
Emergency Management Agency. I am grateful for the invitation
and this opportunity to speak with you today.
First, I want to acknowledge the loss of more than 11,000
Tennesseeans and 530,000 Americans to this virus. Our hearts
join in mourning the too soon loss of life of so many
Tennesseeans and Americans, and nearly all of us have
experienced the loss of a friend or a loved one, and our hearts
ache with our fellow Americans at that loss.
Second, I want to express my sincere gratitude for my
teammates, for the Tennessee Department of Health, medical
personnel across Tennessee and across our Nation for the
dedicated work they have continued to do for more than a year
now. I want to express my gratitude for our local responders,
our local emergency managers, the Tennessee National Guard, for
FEMA, and emergency managers everywhere for the work that they
have continued to do in these challenging times.
This pandemic has challenged those in ways that few
expected. Time and time again over the last year, they have
stepped up and served. It is awe inspiring to see the
commitment of our public health partners and our agencies that
serve their neighbors and humbling to work shoulder to shoulder
with them.
In Tennessee in 2020, we have been tested over and over
again. Starting in January of 2020, the Tennessee Department of
Health, the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency, and the
Governor's office, and a number of other departments, convened
to examine the situation that was developing in China and the
reports that were coming in from Europe on the spread of a
novel coronavirus. We used that opportunity to examine our
plan, protocols, and to try to prepare for the road that was
ahead of us.
Shortly after we began convening those, we were struck on
March 3 by a series of deadly tornadoes, the largest of which
had a 60-mile track, and it hit Nashville and tracked almost
due east, taking 25 lives and destroying hundreds of homes and
damaged millions of dollars' worth of infrastructure.
And Tennessee is the nighttime tornado capital of the
United States. We have more nighttime tornadoes than any other
State in the Union and, unfortunately, at that time also the
deadliest.
I am incredibly grateful for the quick work of FEMA
following that disaster. I am also incredibly grateful for the
work of our county emergency managers and partners. What I
think we showed is that the investment over the last 5 years
that we have made in working together and collaborating and
building a collaborative emergency management enterprise in
Tennessee paid dividends. We had--while that disaster, the
tornado, was widespread and sudden and struck in the middle of
the night, what we found was that our system worked
collaboratively, we had good communications and very, very--
It was also heartwarming to see the outpouring of the
volunteer spirit, Tennessee being the Volunteer State, as
thousands of Tennesseeans and neighbors from other States
poured in to help with the immediate response and recovery from
that disaster.
Then on March 5, Tennessee had its first confirmed COVID
case. A physician who had attended a conference in
Massachusetts was confirmed by our superb Tennessee Department
of Health, public health lab as being the first COVID case in
the State of Tennessee, the first of more than 660,000 cases
that we would have here. Tennessee has also conducted more than
7 million COVID tests since that time.
On April 12 and 13 then, another series of storms and
tornadoes hit the Eastern Grand Division of Tennessee, and that
disaster, coupled then with the derecho in Waco in May, and
then a Christmas bombing, just has brought a lot of destruction
to Tennessee. Policies, FEMA has done some things incredibly
well. Emergency management has really pulled together to help
address our needs. Tennessee's vaccination plan has been lauded
for choosing equity and buying down risk as quickly as
possible.
And I will just flag too that equitable distribution of
vaccine or aid takes time and patience and persistence, and for
a myriad of reasons, from access, to lack of transportation, to
lack of trust in the government programs, if we are going to
have equitable allocation of vaccine, it is going to take us
being patient and persistent and working with communities that
are most at risk.
If we are going to continue to have data-informed, risk-
based allocation of vaccine, in some ways we are going to have
to be patient. We have to make vaccine available, but in
Tennessee's model we have held out allocations specifically to
ensure that we don't leave out communities that have been most
impacted.
And as my colleague, Chris Brown, indicated, we know that
the African-American community has been disproportionately been
impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, both in terms of cases and
hospitalizations and deaths. And we are able to see that and
act on that, and I would encourage whatever we do with
vaccinations moving forward that we continue to be patient in
ways that are meaningful.
I just want to thank you again for the opportunity to be
here and talk a little bit about what challenges Tennessee has
faced, and I look forward to answering any questions that you
might have.
Thank you, ma'am.
[The statement of Mr. Sheehan follows:] ******** COMMITTEE
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Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you.
And last, but certainly not least, Director McGowan, please
begin your testimony.
Mr. McGowan. Good morning, Chairwoman Roybal-Allard. It is
nice to see you. Last time we were together here in the
Emergency Operation Center.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Yes.
Mr. McGowan. Ranking Member Fleischmann and honorable
members of the subcommittee. My name is Ken McGowan, and I
serve as the director for Los Angeles County's office of
emergency management. Thanks for this opportunity to discuss
the county's response to COVID-19 and our partnership with
FEMA.
First, I would like to acknowledge the incredible toll that
COVID-19 has taken across our county and the country and
throughout the world. In Los Angeles County alone, COVID-19 has
caused more than 22,000 deaths and infected over 1.2 million
people.
I also want to extend my deepest thanks and appreciation to
the hundreds of thousands of Los Angeles County healthcare
workers, emergency responders, disaster service workers for
their commitment and steadfast resolve in day in and day out
answering the call to service. They truly represent the full
measure of public service.
By virtue of our size, Los Angeles County faces numerous
challenges during natural disasters, human-caused disasters,
and technological disasters. In 2020's National Risk Index,
FEMA identified Los Angeles County as having the highest risk
index of all our counties in the country.
This underscores the critical importance of Los Angeles
County to continue to build our emergency management
capabilities and mitigate the national risks of natural
disasters and similarly address our response to disasters like
the COVID-19 pandemic.
On March 4, 2020, Los Angeles County proclaimed a local
emergency due to COVID-19. The county's emergency operation
center immediately activated, and from day one our initial
emergency management actions were to coordinate and support the
county's public health efforts in mitigating the effects of
this global pandemic.
The subsequent activities resulted in uninterrupted
continuation of our county's essential services, while also
allowing for the distribution of tens of millions of critical
pieces of personal protective equipment, the administration of
millions of COVID-19 tests, millions of doses of vaccination,
the distribution of millions of meals and other essential goods
to our communities.
The safe sheltering of thousands of individuals to prevent
the spread of COVID-19, and the local financial and
programmatic management of hundreds of millions of dollars in
FEMA's public assistance program.
The unity of effort with our Federal, State, and community
partners has been the cornerstone of our response. In Los
Angeles County, it has truly been a whole community response.
The county's emergency management mission requires this, and it
is ever present in our strong organizational partnerships with
FEMA and the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services
and my personal professional relationship with Mr. Fenton and
Mr. Ghilarducci.
No one governmental organization can do this job alone.
With this whole community partnership, we have leveraged our
strengths, capabilities, and resources to respond to this
pandemic. There have been numerous positive results from this
partnership. The first was FEMA's rapid approval of expedited
projects, which provided a lifeline of critical financial
resources to the county and supported our ability to continue
to provide these critical services and response functions to
our community.
The second was FEMA's support for non-congregate sheltering
which resulted in Project Room Key, a collaborative effort with
the State, the county, and the Los Angeles Homeless Services
Authority to secure hotel and motel rooms for vulnerable people
experiencing homelessness in our county.
Project Room Key not only helps protect high-risk
individuals but also helps prevent the spread of the virus in
our communities and has the added value of bringing capacity
and protecting our hospitals and healthcare system.
The third, FEMA's efforts to support the distribution of
vaccines to residents from communities who have been
disproportionately impacted by the pandemic.
FEMA's partnership with Cal OES and the California State
University of Los Angeles has resulted in the administration of
hundreds of thousands of vaccination doses in some of our
county's hardest hit communities. And I will reference Bob's
earlier comment about the hub-and-spoke model where the Cal
State L.A. Site serves as the hub, but then we have multiple
sites that spoke off of that.
Finally, I want to express the county's appreciation and
support for President Biden's executive actions in January
2021, directing FEMA to provide 100 percent reimbursement of
eligible costs for public assistance programs retroactively to
the start of the emergency, as well as prospectively. This
action greatly reduces the financial stress of the widespread
pandemic-related costs which have been borne significantly by
local jurisdictions, including Los Angeles County.
The pandemic is not over, and we understand there is a long
road ahead. We appreciate our partnership with FEMA and hope to
continue to identify ways to improve effectiveness and
efficiencies in our response and recovery efforts. In
particular, I recommend exploring more integration with FEMA
response capabilities at the State and local organizational
level, streamlining the administration of public assistance
programs, including the minimizing of administrative burdens on
local jurisdictions.
And then, three, revising grant methodologies and
requirements for performance periods for grant programs like
the Emergency Management Performance Grant and the Building
Resilient Infrastructure and Communities Grant, and all of
those under the consideration of the new National Risk Index
which shows that Los Angeles County has a significant path
ahead.
Additionally, the county is hopeful that an additional
upfront commitment from Federal financial resources can be
obtained to continue our important initiatives that we have
already invested in and are underway.
Thank you so much for this opportunity to appear before
this subcommittee, and I look forward to any questions you may
have.
[The statement of Mr. McGowan follows:] ******** COMMITTEE
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Ms. Roybal-Allard. Director Ghilarducci, I understand that
during the pandemic the State of California worked with FEMA,
local governments, and the restaurant industry to develop a
program called Great Plates, which has also been adopted
elsewhere in the country.
Can you explain what Great Plates is, how it has worked,
and if you believe it is a model for providing food assistance
during and after other kinds of disasters?
Mr. Ghilarducci. Thank you, Congresswoman.
So Great Plates was an idea launched in April of 2020. It
is a program that aims to provide meals, again, to adults 65
and older and adults 60 to 64 who are at high risk, designated
by CDC guidelines, and who are eligible to assess free meals
while staying at home or are ineligible for other nutrition
programs. The program also supports local restaurants and other
food providers and agriculture workers who have closed or are
struggling to remain open during the COVID-19 pandemic.
To date, the program has served over 28 million meals to
older Californians since the program's launch in April. Using
the Emergency Feeding Program framework approved by FEMA, OES,
in partnership with our California Health and Human Services,
worked directly with local governments to implement the
program. The program is locally led with a designated local
government leader responsible for program administration and
operations, including all fiscal data requirements, reporting
participant food provider enrollment and delivery services.
OES provides technical assistance, engages directly to make
sure that the program runs smoothly, provides any additional
clarification or resources to make the program supportive, and
has a website, covid19.ca.gov which allows local governments to
participate in the program.
Overall the program has been very successful. Obviously,
with the number of meals that have been served, it really is a
model for providing food assistance that work well for
populations seeking, in this particular circumstances as in the
pandemic, but does, we believe, have merit in other kinds of
disasters where we have communities that have been impacted,
mobility has been decreased, and the ability for people who
have limited either access in functional needs or for seniors
who have the inability to get out and be able to get the
assistance that they need.
So we believe that as time goes on, Congresswoman, this is
a program that can be a model in emergency management and be
utilized across the country.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Can you elaborate on some of the other
innovative programs that California has developed in response
to the pandemic?
Mr. Ghilarducci. Sure. So some of the other interesting
programs, obviously, this Project Room Key, which was the
ability to identify hotel rooms, working with the hotel
industry, and the idea was to provide safe isolation capacity
for tens of thousands of Californians experiencing
homelessness. This was an idea to get homelessness--people who
are homeless off the streets, out of congregate shelters, into
safe and secure hotel rooms where they can be monitored and
supported both with meals, with testing, with contact tracing,
and keep them as safe as possible.
That program has been working very well and been very, very
successful, as well as a very similar program, Housing for the
Harvest, which provides temporary, non-congregate shelter for
agriculture and farm workers. And as you know, many of our farm
worker communities within the State are migrant workers.
They come in. Their general culture is to congregate as a
family. We were seeing a high degree of COVID spread in these
family congregation units, and so we had to work with them to
be able to establish these housing opportunities, again much
like a hoteling program, and be able to get them to uptake. And
we saw then, we started dropping the number of cases that we
saw in the spread.
And so, again, the Housing for the Harvest we used in the
Central Valley, hard hit Central Valley, hard hit Imperial
Valley, along the Monterey coastline, and down in Ventura
County. These are all areas where we see a lot of our
agriculture industry, and the program proved relatively
successful for that.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you.
Mr. Ghilarducci. Those are couple of key programs that we
implemented that had a great uptake and were very successful.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Fleischmann.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chair. And to all of the
witnesses, I appreciate you participating and your patience
being in the second panel.
Madam Chair, I want to specifically welcome Mr. Patrick
Sheehan. This gentleman I have worked with extensively in the
great State of Tennessee in his capacity, and we have been
through disasters together; but he and I have both worked very
well with FEMA, so its great to have Patrick and all of our
guests with us.
And I am going to, in the interests of time, move forward
with my first question. I will direct it to Mr. Sheehan first,
but I am solicitous of all of the other witnesses to get their
thoughts as well, to get varying perspectives.
Last year, the Governor's office contacted me about FEMA
and was proposing--these were changes that were proposed
regarding reimbursement for PPE in terms of classifying PPE as
increased operating costs for emergency protective measures.
This change in classification could have huge impacts on State
budgets with damaging public health results.
Have you--my question is in two parts. Have you run into
challenges with inconsistent classifications? And, secondly,
what would be the budgetary impact of absorbing increased
operating costs into your State and local budgets?
Mr. Sheehan. Thanks, Congressman, for the question.
So from January 2021, moving forward, the kinds of actions
that we took to provide PPE and sanitizing materials to schools
it considered eligible. But those actions that we took in
Tennessee to help provide PPE and sanitizing materials,
cleansing materials, cleaning goods to classrooms so that we
could have a safe reopening of schools last year, so the
actions in Tennessee that we undertook in July and August,
those were considered or determined to be increased operating
costs as opposed to an emergency protective measure.
I disagree with that estimation or the way that that was
determined. I think if FEMA now says that those are indeed
emergency protective measures, that those should be
consistently classified as emergency protective measures. You
know, we undertook those actions then not as an increased
operating cost but as a way to safeguard the well-being of
teachers and students and faculty and staff in schools.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you.
Who would like to jump in and participate further? I will
open it up.
Mr. Brown. Congressman, Curtis Brown from Virginia.
I agree with Director Sheehan. These are protective
measures and life safety goods for our citizens and essential
workers. And as I stated in my written testimony, having all of
the tools, including the full support of the Federal Government
in terms of providing these funding and 100 percent
reimbursement, is essential for our ability to respond.
And so providing us on a State and local level with that
funding frees up other resources to support other essential
government functions that are outside the emergency
declaration.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, sir.
Would anyone else care to respond?
Mr. Ghilarducci. Congressman, this is Mark Ghilarducci in
California.
First of all, let me just say that, you know, we have been
absolutely so appreciative of our FEMA partners, and they have
been right with us in being able to try to find innovative ways
to be able to cover any costs of all of these things.
I think early on in the pandemic, you know, we all believed
that the items that were brought up by my colleagues from
Virginia and Tennessee are eligible emergency protective
measures, and they are things that, you know, whether it is PPE
or ventilators, you know, there was a lot of requirement upon
the States to have to go out and procure much of this
equipment.
At the time that the Federal Government wasn't providing
the resources. The strategic national stockpile was not
operating efficiently or effectively. We weren't getting the
resources that were needed. So it was really incumbent on the
States to go out and procure this equipment.
And, you know, for schools, for opening schools, for
keeping teachers safe, to making sure our transportation
workers, our frontline workers have the PPE when necessary,
these were all things that really would be something that need
to be eligible under emergency protective measures.
And even if we hadn't used all of the PPE at the time we
needed it, you know, you don't know that, as well as the number
of surges that were going to be recurring. Now we are--most of
the States in are in a place where we have resources in our
warehouse, we are ready to deal with a surge and be prepared
for that.
And, again, these are all things that have a direct nexus
and correlation to the response to COVID and really should be a
reimbursable item.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, sir.
And with that, I will yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Rutherford.
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you, Madam Chair.
You know, gentlemen, as a first responder myself for many
years and kind of enjoying the Federalist idealogy that the
individual States and localities control their own destiny,
that is one of the areas that I think is most interesting in
this pandemic.
And the reason I say that, I know in Florida--and maybe it
is because of our familiarity with emergency management as a
result of hurricanes coming through every year, which is never
fun, but also the development of the National Incident
Management System, I don't believe there is any agency, local,
State, within Florida that is not NIMS compliant at the highest
levels.
So my question is this: One of the challenges that I see
with COVID-19 was the fact that, you know, normally when you
have a disaster, you get resources that come in from outside
your State to assist.
That clearly didn't happen here because the disaster was,
in fact, nationwide. And I know States like--Mr. Brown, you
mentioned VEST there in Virginia. How much more difficulty was
created by, number one, the fact that assistance couldn't come
from outside the State, except at the national level, and then
the issue of dealing with the pandemic and lockdown and your
own people, you know, being impacted by this and having to do
everything sort of virtually, I guess? Can you talk a little
bit about your experience with that?
Mr. Brown. Thank you, Congressman.
Yes, very difficult within this virtual, mostly virtual
environment. We want to follow health and safety protocols
within emergency management. Through the National Emergency
Management Association, we have our Emergency Management
Assistance Compact that we leverage each other when we have a
tornado or a hurricane to send staff to support.
Clearly, that capability was limited because everyone was
dealing with their emergency at home. And so we have tried to
scale up resources here within the State, through our
Department of Health, working with our Medical Reserve Corps,
to leverage retired medical professionals, doctors, and nurses.
We have definitely leveraged the funding from Federal
Government to leverage contractors and pull in all of our State
agencies as well. Right now for our Vaccinate Virginia
Campaign, we have a goal of a thousand State employees to
support at our vaccination centers, et cetera.
So it has been a very difficult response environment, but
we have been very creative. We also appreciate the support of
the private sector who have changed their operations. We had a
couple of places that used to make beer and wine, changed their
operations to making hand sanitizer in mass and things of that
sort.
So we have been able to innovate and create in real-time. I
would also recognize the faith-based community, our nonprofit
organizations, who are most directly connected to our
communities of color and marginalized communities. So it has
really been an all-hands-on-deck response given the scale and
the impact of the disaster. RPTR WARREN EDTR ROSEN [12:01 p.m.]
Mr. Rutherford. Mr. McGowan, in response, what singular--
well, I don't want to say "singular," because I am sure there
is many. What is the most important change going forward for
emergency management on a statewide level are you are dealing
with now?
Mr. McGowan. Thank you, Congressman, for the question.
So I think, you know, COVID-19 has provided this evolution
of response phases. In Los Angeles County, we have endured
multiple other incidents that have occurred while COVID-19
pandemic response has occurred. And one thing, I think, that is
highlighted for us is our ability to continue to build out
capabilities in capacity with the use of--in the State of
California, we have disaster service workers, which empower
local governments, and then, also, the State government to, you
know, have county or city municipal employees be tasked to do
work towards disasters, and, really, leverage all of these
things and learn from those lessons so that we can apply them
to future disasters, such as an earthquake, and really see what
our true exposure risk is. And then, all the while, you know,
be creative, like Mr. Brown has said, Mr. Ghilarducci, Mr.
Sheehan about leveraging new things that we have never
leveraged before, partnerships with the private sector.
I think the story is probably consistent across the entire
country about partnerships with creating hand sanitizer and
masks. One thing that I think has been very unique about this
is, we have strained every resource. Every resource has been
scarce across the country because everyone needed it, whether
it was personal protective equipment, hand sanitizer,
sanitation equipment. And, so, to really be creative at the
local level to figure out how to solve those problems was a
good lesson learned.
Mr. Rutherford. Right.
And we can't depend on China to supply what we need either.
I think my final moment, Madam Chair.
I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you very much.
I have several questions that I would like to ask. I see
that we are running out of time, but I would like to, at least,
ask the following questions for the whole panel.
What lessons have you all learned from this pandemic that
will assist you in responding to future disasters? And if we
could just start with Ghilarducci, and then go on down the line
with Coordinator Brown, Sheehan, and then McGowan.
Mr. Ghilarducci. Thank you, Congresswoman.
So, I think, beyond anything, I think this particular event
really amplifies the whole issue about coordination and
relationship building, the ability to work together at a time
when resources are stretched thin. We learned that we need
capacity in this country. There should no reason, none in the
United States of America, that State and local emergency
managers and the Federal Government are straining for resources
of this style, of this type when we have such a critical crisis
on our hands.
The whole issue of information, misinformation, the ability
to make sure that we are all rowing in the same direction
through a communications plan that is adopted at the local,
State, and Federal levels. These are people's lives we are
talking about. And we were very disjointed. We had commodities
that were old; they are not operational.
You know, we talked about, the Congress Member talked about
NIMS, the National Incident Management System. I couldn't be
more relieved when FEMA came on the scene to help to coordinate
U.S. HHS. That is an organization that would have a big role
here, but they don't know ICS. They don't understand the role
of how to implement and what is going on on the ground. It is a
very much top-down organization. If you don't have good
situational awareness on the ground, you are never going to
know what really your needs are going to be, and you are going
to be late to need. So these are just real key lessons learned.
I would just close by saying the Stafford Act maybe needs
to be re-looked at, maybe broadened to address the issues of
pandemic. I think there was a lot of workarounds in the ability
to try to stretch the Stafford Act in a big way. You know, when
you look at other agencies and what they can bring to the
table, if there are less, I would just say, bureaucratic and
more thinking about what the immediate need is, they may be
able to have, under their own authorities, the ability to
leverage resources in a much more expedited fashion.
And then, of course, giving us an expedited cost recovery,
which will help local governments in particular stay afloat,
when we are dealing with this long-term kind of year-long
disaster where we need those funds immediately.
Those are some of the things, Madam chair.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. Mr. Brown.
Mr. Brown. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
I second everything that Director Ghilarducci just
mentioned. I would probably highlight the importance of equity
and disproportionate impacts in disasters. Time and time again,
with every disaster, we see that the folks who suffer the most
are communities of color, marginalized communities, people with
disabilities who, again, suffer, whether it is a flood or a
hurricane or a natural disaster. So how do we change our
programs and policies to prioritize them and to build
resilience ahead of time, and to work with speed to mitigate
the loss of life and those negative impacts?
Equity has been a core part of our response here in
Virginia. We have a health equity working group and a task
force as part of our unified commands that really guides our
resource allocation, our planning, our prioritization. Working
with FEMA and the funding provided by Congress for our
community vaccination centers, we used a strategic approach to
identify those areas that are most vulnerable and that have
been hardest hit by COVID-19, large number of vulnerable
populations and impoverished communities.
I am here in Danville, Virginia, in Southside, Virginia
where our first CVC opened up yesterday and very appreciative
from the community. We are vaccinating those who are most at
risk and vulnerable, our seniors, communities of color, and
equity is guiding our whole response.
So as we move forward, looking at FEMA policies, the
Stafford Act, programs, grant programs like the BRIC program, I
think equity needs to guide what we do. It is going to take a
lot of work and intentional action. But if we are able to be
successful for future disasters, we will protect those who need
the most support and those who are most at risk.
Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Director Sheehan.
Mr. Sheehan. Thank you, Chairwoman.
So, I think the first thing--and it kind of touches on the
supply chain issue, and it is included in my remarks, but our
domestic manufacturing capability needs to be reevaluated and
perhaps along the lines of the defense industrial base where we
examine what kind of capacities we need here, domestically to
ensure the safety and well-being of all Americans.
More centered toward emergency management, I think we can
build to more policy and program predictability and
consistency, both just across the disaster management programs
within FEMA and across regions. My counterparts and I often
talk about how FEMA policies are applied, or interpreted
differently, from region to region.
I think I echo what Director Ghilarducci said. The Stafford
Act really needs a comprehensive review and probably an
overhaul. It is 35 years old, I think, at this point, almost 35
years old. It is just time for--we have learned a lot about
emergency management in the last 35 years. We really need a
peacetime look at this where we are not being forced by just
some event to fix certain parts of it, but really,
comprehensively disaster management, emergency management in
the United States needs a comprehensive overhaul.
The last thing I will just say is--and this is something
that I tried to share with my team pretty often--is that, if
something can happen, it is going to happen. If something has
happened, it will happen again. We are going to have additional
pandemics in the future. We are going to continue to have
disasters while we are facing public health crises, and we need
to face it--face these crises, face these disasters with that
lens, because our memories as human beings are very short when
it comes to disaster events. And emergency managers, whether it
is FEMA for the State of Tennessee, at a county level, we need
to take a long, holistic view about what we can do to buy down
our risks and make our Nation more resilient, make our
communities more resilient. We have just got to keep that in
mind.
Thank you, ma'am.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Director McGowan?
Mr. McGowan. This is the beauty of going last. So I echo
everything that everyone said. I will keep my remarks really
quick.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, my grandma
always used to tell me. And I think it is the investment on the
front side. So building off of what everyone else said but
adding to it, you know, the BRIC program, you know, we have
seen the pandemic do what most of the other catastrophic
disasters have done, which is, they exacerbate the already
preexisting issues within society. So whether it is health
equity, a variety of other types of things, food insecurity, to
name a few, we should be investing in those.
So I know we have, you know, talked a lot about emergency
management but a big part of this pandemic has been just the
structural and systemwide challenges that we face, and the
pandemic has exacerbated those problems and an earthquake is
going to do the same thing; wildfires do the same thing.
So, to continue to invest resources in programs, like the
BRIC program, is going to be critical to make sure that in
future disasters, you know, the society and systems that
support society are resilient and robust enough to weather
these through those storms.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. I have another question dealing with the
Emergency Management Performance Grants.
Both the CARES Act and the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021
provide funds for the Emergency Management Performance Grant
program. Can you tell us how EMPG has been of assistance during
the pandemic, and how your State and its communities have used
EMPG? This, again, is a question for the entire panel.
But I can start with you, Mr. McGowan, since you have been
last all the time.
Mr. McGowan. Okay. Yes, so I will start off actually with
the way that we can improve the EMPG, which I think is the
Emergency Management Performance Grant has some administrative
burdens and timelines associated with it that don't make it the
most effective grant at leveraging towards what I call, like,
the big problems. So, a lot of programs I think use the
Emergency Management Performance Grant to tackle things that
are kind of low-hanging fruit.
So, in general, most of our Emergency Management
Performance Grants are geared towards purchasing, or a
maintenance of efforts or critical supplies within our
emergency operation centers, for example. We also use them to
develop critical plans like our emergency operation plans. Then
sometimes, you know, organizations, including Los Angeles
County, use them for critical staffing positions.
So there is different kind of buckets that the Emergency
Management Performance Grant goes towards, but I think it would
be a much more effective grant if we could leverage it over a
longer period of time with kind of some less restrictions or
less administrative burdens on it that then we could really
target it towards really more substantial challenges.
So, with that, I will hand it over to the rest of the
group.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. I am going in reverse order this
time.
Director Sheehan.
Mr. Sheehan. Thank you, Chairwoman.
I think Mr. McGowan was touching on this. But, you know, in
some ways, the EMPG has already become a little more complex.
They added some administrative burdens to it. It has made it
more difficult. That being said, EMPG is the primary
preparedness funding mechanism for emergency management in the
United States of America. Yet, we find that no matter who is
President, that program is on the chopping block, or faces
reductions that have to be--that Congress, regardless, again,
of party, ends up restoring the full amount which is needed.
We rely on EMPG at the county level; we rely on it on the
State level. It fills the capacities that we use to manage
disasters. When Tennessee sends first responders via the
Emergency Management System's contact to Florida or the Virgin
Islands or Puerto Rico or the Carolinas, a lot of those
capabilities have been funded and bolstered by the Emergency
Management Performance Grant program. And it really needs
stability and predictability, and I think Mr. McGowan also
talked about just the need for a longer time horizon, and I
certainly agree with that.
We have opportunities here, I think, to bolster these
capabilities over time, but they take time and they take
predictability so that we budget for them.
Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Brown.
Mr. Brown. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
And I agree with my colleagues. EMPG is essential to our
ability to respond and build capacity on the State and local
level.
We do need to eliminate any complexities with that and also
look at, again, what does emergency management look like in the
21st century, and add additional funding and resources to
support building capacity on the local and State level. Last
year, we were dealing with three simultaneous statewide
disasters, including COVID-19.
We dealt with our busiest hurricane season, and, so, we are
looking strategically at how can we build capability on the
local level? There are a couple of my local emergency managers
who are one person, or part-time staff. They are supported
through EMPG, but building that capability so they are able to
manage the full responsibilities of preparedness, mitigation,
response, and recovery, given the impacts of climate change,
and more frequent impactful disasters, is going to be
important.
So I hope that we could, collectively, as a profession,
along with Congress and the administration, look at how to
recognize the innovation and the advances and the more frequent
disasters and ensure we have the resources needed to face these
challenges that we are facing today.
Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Director Ghilarducci.
Mr. Ghilarducci. Well, Madam Chair, you have such
exceptional emergency managers on this panel, they are really
hitting it off on all cylinders.
You know, and I have said this before, and publicly said
this before: Look, EMPG is underfunded. When you think about
the fact that we are seen more complex by scope, by scale, by
type of events, the diversity, the impact on our communities,
the frequency of these kinds of events; you amplify that by
climate change, by biohazards, by pandemics. The emergency
management community needs to have resiliency. They need to
have that resiliency built in, baked in.
The Emergency Management Performance Grants across the
country at $350 million or so, is nothing really by comparison
at what needs to be invested into that to help local and State
emergency managers be able to build that capacity, that
sustainability to deal with all hazards.
As you have heard, multiple directors here today, including
myself, we dealt with, as you know, Congresswoman, the worst
wildfire season. We had civil unrest. We had an earthquake, we
had pandemic, we had power outages, all at the same time. That
takes a lot of capacity, training, and ability to be able to
navigate that and ultimately serve the public.
So we are asking more of emergency management than we ever
have in the history of our country. And I think that that has
to be reflected, more importantly, by the funding level, first.
But, secondly, as stated, it has too many--it is still built on
an old-school format. It needs to be reevaluated and opened up
and broadened to make the most flexibility so that State and
locals can utilize that in the most effective way possible.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. And I have just one more question.
And this is for you, Director, and Director McGowan. And
this has to do with the issue in Los Angeles, which is one of
the cities that was impacted by the--most impacted by the
pandemic, particularly in my district of East Los Angeles,
which has suffered, as you know, very high rates of infection
and mortality rates, and yet, rates are lagging there compared
to other parts of city and California as a whole.
I know that this has been touched on somewhat, but can you
further address the challenges that you face in assisting these
communities and the steps that you are taking to address those
challenges, particularly as they pertain to the vaccinations?
Mr. McGowan. Thank you, Congresswoman, for the question.
So health equity and the distribution of the vaccines in an
equitable fashion has been a top priority. I think every board
of supervisors meeting, we address this prioritization of
effort. Our Department of Public Health, you know, consistently
is looking at the different metrics to evaluate the areas that
are hardest impacted and then really work with the greater
framework to make sure that we are pushing through the
vaccination dosages in the areas that we can have the most
impact in those heavily underserved and impacted areas. We have
over 400 providers as a part of the L.A. County network that
can distribute doses of vaccination.
And then I also want to highlight the great partnership
with Mark and Bob as it relates to the Cal OES and FEMA site
that was set up at Cal State, Los Angeles, and the day-to-day
support that goes into that site and reaching into our
communities, our faith-based and community-based organizations
to set up mobile vac sites.
I think, Congresswoman, we are seeing the trend going in
the right direction as far as getting vaccination in the areas
that are most impacted, and every day, I feel--I don't feel--
every day I see marked increases in those impacts. I think one
thing we have observed over time, over the last month, and 2
months of time, is that mobile vaccine sites, even though they
are capacity and throughput, might be on a day-to-day total
smaller than the mega-sites, really gets to those communities
in a more effective manner.
So it is really a three-prong strategy. We have to use big
vaccination sites for big throughput, and make sure we can keep
up with the supply that is being provided. We need to use our
public-private partnerships with pharmacies and health clinics,
FQHCs, our Federally Qualified Health Centers, and our
hospitals. And then, thirdly, we need to use these mobile
vaccine sites to get to these impacted areas.
And I will close it out to say this: When we talk about
vaccine hesitancy, one thing we have noticed when we have gone
to a bunch of the mobile sites and we have talked with people
going there is there is a really good word-of-mouth story that
is being told now in these communities. And they really trust
their community members more than they are going to trust, you
know, the government public information officers putting out
information. And we are seeing that snowball starting to occur,
where the community is talking with the community. They trust
their community-based organizations and their faith-based
organizations, and it is building the momentum in the right
direction.
With that, I will hand it over to Mark, if he wants to add
anything.
Mr. Ghilarducci. No, you hit the nail on the head.
Look, right in the beginning, as I said, it is all about
relationships. So this has been a one-team/one-fight effort.
Kevin, the county, you know, the partners in the communities
within L.A. County, you know, FEMA and OES, our Health and
Human Services agency, all working together to try to address,
looking at the county as a whole. We, you know, are identifying
what we call vaccine deserts, areas where they are underserved
and communities of color.
Kevin was exactly right. The mega-site, I mean, we chose
Cal State, L.A. In east Los Angeles strategically to address
and put that mega-site smack dab in the middle of the most
underserved parts of the county of Los Angeles. But then, it is
those mobile clinics, sort of the hub and spoke, where those
mobile clinics have gone out into the community could not be
successful without building relationships with faith-based
leaders, community-based leaders and the community leaders at
large. It has taken a little bit to build the trust.
There is a lot of misinformation, disinformation about the
vaccines out there, but putting those mobile clinics in the
right location. We now have, you know, mobile clinics stationed
in South Central Los Angeles, in parts of East L.A., outside of
and around the mega-site. And those sites have just really, we
have really been able to penetrate.
And Kevin is right. We are now at almost 70 percent of
people of color and underserved being served by vaccine within
the FEMA State site, now, speaking about what we are
controlling and, you know, less than about 30 percent of non-
people of color. This flipped. It was the other way around when
we started, and that is a good trend.
The Governor, of course, has made a metric in place for all
vaccines. The first have to be 40 percent underserved to meet
that equity metric for all vaccines that are going to be pushed
out by all counties in the State.
So, from the State perspective as a whole, the leadership
perspective of the Governor, you know, equity and making sure
that the underserved, underprivileged and people who have the
hardest time getting the vaccine, but have also been hugely
impacted by the virus, are the ones that get the vaccine first
and that we take care of those folks.
So, you know, Congresswoman, it is continuing to work well,
but it cannot be done, and it is one of those ones where you
can't take your foot off the gas pedal. It has to be, continued
working with the community because, once you build the level of
trust, you have to maintain that level of trust and it is very,
very critical that we can do that.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Absolutely.
Well, as we have discussed, the past year has been
challenging for our country and, in fact, for the entire world.
With infections declining and vaccinations increasing, there is
light at the end of the tunnel. I hope that we are never again
faced with a pandemic of these proportions. If we are, I know
we can count on FEMA and emergency managers at every level to
help us see us through it.
I want to extend my sincere thanks to our witnesses for
their testimony and for your service.
And since there are no more questions, the Subcommittee on
Homeland Security stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:27 p.m., the subcommittee was
adjourned.]RPTR MERTENSEDTR ROSENDEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND
SECURITYAPPROPRIATIONS FOR 2022Wednesday, March 17, 2021DHS
MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
APPROPRIATIONS FOR 2022Wednesday, March 17, 2021DHS MANAGEMENT
CHALLENGESWITNESSESMICHAEL CHERTOFF, FORMER SECRETARY,
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY;AND JEH JOHNSON, FORMER
SECRETARY, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
Ms. Roybal-Allard. The Subcommittee on Homeland Security
will come to order. As this hearing is being conducted
virtually, we must address a few housekeeping matters. Members
are responsible for muting and unmuting themselves. When you
are recognized to speak, if I notice that you have not unmuted
yourself, I will ask you if you would like the staff to unmute
you. If you indicate approval by nodding, staff will unmute
your microphone. To avoid inadvertent background noise, the
chair or staff designated by the chair may mute participants'
microphones when they are not recognized to speak.
I remind all members and witnesses that the 5-minute clock
still applies. If there is a technology issue during a member's
speaking time, we will move to the next member until the issue
is resolved, and you will retain the balance of your time. You
will notice the clock on your screen showing your remaining
time. At 1 minute remaining, the clock will turn yellow. At 30
seconds remaining, I will gently tap the gavel to remind the
member speaking that their time has almost expired. When your
time has expired, the clock will turn red, and I will begin to
recognize the next member.
We will follow the speaking order set forth in the House
rules beginning with the chair and ranking member, followed by
members present at the time the hearing is called to order in
order of seniority, and we will alternate by party. Next, we
will go to members who were not present when the hearing was
called to order until every member present has had a first
round.
Finally, House rules require me to remind you that we have
set up an email address to which members can submit information
in writing at any of our hearings or markups. The email address
has been provided in advance to your staff.
Now, let's begin. I welcome everyone to this morning's
hearing on Management Challenges at the Department of Homeland
Security. As we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the
event that precipitated the formation of the DHS, and after 18
year since Congress created the Department, it continues to
struggle with longstanding and new management challenges.
These challenges span from the management of federated
component agencies, employee morale, and the evolving nature of
new threats to the security of our country. This past year
dramatically exemplifies these constantly emerging and daunting
threats. When nearly 3,000 Americans were killed on U.S. soil
on 9/11, DHS was founded to counter the threat of terrorism
from abroad. However, over the course of this year, we
experienced weeks in which the daily number of Americans who
died of COVID-19 surpassed the tragedy of 9/11.
While the threat of foreign-based terrorism continues to be
a serious threat, recent events have highlighted the real and
growing danger posed by domestic violent extremists. As was
discussed during a subcommittee hearing last week, we are also
extremely concerned about the very real hazards posed by our
vulnerabilities to ever-evolving cybersecurity threats which
were not easily foreseen 20 years ago.
Joining us to share their expertise and recommendations on
these critical issues, I am pleased to welcome two very
distinguished and experienced witnesses. Secretary Michael
Chertoff headed the Department from 2005 to 2009. He continues
to play a role in securing the Nation as the co-founder and
executive chairman of Chertoff Associates. He is also senior of
counsel at the law firm Covington & Burling. Before his service
as DHS Secretary, he served for more than a decade as a Federal
prosecutor, and then a Federal judge.
Secretary Jeh Johnson led the Department from 2013 to 2017,
and serves as a partner in the litigation department of Paul,
Weiss law firm. Prior to leading DHS, his accomplishments
included both private sector legal work, and public sector
senior leadership roles at the Departments of Justice and
Defense. Each of these men led the vast 22-component agency,
230-employee Department. Both have contributed significantly to
the development of the Department's management functions.
As we approach the end of the DHS' second decade in
existence, I look forward to hearing their thoughts on what
they see as the Department's most pressing management
challenges and major obstacles, and how best to address them.
We greatly appreciate you both agreeing to appear before our
subcommittee this morning.
I would now like to turn to the distinguished gentleman,
Mr. Palazzo, for opening remarks, if he has any.
Mr. Palazzo. Well, thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Mr.
Chertoff and Mr. Johnson, for coming today to speak with us
regarding management issues within your former departments.
Since its inception post 9/11, this Department has taken on
the crucial task of protecting our homeland and ensuring the
safety of the American people. I would say both of you have
been successful in that mission, and I thank you for your
service to our country.
Over the last decade, you have had the firsthand experience
of the many challenges our men and women in the Department
face. As we sit here, our country faces a serious issue at our
southern border, cyber threats from our adversaries, and
pressure from China near our territories and interests. I look
forward to your answers and comments on how we can improve our
Homeland Security and work together on helping the American
people.
Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you.
Secretaries Johnson and Chertoff, we will submit the full
text of your official statements for the record. Please begin
your oral summary which I would ask you to keep to 5 minutes.
We will proceed in chronological order of service with
Secretary Chertoff going first.
Secretary Chertoff, please begin.
Mr. Chertoff. Thank you, Madam Chair, and Representative
Palazzo, and I appreciate the opportunity to be here virtually,
even if not physically. Let me try to sum up my views in the
following statements:
First, DHS was founded to deal with all hazards, and to
protect the United States against all hazards. And that
remains, I think, at the core of the mission. Although
terrorism was the immediate instigating cause of the
Department's foundation, there was a clear decision to look at
natural disasters and pandemics and other kinds of national
systemic threats as part of the mission set for DHS.
A second critical element of DHS, which I know both
Secretary Johnson and I worked very hard to implement, was the
idea of unity of effort, bringing together the various
capabilities of the components in a single, unified program to
respond to particular threats. We saw that in natural disasters
where we were able to use FEMA, supplemented with, for example,
Customs and Border Protection and the Coast Guard, and other
components to respond to emergencies.
More recently, as we have seen an elevation in
cybersecurity, I want to emphasize that physical security and
cybersecurity must go hand in hand and that often what we see
in threats in the cyber sphere have a physical element that is
part of the attack vector.
That is one of the reasons I want to say, for the record, I
believe it would be a very serious mistake to honor the
suggestion of some people that the Secret Service be removed
from DHS. The Secret Service plays a critical role in securing
the physical environment of our national special security
events and other kinds of critical infrastructure, and they
work hand in hand with CISA and other cyber components to do
that, and that unity of effort should be preserved.
I will acknowledge in the past couple of years, there has
been a sense of the drift, and I think it is attributable to a
number of things, but two in particular. One is, there has been
an unbelievable leadership turnover at the Department. What
that has done is rob the Department of confirmed leadership
that will be stable, that is able to identify and implement the
strategy, and that has the credibility with the workforce to
execute on that strategy. Having people rotating through the
Secretary's job with temporary appointments that may or may not
actually be authorized is designed to undercut the ability of
the Department to operate as a single unified effort.
I would also say that there was, while understandably a
focus on the border as an important issue, it was treated, in
many ways, as the only issue. And some of the capabilities of
other parts of the Department were shifted over or subordinated
to the border mission, and that, ultimately, robbed our ability
to continue to plan and build capabilities that are cross-
cutting, and would deal with many of the issues we have now.
So I would suggest that moving forward, we need to do the
following: First, Congress needs to make sure there is clarity
in the law about succession in the event of vacancies and
confirmed positions, and not allow situations where a future
President, not the current one, would decide to use vacancies
as a way of simply populating the Department with people who
will be nothing more than agents to do bidding on particular
weeks.
Second, I think Congress needs to articulate the
significance of unity of effort, joint planning, and joint
execution. At the heart of the Department's mission, we have a
national incident management system. That is supposed to be a
cross-cutting way to guarantee that all of the elements, not
only of DHS, but of other Federal agencies and State agencies,
can work together in coordinated fashion. That has to be
[inaudible] And reinvigorated.
Third, we need to broaden the focus on the new set of
hazards which have arisen. Some of these are now factors,
whether it be pandemics or disasters caused by climate change.
I think we have seen more of these natural impact and natural
hazards in the last couple of years that I remember seeing in
the last 20 years, and this is only going to continue to get
worse. So again, the ability to plan, equip, and train to deal
with these things must be a priority.
And I know Secretary Johnson will remember that both under
his tenure and in my tenure, we worked very hard in building
and exercising pandemic response plans. But unfortunately, they
were allowed to lapse.
Finally, I would argue there are three new threats that,
again, fall within the domain of DHS that have to be funded and
have to be emphasized. One, as the chair said, is domestic
terrorism, which is now, in terms of casualties in the U.S.,
causing more death than global jihadism that we dealt with 20
years ago. That problem is not going away. And in conjunction
with the FBI and State and local law enforcement, we have to be
prepared to address it.
Second. As demonstrated by solar winds and other attacks,
including an attack on our water system in Florida, cyber
attacks are becoming more and more dangerous, more and more
frequent, and the scale is increasing. An adequate refunding
and giving authorities to CISA, working with the Secret Service
to respond to those attacks is probably the number one hazard
that requires urgent action.
And, finally, both foreign adversaries and domestic actors
are engaging in disinformation campaigns and attacks on our
democracy. And while our physical security is obviously
critical, the security of our Constitution and our
constitutional values is also, in my view, part of the
responsibility of DHS.
So there is plenty to do, but I will leave by saying I
still believe that the vast majority of people who work at the
agency are committed to the mission, if given proper leadership
and direction and support, will happily execute that mission,
and all of us depend upon the ability of the Department to do
its work.
So with that, I thank you very much, and I look forward to
answering questions.
[The information follows:]******** COMMITTEE INSERT
********
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you.
Secretary Johnson, please begin.
Mr. Johnson. Thank you very much. Let me begin by
apologizing for the darkness in my office here. It is a little
hard to see me, but at least you get a panoramic view of
midtown Manhattan. I am sitting in my law office in New York
City.
Madam Chair, Ranking Member Palazzo, it is good to see so
many friends of mine on the subcommittee. As a matter of
reflect, so I have been in private life for 4 years now. When
the appropriators call, I still respond. I welcome the
opportunity to testify at this hearing concerning management
challenges at DHS. I also welcome the opportunity to testify
alongside my good friend and predecessor, Mike Chertoff. Though
we served administrations of different parties, Mike and I have
often collaborated on a number of projects and events.
As you know, DHS is the third largest cabinet department of
our government. It is a fraction of the size of the Department
of Defense, where I served as general counsel from 2009 to
2012. But in many respects, it feels much larger. Without a
doubt, DHS is the most decentralized cabinet department with
the most diffuse set of missions and workplace cultures, all
under the umbrella of Homeland Security, ranging from CISA,
TSA, the Coast Guard, where my son serves, and the United
States Secret Service.
No matter whether you regard DHS as too big or too small,
the reality, however, is that DHS' current structure is
outdated to meet all current homeland security threats. DHS was
created in the wake of 9/11, as you well know, ostensibly for
the counterterrorism mission.
In 2002, terrorism was regarded primarily as an
extraterritorial threat. The view then was that the
consolidation into one cabinet level department of the
regulation of all the different ways a person can enter our
homeland, land, sea, or air, is the effective way to
counterterrorism. Now, almost 20 years later, we know that the
principal terrorist threats to our homeland are domestic-based.
In recent years, most attacks have been committed by domestic
groups or individuals, not by those directed or inspired by
foreign terrorist organizations.
Beyond that are the other serious threats to our Homeland
Security, namely, COVID-19, cybersecurity, climate change, and
other things. The Department of Homeland Security must meet all
these challenges, plus administer and enforce our immigration
laws. But DHS has, in recent years, been under constant siege
and in constant crisis, while suffering from management
upheaval and leadership vacancies.
Over the last 50 months, there have been nine, nine people,
including myself and the incumbent, to occupy the role of
Secretary of Homeland Security, four Senate-confirmed, and five
acting. Over the last 4 years of the Trump administration,
there was no Senate-confirmed director of ICE at all.
There have been public calls, as you know, for the
elimination of certain components of DHS, or the casting off of
certain components of DHS, and even the elimination of DHS in
its entirety. In the current environment, it is easy to forget
that DHS is responsible for the vital missions of protecting
the American people and their homeland from land, sea, and air,
and in cyberspace. The Coast Guard performs the vital maritime
safety, national security law enforcement, and counter drug
functions. The Secret Service protects the President and
others. TSA provides basic aviation security to Americans every
day. FEMA is the Nation's disaster response agency. CISA is the
U.S. Government's primary information exchange hub for the
Nation's cybersecurity.
These are matters in which politics should play a little
role, and around which there should be bipartisan consensus and
support.
You have my extended prepared statement in which I put
forth a number of observations and recommendations, places
where I think DHS has improved and where it still has a
challenge. I look forward to answering your questions in our
discussion. Thank you.
[The information follows:]******** COMMITTEE INSERT
********
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you.
Secretary Johnson, there has been a longstanding criticism
about how DHS was created and structured by combining multiple,
somewhat disparate agencies into a new department without
giving its leadership sufficient authority to exert effective
control over components which too often operated independently.
You attempted to address this with your unity of effort
initiative. Unfortunately, much of the progress that you made
seems to have been lost since your departure.
Both you and Secretary Chertoff served as senior advisors
or board co-chairs of the Atlantic Council Future of DHS
project which issued a number of recommendations in December,
including ones focused on internal challenges. Importantly, it
recommended that policy and budget officials work more closely
together.
Do you agree that a power imbalance exists between
headquarters and the components, and if so, what reforms are
needed, either statutorily or administratively, to address the
problem?
Mr. Johnson. I do agree with that statement. When I got to
DHS in 2013, frankly, I was surprised to find out that the
budget process was still very stovepiped. The acquisition
process lacked maturity. We, in my 3 years, revised the budget-
making process to focus more on missions than components, and
told the components to bring forth budgets that took account of
overlap. Let's focus on the mission.
As you probably know, and I know Henry knows, we created
joint task forces for border security on our southern border.
Congress in the NDAA one year actually codified joint task
forces into law. Regrettably, it is my understanding that they
have been disbanded or not used.
I think the answer to your question is that there has to be
a commitment across several administrations to keep in place
certain things to give the Department-wide more authority over
the components. It is simply not enough time for one Cabinet
secretary over one 3- or 4-year period to try to change all of
this. There has to be a multi-administration commitment to
doing so, and I think the answer there is Congress. Congress
can take care, through codification of a lot of this, that
multiple administrations pay attention to reforming the
Department and making it function better.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Secretary Chertoff, it has been several
years now since you left the Department. How would you rate the
Department's management progress over the years, and what would
you recommend as the top management reform for the current
Secretary?
Mr. Chertoff. Well, thank you, Madam Chair. I agree with
what Secretary Johnson, my friend and successor, said. I
certainly think we have slipped back over the last 4 years. And
as I indicated, I think one of the critical reasons is that
there was such churn in the leadership that the message went
out to some of the component heads that they didn't really need
to pay attention to what the Secretary said because that job is
going to change in about 10 minutes.
So I do think having consistency in leadership is critical,
but I would also agree that we ought to codify the need for
having coordinated unity of effort within the Department. And,
frankly, one of the reasons we had a problem with that is there
are so many different authorizing committees which exert
jurisdiction over the Department, which give some of the
components the feeling that if they don't succeed with one
committee, they can run to another committee and get support
there. I think combining the authorization to a single
oversight committee for Homeland Security would be a big step
forward in getting this unity of effort.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Palazzo.
Mr. Palazzo. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And just to follow up on what Secretary Chertoff just
mentioned, I believe what he just described, if we could codify
the authorizing committees under one committee of jurisdiction,
it would save a lot of the problems. That is also one of the
last 9/11 Commission findings that has not been implemented, if
I recall that from my time on the Homeland Security Authorizing
Committee. So, Secretary Chertoff, thank you for bringing that
up.
You know, I have been very focused on two borders: the
maritime border and the southern border. And, you know, when we
focus on the southern border, we have a tendency to not focus
on the maritime border. And we know those who are trying to
find their way into our country, whether it is to work, smuggle
in hard narcotics, foreign nationals, or human trafficking,
they are going to find a way. So we have got to be cognizant of
all of our borders.
And I love the way you described the air, the land, the
sea, and space as an important mission. And as Secretaries,
both of you, I mean, you had a huge, monumental task, you know,
under the Homeland Security Department, because it covers so
many various responsibilities, but I would like to just direct
my questions to Secretary Johnson.
You know, you are probably familiar with the National
Security Cutter, you know, and it is crazy that in Homeland,
you deal with flood insurance. You get a question on flood
insurance under FEMA. The next day, you get a shipbuilding
question from the Coast Guard. Can you tell me how beneficial
the National Security Cutter has been filling in the gaps for
the United States Navy, but also fighting the war on drugs? I
mean, sometimes they are the only American presence in South
and Central America, and they have stopped and prohibited tons
of cocaine and hard narcotics from finding its way into
America. So can you take a moment and just, you know, share
your thoughts on the National Security Cutter program?
Mr. Johnson. Yes. I have been aboard several NSCs. It is a
wonderful vessel. The first time I was on the Stratton in 2015
which is in Alameda, California, I wanted to meet the master
helmsman of the ship, this 400-foot cutter, and they brought
her up for me. She was 19 years old. She had just finished high
school the year before, but she had demonstrated her acumen on
the bridge, and they made her the master helmsman. It was a
wonderful testament to what someone can do in a short period of
time.
Sir, I will tell you this: I know that the Coast Guard is
very busy in the Pacific Ocean with drug interdiction. The
cartels are active to this day. One Coast Guard unit of eight
people on board the Gabrielle Giffords, a littoral combat ship,
seized $290 million worth of cocaine. That is public
information. They were very busy.
As you probably know, the Coast Guard serves in the Persian
Gulf as well, supporting the Navy, supporting the security for
the Navy, which over the last year or so, was a particularly
intense mission.
When I came into office, I learned that the Coast Guard has
the oldest fleet of vessels of any Navy in the world, and we
need to recapitalize. We need to continue that effort. When I
was Secretary, there were efforts to try to cut back on NSCs,
on the OPCs, the midsize cutter. I think we need to keep at
this.
People forget. The Coast Guard is not just maritime
security, pulling somebody out of the water when their jet ski
capsizes. It is a vital national security mission on the 1-yard
line, not the 30-yard line, not the 50-yard line, but on the 1-
yard line. So I could not agree more with the spirit of your
question, sir.
Mr. Palazzo. Well, thank you, Secretary Johnson, for
sharing that. You know, the National Security Cutters--and we
have seen this. They pay for themselves. Just in the drugs that
they take off the ocean before they find their way into
America's backyards, destroying families, destroying
communities, they pay for themselves. And we still have the
same issues with OMB, and people not requesting them in their
budget, because they know Congress will find a way to fund the
Coast Guard shipbuilding program. But I wish, you know, the
fact that the Coast Guard currently is actually deploying to
counter China in the areas of our country, it is just amazing
what they have done. And so, again, thank you, and I will save
my questions for the second round. Thank you.
Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Cuellar.
Mr. Cuellar. Thank you, Madam Chair. And I also want to
thank both Secretaries. It is always a pleasure.
I think both of you understood the balance between security
and letting legitimate goods and people into the United States,
so I appreciate both of y'all understanding that balance
because there are a tendency that people push too much to one
side and not understand that.
As the chairwoman said a few minutes ago, and Secretary
Johnson, actually, my first question has to do with the unity
of effort. And along with that, as you mentioned, if we don't
do that, as you know, there are several overarching Homeland
Security missions. And, especially if you are talking about
security, border security, how do you go ahead and put all of
that together?
You are right. I got calls back in November, December that
they were dissolving the Joint Task Force West, and I thought
it was a mistake, but as you know, it was something that got
done by the prior administration.
So my question, I would ask you, and Secretary Chertoff, if
you want to add on this, you know, should we put back the joint
task force again? I assume both of you will say yes and tell us
why that is important. Question number one.
And then question number two for both of us, for both of
y'all, temporary travel restrictions. The balance between
letting people in, and how do we secure the border. As you
know, this March, in about a week, we will have 1 year of not
letting the legal visa holders from Canada and from Mexico come
into the United States. They can fly in from Mexico, but they
cannot drive or cross.
And I am talking about what they call non-essential, which
is, in my opinion, very important because before the pandemic,
Mexicans would spend--18 million Mexicans would come over and
spend over $19 billion. Laredo, about 45, 50 percent of all
their retail is made by Mexican shoppers.
So there has got to be a way that we can safely let people
in, into the United States, and still help our economy. So I
don't know if y'all are familiar with that particular border
restrictions, but if y'all want to answer both questions. And
thank you for--both of y'all, for being on board with us.
Mr. Johnson. I will start, if I could. The first time I
went to the southern border of Texas was in 2014, early 2014,
and I met in a large conference room at the Border Patrol
station with everybody who was devoted to the effort on the
southern border at that moment. You had Border Patrol; you had
air and marine; in the brown uniforms, you had the Customs; in
the blue uniforms, we had FEMA; we had USCIS. We had ICE ERO.
We had, like, 30 different people from 10 different components
of DHS.
And the oddity that struck me was that I was the only
person in their chain of command that they had in common; me,
the person at the very top of that organization. We were way
too stovepiped, and, so, we created joint task forces modeled
after a pilot program in Arizona that was working well, and
modeled, frankly, after my experience in the Department of
Defense with joint command structures.
I thought it made a tremendous amount of sense, but when
something is new, you are always going to have bureaucratic
resistance to change. And, so, unless there is a sustained
commitment to getting used to things in a new manner, it is
going to fall apart. And that is exactly what happened over the
last 4 years to the detriment, in my view, of border security.
On the travel restrictions, the one thing I will add there
is it is not an all-or-nothing proposition. You can have travel
restrictions that are very targeted, very nuanced, like, for
example, instead of just banning all travel from a certain
country, you can funnel people into certain airports. The
Secretary of Homeland Security actually has the authority to
require that passengers coming from a particular country only
land at two or three airports in this country where they might
receive a heightened health screening. That is what we did
during the Ebola crisis in 2014. And so, travel needs not--it
need not be an all-or-nothing proposition. Over to Mike.
Mr. Chertoff. I agree with what has been said. Let me just,
on the travel point, make the observation that as we get more
vaccinated people, having some kind of a travel document, or
even electronic travel record that indicates that you are
vaccinated could be an important element in allowing for your
travel.
I would also say you need to look at this issue, which kind
of is--I am not quite sure it has been implemented, but it has
been discussed, which is a rule that would say that even U.S.
citizens, or permanent residents, returning from overseas,
can't board the plane or can't come in unless they are tested.
And if they test positive, they have to stay in the foreign
country until they test negative.
And I have to say, now putting on my hat as a former judge,
I am wondering at the legality of saying over an extended
period of time to Americans, not that they have to quarantine
themselves, but that they have to quarantine themselves outside
the U.S.
So, again, having a consistent policy that doesn't
overreact, I think, is going to be very important as we
hopefully emerge from this.
Mr. Cuellar. Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Fleischmann.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chair.
I apologize profusely to you and the members of the
subcommittee. Madam Chair, I was working on an issue that you
and I have discussed before, and so my profuse apologies.
To Secretary Chertoff, thank you very much for your
outstanding service to our country. I did not have the pleasure
to serve with you. I thank you for being here today.
Secretary Johnson, I want to specifically and profusely
thank you. I had the privilege of serving on this subcommittee
with you, and I also want to thank you for giving back. Even
during the last administration, you were always very kind with
your time and advice, and I appreciate your great dedication to
not only to this issue, but to our Nation, sir, and I thank
you.
I will start with some questions. As you know, the
situation at the southwest border is escalating to be a crisis
greater than we saw in 2019. I was there just this weekend. It
is--it is scary. Think of any negative adjective, and it is
there. Should there be a set of criteria that triggers action
like FEMA, Stafford Act declaration that gets put into motion
when apprehensions reach a certain number, or time in custody
measures exceed thresholds, or intel about activities in
Central America and Mexico alert that caravans are enroute? And
I will defer to both gentlemen.
Mr. Chertoff. I can begin. I think, Representative
Fleischmann, yes. The short answer is that I know FEMA has now
been mobilized. The challenge is how do you deal when you have
an expansion of particularly unaccompanied minors, and you need
to have humane and secure facilities in which they can be kept
while they are being processed.
Now, I understand from what Secretary Mayorkas said the
other day that there are, for adults and families, people
simply being expelled and being sent back, either into Mexico
or their home countries, but it is not always possible to do
that. And particularly with a pandemic, having safe and secure
facilities becomes important, and they have to be humane. So I
think there is a challenge in scaling up, and part of the
planning process which I talked about earlier is you have got
to have standby plans for dealing with these kinds of surges,
much as we do in hurricane season when we understand we may
have to do evacuations on a large scale. So I would agree, this
ought to be part of this unity of effort we have been talking
about.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, sir.
Secretary Johnson.
Mr. Johnson. Congressman, nice to see you again. I was just
in your home State a couple of weeks ago. My father passed
away, and we buried him in his hometown of Nashville, so I had
an opportunity to visit your State just recently, though it was
a sad occasion.
As I listened to your question, it occurred to me that it
is appropriate to have, in place, mechanisms to deal with a
border surge like invoking FEMA, like invoking Title 42, public
healthcare laws. I would not adopt specific triggers for those
measures. I would leave it to the discretion of the Secretary
of DHS to invoke them, depending upon circumstances.
For example, 2 years ago, if we had tried to develop
specific benchmarks for when we would invoke FEMA or doing
other things, I suspect very few of us would have anticipated a
global pandemic like the one we are facing now. And, so, I
would leave it discretionary in terms of when emergency
authorities are invoked. Of course, always with the oversight
of Congress.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, sir. And in the interest of
time, I will yield back with our condolences, Mr. Secretary, on
the passing of your father.
Madam Chair, I will yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Ms. Underwood.
Ms. Underwood. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thanks for calling
today's hearing.
As the Department of Homeland Security nears the end of its
second decade, I look forward to working with the committee and
the administration to help the Department mature its mission
and organization. I think it is important to know exactly what
we are talking about when we refer to the Department's mission.
Mr. Johnson, you oversaw an update to the Department's
mission statement in consultation with Mr. Chertoff and the
other former Secretaries. That mission, which is still in
effect today, is, quote, "With honor and integrity, we will
safeguard the American people, our homeland, and our values."
And I am interested in hearing more about how the Department's
work at the border fits into that mission.
When you served as Secretary, you testified to Congress
that DHS was committed to providing for migrant safety,
security, and medical needs, and to treating all individuals
with dignity and respect. Mr. Johnson, can you elaborate on why
basic medical care is such a critical part of the mission of
safeguarding both our values and our safety?
Mr. Johnson. I agree with that statement. People under our
care and custody, and we are most often talking about families
and children, deserve, in my opinion, as a matter of basic
humanity, healthcare. They deserve a certain level of
healthcare. We are facing COVID-19 right now. I cannot begin to
comprehend the complexity of dealing with a border surge on top
of COVID-19.
I believe that the question you raise requires further
study. I believe that Congress should consider calling upon DHS
to address exactly what levels of healthcare should be provided
to migrants who have been apprehended at the border,
particularly when you are dealing with a situation like the one
we have right now.
Ms. Underwood. And can you briefly explain what the
function of the Chief Medical Officer is and how that office
fits into the Department's mission of safeguarding our values?
Mr. Johnson. I dealt most often with the Chief Medical
Officer during the Ebola crisis of 2014. She was in my office
every day and was critical in terms of the advice she provided
to me and to our components wrestling with the issue. We had
many medical experts across the Federal Government and in HHS,
including Dr. Fauci, who was at the table in 2014 in the
Situation Room. But it was good to have in a public health
challenge like the one we had in 2014, our own in-house Chief
Medical Officer and advisor.
Ms. Underwood. Right. So how did that person help you in
terms of safeguarding the values?
Mr. Johnson. In terms of safeguarding the values, I would
say that it goes very much to the honor and integrity of those
who work at DHS. Honor and integrity includes treating people
humanely, in my judgment. Incidentally, I wrote that statement,
and I am glad it is still part of DHS' mission.
Ms. Underwood. Yes, sir. Thank you. I am also conscious of
the medical needs of DHS staff whose work often puts them on
the front lines of the pandemic. Mr. Johnson, as a former
leader of the DHS workforce, would you agree that vaccinating
its own frontline workers should be a top priority of the
Department right now?
Mr. Johnson. Yes.
Ms. Underwood. And do you have any explanation about why
that might be so important?
Mr. Johnson. For the reasons you just stated. They are on
the front lines. They are on the front lines dealing with vast
numbers of people at the ports, the land borders, and they are
essential government workers. I don't know why they wouldn't be
a priority.
Ms. Underwood. Yes, sir. It is certainly, at the front of
my mind, as I think about how DHS' medical leadership could be
strengthened and empowered to support ongoing efforts to care
for both department staff and the migrants they encounter. This
issue is more urgent than ever as we look to the current
situation at the southern border. The damage done to our
immigration system by the previous administration was profound,
and it will take time to rebuild the capacity to process
migrants in a humane way at the scale currently required.
Providing appropriate medical care to these migrants is an
essential part of humane treatment, and it is key to our
national security. If we fail to meet migrants' basic health
needs, especially during a pandemic, that threatens public
health and makes Americans, including the DHS officials and law
enforcement officers who interact with them, it makes our
country less safe.
Each component within the Department has a different
mission and interacts with migrants in different ways, so
"appropriate care" can mean different things. In some cases, it
means initial medical screenings. In others, it means influenza
vaccinations, or COVID testing. I think it is time to assess
how medical care is managed department-wide, and consider
whether the current organizational structure is adequate to
protect public health along our border, and achieve the mission
of safeguarding our values. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank
you to our witnesses for being with us today. I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you.
Mr. Price.
Mr. Price. Thank you, Madam Chair. And welcome to our two
former Secretaries, both of whom I have fond memories of
working with, very cooperatively, when I was chair and ranking
member of this subcommittee.
Both of you have referred in your statements to the
preoccupation of the last administration with immigration, and
you have portrayed that as working to the detriment of other
departmental priorities and functions. I am presuming you mean
by that not just the degree of attention given to immigration,
but also major changes in policy. After all, it hasn't been
that long since Secretary Chertoff was the leader of a
Republican administration's efforts to achieve comprehensive
immigration reform. We are certainly a long way from that now.
And on The Hill here, we have seen Homeland Security, this
subcommittee, go from being the least controversial of our
appropriations bills to the most controversial, and the reason
for that is solely immigration.
Now, we are moving back to a more balanced view of
immigration at the top of the administration, but there are
many reminders of the divisiveness and the toxicity of the
Trump policy, many reminders on the ground, many reminders in
this body, and many reminders at DHS, and that is what I want
to ask you both about.
In the culture of DHS, you have seen the troubling reports
of punitive attitudes and behavior trickling down to the front
lines of DHS agencies. You know the controversies about what
kind of restraints are honored, what kind of norms are with
respected with respect to the treatment of desperate people,
for example, the separation of families. There is a question of
the agency's discretion, the Department's discretion, and there
are lots of discretion that is exercised, as both of you very
well know, in setting priorities, for example, for enforcement
and deportation, in dealing with local law enforcement, how to
deal with local law enforcement and so on.
So it has been a traumatic 4 years. And my question to you,
in terms of management challenges, is what do those challenges
look like as a result in the immigration area? Particularly, we
are talking about the culture of the Department. We are talking
about the level of morale. We are talking about the discipline
within the Department. We are talking about the sense of the
Department's mission. We are talking about its legitimacy in
the society. It looks to be like a long list of challenges, and
I would very much value your reflections on them.
Mr. Johnson. Mike, do you want to go ahead?
Mr. Chertoff. Congressman, it is good to be dealing with
you again, and I do have fond memories of doing that. And I
think you have hit the nail on the head. I think this is very
challenging. It is like turning a big ship around. It is not
going to happen on a dime, and I know Secretary Mayorkas
recognizes this. I mean, I saw that not only in his statements
but in conversations I have had with him.
So let me be blunt. The prior administration treated wanton
cruelty and disdain as actually policy tools in what I think
was a deeply misguided effort to discourage unauthorized
migration and also, frankly, to clamp down on legal migration,
including visas and similar types of legal mechanisms. And
there was a manifest hostility that was articulated from the
very top of the administration.
So, the first thing that needs to happen is there needs to
be a reframing of the narrative, an understanding that we still
need to have borders that we secure. We need to make a decision
who gets admitted and who doesn't, but we also honor our
obligations to refugees and to asylum. We recognize that there
are some important reasons to have immigrants come in, either
on a temporary basis, or even, ultimately, to be on a permanent
basis, and we need to express that in word and deed in a way
that is not unduly encouraging people to think it is open
borders, because that is not helpful either.
If the smugglers all of a sudden get the opportunity to
smuggle, you know, vastly more people to the border and make
money off of it, and then there is people who are getting sent
back, the only winners are the smugglers. So this is a daunting
challenge to calibrate the message to be clear and balanced.
And at the same time, I think we need to look more
generally at the system as a whole. And this is an issue that
Congress visited multiple times. When I was Secretary,
President Bush was very interested in pushing this. It has got
to be some combination of legal mechanisms for people who are
filling employment needs in the U.S., or have other
humanitarian reasons to come in, but also to enforce the rules
so that it doesn't just become willy-nilly, you know, everybody
comes in when they feel like it.
And I think this is going to require an all-hands-on-deck
approach at the Department. As I said earlier, migration is not
the only mission, but is certainly will be, at least for the
foreseeable future, one of the things that is on the front
burner.
Mr. Johnson. Good morning, David. I am going to answer your
question with two comments. First, in my experience, you talked
about the culture of the Border Patrol, and others. In my
experience, working at DHS, in November 2014, we adopted new
priorities for deportation, for enforcement. They were very
clear. They were very concise. Before I even issued them, I
spent hours with our enforcement personnel, with ICRO, with the
border patrol leadership, CBP leadership, as well as people
advising me who reflected more so the viewpoints on the left,
and we collaborated on those priorities.
And people like Tom Homan will say--and Tom was the head of
ICRO when I was there. He is now a Fox commentator. He will
say, and he has said publicly that not everything he advocated
made it into our enforcement priorities, but he was very
comfortable adopting them, implementing them, supporting them,
and explaining them to his workforce.
So, in answer to the first part of your question, my
experience, if you have a leadership style that is
collaborative, inclusive, and people feel like they have been
heard, they are prepared to support what you do, even though it
is not exactly what they would do.
Big picture on the issue of immigration, on the issue of
our southern border. In my experience--and part of this I
learned from just listening to Michael Chertoff and his advice.
In my experience, the things you could do at our southern
border to heighten enforcement, heighten border security that
may have an effect in the short term, but as long as the
conditions in Central America and in Mexico persist long term,
we are going to be dealing with illegal migration, because
people in that region of the country are making the very basic
choice to flee a burning building, and there is no amount of
deterrence, border security, or a wall that will stop them.
We have to address the problems in Central America. We
began that effort in 2016 with an appropriation of $750
million. I am told by experts that that money, though it was a
drop in the bucket, was beginning to make a difference, and I
think we need to stay that course. We have to give people in
Central America a reason to want to stay. And that is the only
way, in my observation, we are going to deal with this problem
long term.
Mr. Price. Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Rutherford.
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Let me first say, I agree completely with Mr. Johnson's
last soliloquy about Central America, South America, and our
need to address their social issues. And I think we have had
some good success in those countries, like Colombia, Honduras,
but more needs to be done. And, in fact, I think Secretary
Mattis, when he was talking about the military, he said it best
of all. He said, If you are going to cut the State Department
budget which is where these funds would come from to assist
down there, if you are going to cut the State Department
budget, buy me more bullets, because I think he understood that
we have got to be about winning the hearts and minds of people
around the world and lifting people out of poverty.
The fact of the matter is capitalism has lifted more people
out of poverty than any other economic system in the world,
and, so, that is one reason we need to keep our economy strong.
But I can tell you as a lifelong police officer, what
concerns me and what I see at the border going on, this
policy--you know, Mr. Chertoff, you were talking about a policy
that was inhumane, I will paraphrase, in that it discouraged
people from coming. I think it is inhumane that we have a
policy now that is encouraging people to come into desperate
situations.
And so, as a law enforcement officer, my greatest concern
with DHS and CBP is what are we doing? After 9/11, DHS--and we
have to remember this. After 9/11, DHS was formed because we
had all these agencies that were working in silos. And the
challenge within law enforcement is not lack of information, it
is turning that information into intelligence through good
analytical tools.
And so, we missed a lot. And so I am afraid with this mass
of humanity that is coming across the border down there right
now, that is a crisis that is completely policy-driven; we need
to know that, you know, everybody is sharing information
because we just captured four folks off the terrorist watchlist
coming across down there.
I am very familiar with the opioids. My hometown,
Jacksonville, Florida, has the highest opioid death rate from
Fentanyl and opioids back just a year ago. And, so, I know a
little bit about these drugs and the cartels that are bringing
them and children across our border.
So my question is what system does DHS have in place to
help communicate with State and local partners? And how are
they making sure that we are not going back to those pre-9/11
silos of information? And, Mr. Johnson, if you would like to
start. RPTR BRYANTEDTR ZAMORA[11:14 a.m.]
Mr. Johnson. Sure thing. Yes. The principal objective of
the Intelligence and Analysis Directorate is vertical
information sharing. When I was ramping up for my job, I asked,
what does DHS need with an intelligence directorate, and I was
told vertical information sharing with State and local law
enforcement. So if they are failing in that mission, they are
failing in their principal mission.
But I want to go back to something you said about
intelligence from Central America, which really rings a bell
with me. When I was in office, I used to urge our intelligence
community, can you please devote some of your resources to
helping me in Central America. It wouldn't be that hard to find
out what the coyotes are saying on the streets of Guatemala to
people about why they should come to the United States. That
way I know what is coming before it shows up on our front door
in Texas or Arizona, to put the resources from the intelligence
community so that we can see these waves before they show up.
And I would urge Congress to urge the intelligence
community to do the same thing. It shouldn't be that first sign
of a wave of 100,000 people in a month is when they show up at
the holding stations in McAllen or Brownsville or El Paso.
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you. The only thing I would say to
that is, we have seen the caravan coming for quite some time.
But you are right. The genesis of it is what I would like to
see us get down to. So thank you, Mr. Johnson.
And I see, Madam Chair, my time has run out, so I yield
back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Ruppersberger.
Mr. Ruppersberger. Well, first I want to thank you all for
your service in the past. The Department of Homeland Security
really was stood up after 9/11 and a lot of different agencies
and different missions. And then, thank God, we had the Coast
Guard, which was a well-managed operation that kind of led the
charge. And then when you all came into leadership, I think you
both, based on your past experience, just did a lot to build on
where we needed to go.
As far as when I came to this subcommittee, one of my tasks
was to equip and resource the Department properly so we could
meet the moment on the Federal Government cybersecurity
challenges and coordinate better with State and local
governments and private sector.
Now, I have to give a great deal of credit to the
leadership of this subcommittee now and in the past and the
full committee. I think we have taken CISA from around $1.5
billion to now well over $2.2 billion. And we just gave them an
additional $650 million in the American Rescue Plan passed last
week.
One of my questions to CISA last week was, when can we
expect them to submit their posture review, as required by the
fiscal year 2021 NDAA, so this subcommittee can have a better
idea of resource planning well into the future.
And I think what I am really concerned about is that the
mission that CISA has, as far as Homeland Security and
cybersecurity, is massive.
I happen to represent NSA. They are in my district, and I
was one time ranking on the Intel Committee. And I think NSA,
until recently, was right on their game as it related to Russia
and China. I am a little concerned about the attacks, the
Russia attacks, now the Chinese, as far as our defense is
concerned, and I think we have a little bit more to do in that
regard.
But what do you think of the future of CISA? How well do
you think they are managed internally in the Department? How do
we see their ability to take on, Federal Government, the
cybersecurity mission? And it increasingly grows larger and
more complex. And, hopefully, we would never have a another
world war, but I see a lot of it in the cyberspace and in the
space, space itself.
Now, how should we approach--approach is my question--to
the final line of giving CISA the tools to do the job, but not
directly competing with the robust U.S. cybersecurity service
market, that sector, private sector?
And the one thing that I would put on the table is that I
feel that the cybersecurity issue is so large, and we just
created a Space Force, I think there is a need to have
cybersecurity set out in maybe another area with a direct line
to the administration, because of all the areas and issues that
we are going to deal with in the future. We keep growing,
growing, and we are getting attacked now on a regular basis.
So if you can just give me your opinion on that, the
possibility of taking cybersecurity into another level. And
start, I guess, with Mr. Johnson and then Mr. Chertoff.
Mr. Johnson. Thank you for that question, Congressman.
First of all, regrettably, the executive branch often does not
take congressional deadlines seriously. The last QHSR was--it
was supposed to be every 5 years, but the last one was the one
that I helped write in 2014. And going through the exercise of
delivering to Congress a report on the future is a worthwhile
exercise, because it forces us to focus on that as an agency or
as a Department.
My general assessment of CISA is that it is going in the
right direction. I am pleased that Congress approved
reorganizing from NPPD, which was a cumbersome directorate, to
an agency devoted to cybersecurity and infrastructure
protection. I think Chris Krebs did a good job. I think that
CISA did a good job preparing us for the 2020 election, in
terms of election infrastructure. They worked effectively with
State and local election officials on that.
The report that was declassified yesterday indicates that
there was no attack on our election infrastructure per se, but
there is still a lot of work to do. The SolarWinds attack was,
in my observation, the most devastating cyber attack on our
Nation perhaps in history.
The big challenge that I see for DHS--and I would not
rewicker the structure right now. I would give the current
alignment time to stabilize. The biggest challenge that DHS has
is talent, as you suggested. Just on my watch, some of our best
cybersecurity people were stolen away by the financial services
sector, who could pay them two or three times what the
government pays them.
And my approach has been come and serve your country for
just a couple of years. Give us your expertise for just a
couple of years before you go off and work at Goldman Sachs or
Citigroup or the defense industry, and learn from working for
our country the insights there. But recruiting and retaining
talent, in my judgment, in cybersecurity is our biggest
challenge.
Mr. Ruppersberger. And an example, Chris Krebs, though, I
think did an excellent job. He moved forward. And because he
made the comment that he felt that the election was secure,
which is not what Trump was putting out for whatever reason, he
got fired. And that inconsistency of leadership is not good
either.
So I agree with all of your comments, and we are losing
good people. We just need some smart people in the cyber field
to stay 3 or 4 years.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. I believe that ends our first round, and
we do have some time for a second round.
So I would like to talk a little bit about employee morale.
Each year since the creation of DHS, based on the Federal
Employee Viewpoint Survey conducted by the Office of Personnel
Management, employee morale has consistently ranked among the
worst in the Federal Government.
I know that you, Secretary Johnson, and Secretary Chertoff,
have worked very hard to address this issue during your tenure,
but the problem still persists.
Secretary Johnson, what responsibility does the
departmental management have in addressing this issue? And what
steps should be taken by today's leaders within the Department
to address the systemic low morale, and is there anything that
Congress can do to help?
Mr. Johnson. When I came into office, I was beaten over the
head by Congress during my confirmation process about improving
morale. It was at the bottom of the list in terms of Cabinet
departments, and I was going to raise morale if it killed me.
Our third year, my third year in office, according to FEVS,
the morale within DHS, which is no small lift because you are
talking about multiple components, went up a whole 3 percentage
points. Interestingly, the most dramatic increase was in ICE my
last year of office, 7 whole percentage points.
And morale is not just a general indicator of whether the
workforce believes in their mission, but it also was the
recruitment tool. It also reflects directly on the prestige of
the agency. And morale, according to, if you look at FEVS from
2016, we bottomed out in 2016, and it has increased steadily
ever since.
It has to be a focused, sustained commitment to paying
attention to this issue. I believe that the current human
capital officer, Angie Bailey, has done an excellent job. She
was hired in 2015 or 2016. I think she is doing an excellent
job.
In terms of what Congress can do, I will tell you one
episode. I came to work one morning and I read in The
Washington Post that a subcommittee--I can't remember which one
it was--was holding a hearing on worst places to work in the
Federal Government. And one of my people had been called to
testify, because Congress was going to highlight that DHS was
one of the worst places to work in the Federal Government.
And I said to my staff, let's not send so-and-so, I will
go. And I got lots of pushback from my staff, but I went
anyway. And I said to the chair of the subcommittee at the
time, Mr. Meadows, would you please stop holding hearings
telling people how terrible it is to work at DHS. That doesn't
help me. Help me.
And so I am glad that we were able to finally turn the
corner. It is a sustained effort, and it is a very, very big
agency. And leadership on this must have a cascading effect.
You have got to get the component leaders to focus on it, their
subordinates and their subordinates, and it has to trickle down
through the organization.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Secretary Chertoff, do you have any
recommendations?
Mr. Chertoff. No. I agree it does require sustained effort
and appreciation being shown, not just by the leadership of the
Department, but by the leadership of the administration.
I recognize that one of the challenges is that the people
at some of the components are interacting with the public under
circumstances in which the public is usually a little bit
grumpy. For example, TSA, nobody really likes the experience at
the airport, and TSA is really right on the front lines of
that. Like our CBP, you know, the border inspectors run up
against people who are tired and a little bit cranky.
So we need to recognize that, maybe with the possible
exception of IRS, there is no Federal agency that has as much
direct, repeated, and sometimes challenging contact with the
public as does DHS.
But with that, I agree, emphasizing and celebrating the
importance of the mission and highlighting where the mission
has made a difference in a positive way is one thing I would
like to see as a response to this challenge.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. DHS has gone through a number of
reorganizations since it was first established. And there have
been various suggestions made, such as I think, Secretary
Chertoff, you mentioned the fact that there was discussion
about moving the Secret Service. And there have been also calls
to dissolve the Department and move its operations to other
departments and agencies.
What is the argument for maintaining DHS as a Federal
department, and are additional organizational changes needed to
ensure its success?
Mr. Chertoff. I will try to be very succinct. First, I
think the Department, if it is being led properly, does foster
unity of effort among a number of the components that
complement each other. For example, some of the capabilities
and tools TSA has are shared with CBP and vice versa, and that
means that we are able to both strengthen our border for air
travelers and our aircraft and airplane security for our air
travelers.
As I said earlier, the Secret Service and its capabilities
in the area of personal protection and physical security mesh
very well with other missions of the Department at CISA that
are also focused on the issue of critical infrastructure.
If you separate these out, you are not going to make the
mission disappear, you are just going to make it very difficult
to coordinate and everybody is going to pursue their own thing.
So I think it would be a tragic mistake to go back to the old
days when we actually promoted stovepipes and separation.
Finally, I would say, as a general matter, reorganizations
cost time, money, and always set us back in progress. So I
don't know that I would do any significant reorganizing even
within the Department. What is needed now is consistency of
leadership, strategic vision, clear communication, and
attention to execution.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. I see that my time is up, but I would
like to ask Secretary Johnson if he has any thoughts on this
subject.
Mr. Johnson. Yes. Well, first of all, on the subject of
morale, I think the single best thing I did was one day--I
don't know if you can see this--one day I went to BWI and I
literally put on a TSA uniform and worked the line. I played
undercover boss. And all the TSA officers loved it, and I think
it was a good shot for morale.
From where I sat as Secretary, I thought it made a
tremendous amount of sense for one person to have eyes and ears
on all the different ways somebody can enter our country--land,
sea, and air. And there is a very practical benefit to having
Secret Service and his and all these other components in one
place.
When you have large national security events, like a papal
visit or a U.N. General Assembly, the Secret Service has the
lead, but it draws upon all these other DHS components to
augment the security mission, which would be very difficult if
they are spread across multiple Cabinet departments.
So that is the one thing I would like to add to what
Michael said. Michael and I, we coauthored an op-ed about
keeping the Secret Service within DHS, and I am glad that in
Congress that effort seems to have been set aside for the time
being.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Fleischmann.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you again, Madam Chair.
Components submit their annual budget requests to DHS
headquarters budget office and ultimately through OMB.
Unfortunately, due to the highly politicized environment we
currently live in, the priorities of an individual agency may
get shelved in favor of the highest priorities of the
Department or the executive branch.
Currently, only one DHS agency provides a list of
priorities that were not included in the budget justifications.
The Coast Guard submits an unfunded priority list that helps
the committee undertake our own evaluation of needs and
investments.
But we have cybersecurity investments at CISA that can't
always be accommodated, or technology and infrastructure
improvements we should be investing in at the borders. And we
are not always given information about those needs through the
budget process if we can't see what tradeoffs were made during
formulation.
While the Coast Guard has significantly higher capital and
infrastructure investment needs than many of the other
agencies, do you feel it would be advantageous and in the
interest of greater transparency for other agencies within DHS
to submit a similar report to Congress? For example, CISA and
CBP. And I would like both gentlemen's response, please.
Mr. Johnson. Can I start?
Mr. Fleischmann. Yes, sir.
Mr. Johnson. My answer is no.
Mr. Fleischmann. Okay.
Mr. Johnson. From where I sit--from where I sat as the
Secretary and from where I sat in DOD leadership, I think that
unfunded priorities list mean the Secretary and OMB lose
control of the process. I am being very blunt here.
This originated in the Department of Defense. And somebody
has got to have--somebody has got to look at the big picture in
terms of budget priorities. As you know better than I do, as an
appropriator, you simply can't fund everything that somebody
wants to pay for.
And so, at the very least, if we are to have unfunded
priorities list, the Secretary should have eyes and ears on the
process and have an opportunity to comment on the process.
Because the components, whether it is a military service, God
bless them, or any other agency, don't always have the big
picture perspective in terms of overlap with other departments
and other missions.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, sir.
Secretary Chertoff.
Mr. Chertoff. I am in strong agreement. In fact, as we
talked about earlier, you know, one of the challenges with the
Department has been the sense that there has not been enough
central coordination and unity of effort across the Department,
particularly when you have individual agencies essentially end-
running around the leadership of the Department.
So I think having individual agencies kind of go themselves
and try to promote their agenda over the Department's agenda
would really undercut the ability of leadership to have a
coordinated, strategic approach.
Now, it may be that the Secretary and the Department as a
whole ought to submit a list of priorities that have not been
funded, but it ought to be done as a unified effort and not as
a fragmented effort.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you. Both Secretaries, I want to
thank you all for your testimony today.
Madam Chair, thank you for holding this very helpful
hearing to us all. With the interest of time, I will yield
back, but my sincere thanks.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Cuellar.
Mr. Cuellar. Thank you, Madam Chair.
I have a quick question for both of you. There are three
messages that people in Latin America are hearing right now.
One is from the administration says, don't come now, come
later.
The second message is what I call the friends, family,
neighbors message. Hey, Pedro, I just came across. You can come
over. Come on over at this moment. And they see images on
televisions in Latin America showing people crossing the border
into the United States.
And the third message is the criminal organizations that
target, that target, aggressively market their services,
because they make a lot of money. For example, in February, we
had a little bit over 100,000, and the narcos charge them--and
it varies, I have numbers here--$4,000 if you are Mexican. If
you are an unaccompanied kid from Latin America, it might go up
to $7,500. So let's say an average of $6,000. So that means
that on just the--not the getaways, but just the ones that they
encounter, they made over $600 million for the month of
February.
So that message--there are three messages. And I know--you
know, I think you all know this--they are listening to message
number two and number three.
My question is, what should be the message from the
administration? Because, in my opinion, when they say, don't
come now, come later, that is a horrible message.
And, Secretary Johnson, I know you and I worked on visuals,
you know, when we return people, showing them being returned,
because otherwise, they are just seeing people coming over. And
you were very good at that under the Obama administration when
we had the surge in 2014-2015.
So my question is, what should be, from the opinion of both
of you all, should be the message, the counter-message number
two and number three from the administration?
Mr. Johnson. Don't come here illegally, period. I have had
to go to Central America. This is awkward. I have had to go to
Central America, stand next to the President of the country and
tell his people, don't come to my country, which is an awkward
message to deliver, but it is an unambiguous one.
And you are right that the smugglers, for their own
economic benefit, take whatever policy statements come from the
United States and they distort them. They exaggerate them. They
extrapolate from them for their own benefit.
And so in 2014, for example, when I would talk to the kids
on the border at the Border Patrol stations, I would ask them,
why did you come here? And they would tell me, because the
coyotes told me that the Border Patrol are giving out
"permisos," free passes, if you come to the border. And then
when I would press them and say, well, what are you talking
about, they would say, well, I was handed a piece of paper. It
turned out the piece of paper was a notice to appear in a
deportation proceeding.
So a clear and unambiguous message has to be sent,
accompanied by incentives or disincentives to make the
dangerous journey. You know, processing in place, for example,
which was something we tried to begin in the Obama
administration, allowing people to apply for asylum in place,
in country, rather than make the dangerous journey. And as I
said earlier, addressing the reasons why people flee in the
first place. But messaging clearly does have an impact and an
effect.
Mr. Chertoff. Yeah, this is not a new problem. We dealt
with this issue back, you know, when I was in office. And I
would agree, I think it is important to be clear and
straightforward in your message that there are legal ways you
may be able to come, but don't come without legal permission,
whether that be asylum--and I agree with processing in place--
or if you can get a temporary work visa. And as I think I have
said previously, expanding some of the lawful ways people can
come actually relieves some of that pressure to cross
illegally.
But I would say two other things. We do need to look at
root causes. And, you know, if there is violence or disorder in
the Northern Triangle, people are going to flee a burning
building. So we need to work on that.
We also need to work with our counterparts in other
countries in Latin America. I read a news story today that says
Mexico may start to now reinforce its southern border against
migrants. So a cooperative approach with a consistency of
message can be very helpful here.
And, finally, we need to go after the gangs, because they
create all kinds of problems with not just human smuggling, but
drug smuggling and disorder in places like Mexico.
Mr. Johnson. If I could add to that, one of the ways we
dealt with the 2014 surge was we got the Mexican Government to
help us on their southern border. They don't have a lot of
border security, border patrol on the border between Mexico and
Central America, but they stepped it up and it made a
difference.
Mr. Cuellar. And here is the article that you all are
talking about Mexico doing this. In fact, in 2014, Madam Chair,
we added about $14 million to help Mexico secure the southern
border. And at one time, they were actually stopping more
people than Border Patrol was at their southern border.
Thank you very much, both of you all.
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Palazzo.
Mr. Palazzo. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And I think what Congressman Cuellar was mentioning was we
have had these conversations in Homeland Security. You know,
the Mexican southern border is a lot smaller than the American-
Mexican border. And it just makes sense to push resources there
and help our allies and our partners address this problem
before it even makes its way to the Mexican border, the
southern Mexican border, or the American southern border.
Real quick, you know, again, Secretary Johnson, you know,
when I get stuck on an issue, I kind of keep beating it up.
Right here, this is from JIATF South home page. Real quick,
Coast Guard cutters offload 7,500 pounds of cocaine and
marijuana, estimated cost $126 million; Coast Guard transfers
three smugglers, over $5.6 million in seized cocaine near the
U.S. Virgin Islands; Coast Guard seizes $156 million of cocaine
by Coast Guard Pacific; Atlantic area-based Coast Guard cutters
offload more than $330 million worth of illegal narcotics;
Coast Guard, Navy offload $211 million worth of cocaine,
marijuana.
This is all in the first 2-1/2 months of the year. Just
what I am seeing--and there is probably more that hasn't been
reported--that is $829 million in hard narcotics that was taken
off the ocean before it finds its way into our schools, our
backyards, and devastating our communities.
And I wish the OMB and others would take this seriously. We
need more National Security Cutters, more Offshore Patrol
Cutters for the Coast Guard, not less. And so an NSC costs, on
average, $670 million. It paid for itself in the first 2-1/2
months.
Madam Chair, I hope as we go through, we can take a hard
look at maybe trying to find at least a one-for-one replacement
in the National Security Cutters that replaced the heavy
endurance cutters. Right now, we are one shy. But, look, we
could use it. I think we need it.
And so, shifting gears real quick, you know, I am looking
at press releases and hearings from 2014, Secretary Johnson,
and to me, it feels like a lot of this is dj vu, dj vu all over
again. You know, you cold almost fill in the blank. You know,
President so-and-so sent a clear message of disregard to the
U.S. Congress, the American people, when he enacted so-and-so
like provisions by executive order.
And, you know, there is a crisis on our border. We cannot
ignore that. And we have to be compassionate, right? I mean, I
hear that word tossed around. But we also need to make sure
there are certain deterrents down there.
And I have been a huge proponent of the National Guard. I
think some of our hearings when I was on Homeland, the other
Homeland committee, we talked about utilizing the National
Guard.
And now, while the Border Patrol are becoming babysitters,
taxicab drivers, nurses, you know, whatever they are doing,
they are not doing their core job. And to me, that could
demoralize people. They weren't hired for those positions, but
we have thrust them into those areas of responsibility. They
want to be out--they want to be in the canyons. They want to be
chasing those coming over illegal, smuggling drugs, people,
foreign nationals and things of that nature.
And, Secretary Chertoff too, I know you are no stranger,
because, you know, several Presidents in the past have utilized
the National Guard. I know they kind of fill in for the Border
Patrol, but can we expand their mission on the border? And I
will give both of you an opportunity to address it.
Mr. Johnson. Let me start, if I could. First of all, this
problem always looks simpler from the comfort of a law office
in midtown Manhattan than it did when I owned the problem for 3
years and the complexity. I suspect that the dynamic has
changed over the last 7 years, so it may be a little different
than how I saw it in 2014, 2015, 2016.
We have to always remember that the National Guard, the
U.S. military is limited by our laws againstthe posse
comitatus. Congressman, I know you know that. There can be a
role during surges, during emergencies for the Guard.
Bottom line, the most compassionate thing we can do is
address the reasons why people are leaving Central America in
the first place. And I don't believe that it is an
insurmountable task. We have done this before with, say, a Plan
Colombia.
It is just up to Congress to keep up a sustained effort at
this. If we really want to address illegal migration on our
southern border, I am convinced that is the answer. We can talk
about the Guard, we can talk about more surveillance, more
Border Patrol agents, changing our asylum laws, but so long as
the problem continues to exist in Central America, we are going
to continue to be banging our head against the wall trying to
find answers.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Ruppersberger.
Mr. Ruppersberger. Okay.
Mr. Palazzo. Real quick, if you don't mind. Secretary
Johnson and Madam Chair, I think you will find there is a lot
of agreement with many of the members on the committee that
would agree we have to address the root causes, but we also
have to address the immediate surge and problems that it is
causing for, you know, putting Americans in danger currently.
So I think you will find some common ground if we could
just get past the politics and put the American people and good
policy ahead of those politics.
So, thank you, Secretary Johnson, for you being here, and
Secretary Chertoff.
Madam Chair, I am sorry, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Ruppersberger.
Mr. Ruppersberger. Yes. First, I agree with my friend Steve
about the Coast Guard. A fantastic organization, and they have
limited resources, but they do the job.
I also want to acknowledge, as I did before, I think the
leadership of both Secretary Johnson and Chertoff, to stand up
an operation, any department, and with all the missions you
have, I think you really guided this ship very well in your
leadership.
I want to get into the issue of ports. I think right now, I
think since the Department was set up in 2002, Customs and
Border Protection have made great strides in securing our
southwest border. They have a lot more work to do. The Coast
Guard, I said, has protected our waterways, and TSA has made
flying safer.
However, I am not fully convinced that the Department of
Homeland Security has ever truly emphasized the need to secure
our seaports. The Port of Baltimore, which I represent, is an
economic powerhouse, generating over 33,000 jobs--33,900 jobs,
in fact--and $2.2 billion in regional business revenue. It
might not be Long Beach or Newark, but we had a banner year of
43.6 million tons in 2020, and this number includes well over 1
million 20-foot equivalent units. That is 1 million containers
so far.
But so far, CBP has a lot of work to do. As some officers
admitted when I visited the port, opioids, including Fentanyl
and cocaine, is flowing through our seaports, because Baltimore
is simply ill-equipped. It is not that the work ethic isn't
there at CBP, but it is just ill-equipped, don't have the
resources.
So my question for both of you is, how can DHS better
position itself to intercept drugs and other contraband at our
seaports? And is it simply more personnel, installation of
nonintrusive inspection technology, or a change in policy and
philosophy? Both of you.
Mr. Chertoff. I will step up first. I think some of it is
technology. I think noninvasive technologies that operate at
scale and at speed can be helpful, but I think a lot of it is
intelligence. And we talked about this earlier. It is
collecting intelligence, both analytics about the nature of
what is coming in, what are higher risk shipments that need to
be looked at, but also intelligence collection from the source
points that indicate where there might be particular vessels or
particular types of freight entities that are more likely to be
used by smugglers.
So I think it is a combination of these things. We use
these techniques at the land borders as well as kind of an all-
of-the-above approach.
Mr. Johnson. I agree with Michael. I think that continued
investments in technology, surveillance, and I believe also
that there is a definite role for the Coast Guard in the port
security mission. Over.
Mr. Ruppersberger. Good answers. Thank you.
I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Rutherford.
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Secretary Johnson and Secretary Chertoff, first let me say
thank you both for what you accomplished while you were in
office. I think you all did really a yeoman's job.
Let me ask you about--and, Secretary Johnson, I agree
completely about having to fix the environment in Central
America if we are really going to stop these migrants from
coming. And part of what concerns me--and I think we found some
headway.
I think, Secretary Chertoff, you mentioned I think Colombia
and some of the successes that we have had. I know in Honduras,
for example, when we went in and assisted with the purge of the
Honduran National Police, the acceptance of their law
enforcement went from like 20 percent up to 60 percent.
They were going through the same purge--well, sort of the
same enhancement process with their courts and prosecution with
MACCIH probably 5 years ago. So there are some good things
going on to help bring justice and democracy to these
countries.
What concerns me is when I travel to Suriname and Guyana in
South America, and I see where the--and the Chinese have
already been there. And the Chinese are in Ecuador. They now
have a 160-vessel fleet in the Galapagos Islands.
My question is, during your time, did you see the
beginnings of this Chinese move into the Western/Southwestern
Hemisphere?
Mr. Chertoff. Let me start. I mean, this was not a big
issue when I was in office, but I have been involved in
watching this ever since. And what we have seen the Chinese do,
particularly under Xi, Xi Jinping, who has not really made much
of a secret about it, is they have attempted to extend their
tentacles all around the Southern Hemisphere.
They have done it in the Indian Ocean. They have done it in
Africa, and now they are doing it also in Latin America. And
they do it with a combination of using funding for certain
kinds of projects, helping particularly authoritarian
governments build capabilities to oppress their population, and
then trying to post their assets in other parts of the world.
So this is part of a larger conversation, and it will
obviously have [inaudible] Right now, talking about the need to
pull together our allies in the region to counterbalance the
Chinese. But this, I think, is, to my mind, maybe the largest
geopolitical challenge we face strategically over the next 4
years.
Mr. Rutherford. Secretary Johnson, would you like to add to
that?
Mr. Johnson. I agree with what Michael said. I would give
the same answer from my perspective from the time I served.
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you. And, listen, I would recommend
to folks there is a great report out. It is a report about 13
different countries and where the Chinese have gone in and
through what they call a process of elite capture. The name of
the report is the malign Chinese influence and the dissolving
of democracy, and it is by the International Republican
Institute.
I can tell you that is a game plan. It shows exactly what
the Chinese are trying to do, and they are in our backyard
fulfilling that. And I think a lot of the problems that are
being exacerbated down there with the drug cartels and the
transnational organizations is a direct result of what is going
on with the Chinese.
But I see my time is just about up. So thank you both very
much.
I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you.
Time is almost up, but I do have one more question that I
would like to ask. And it has to do with acquisitions.
Major acquisitions have been a challenge for DHS. GAO has
cited numerous times how the Department has failed to meet
scheduled and cost projections. Other challenges include
systemic stovepipes within each component that can lead to
duplicative programs and a failure to leverage capabilities
that exist in other components.
Secretary Johnson, how can DHS better integrate
acquisitions to head off duplicative programs and leverage
component programs and capabilities across the Department? And
how should we be reviewing these program requirements at the
DHS level to ensure components are not pursuing stovepipe
programs?
Mr. Secretary, I think you are muted.
Mr. Johnson. Sorry, sorry.
I will make two points. In my opening statement, I noted
the fact that over the last 50 months, there have been nine
people who have occupied the job of Secretary of Homeland
Security. Obviously, in that kind of circumstance, no one
Secretary or no one Under Secretary for Management has the time
to devote to addressing the answer to your question, which is a
difficult one. We need a more mature acquisition process in
DHS.
The reality is, with big government contracts, big
acquisitions, what looks like a good idea in year one, which
then takes 10 years to implement, by the time you get to year
seven or eight, somebody says, I can build a better bicycle.
And programs will often outdate themselves, given the life of
the time it takes to put them in place.
So I think across the Federal Government, we know how to do
this if DHS could learn how to embrace best practices. I
suspect that the process has not improved much since 5, 6 years
ago when I was there, simply because there have not been people
in place that have had the time and the attention span to deal
with it.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Secretary Chertoff, do you have any
thoughts on this?
Mr. Chertoff. I agree with what Jeh said. And I think, you
know, part of the issue is you have got to have empowerment by
the Secretary of the chief acquisition officer of the
Department to play a role with respect to all the components,
and that some of that may require some tweaks in legislation,
but some of it requires consistent leadership and strategic
vision.
And I know when I was in office, you know, there were times
I had to call everybody in and make it clear, on a regular
basis, that there needed to be exchange of information, cross-
cutting collaboration, and ultimately a unified position on
some of these issues.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. I believe that finishes the second
round. And I would just like to say to Secretary Chertoff,
Secretary Johnson, thank you so very much for your time for
helping us to think through these challenges. Your insights and
your recommendations have truly been invaluable.
If there is no further business, the Subcommittee on
Homeland Security stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:58 a.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
RPTR GIORDANOEDTR SECKMANDEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND
SECURITYAPPROPRIATIONS FOR 2022Wednesday, March 24,
2021TARGETED VIOLENCE AND TERRORISM PREVENTION DEPARTMENT OF
HOMELAND SECURITY APPROPRIATIONS FOR 2022Wednesday, March 24,
2021TARGETED VIOLENCE AND TERRORISM PREVENTIONWITNESSESJOHN
COHEN, ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR COUNTERTERRORISM AND EMERGING
THREATS, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITYJOHN PICARELLI,
DIRECTOR OF THE OFFICE OF TARGETED VIOLENCE AND TERRORISM
PREVENTION, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITYRICHARD ABORN,
PRESIDENT, CITIZENS CRIME COMMISSION OF NEW YORK CITYTYLER
COTE, DIRECTOR AND CO-FOUNDER, OPERATION250SAMMY RANGEL,
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND CO-FOUNDER, LIFE AFTER HATE
Ms. Roybal-Allard. The Committee on Homeland Security will
come to order.
This hearing is being conducted virtually. So I want to
remind members that they are responsible for muting and
unmuting themselves. When you are recognized to speak, if I
notice that you have not unmuted yourself, I will ask you if
you would like the staff to unmute you. If you indicate
approval by nodding, staff will unmute your microphone.
To avoid inadvertent background noise, the chair or staff
designated by the chair may mute participant microphones when
they are not recognized to speak.
We will be operating under the 5-minute rule. If there is a
technology issue during a member's speaking time, I will move
to the next member until the issue is resolved, but you will
retain the balance of your time.
The timer on the screen will turn yellow with one minute
remaining, and will turn red when a member's time has expired.
We will follow the speaking order set forth in the House
rules, beginning with the chair and the ranking member,
followed by members present at the time of the hearing is
called to order in order of seniority, and we will alternate by
party. Next, we will go to members who were not present when
the hearing was called to order until every member present has
had a first round.
Members can submit written information for any of our
hearings or markups via an email address that has been provided
to your staff.
Now let's begin.
I want to welcome everyone to this important hearing on the
growing problem of targeted violence and terrorism,
particularly domestic violent extremism.
We will have two panels this morning.
The witnesses for our first panel are John Cohen, the
Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism and Emerging Threats
at the Department of Homeland Security; and John Picarelli, the
Director of the Department's Office of Targeted Violence and
Terrorism Prevention.
Thank you both for joining us this morning.
The second panel will feature representatives from
organizations that have been awarded grant funding from the
Department to develop and model strategies for preventing
targeted violence and terrorism.
January 6 was a wake-up call for many people, but we have
seen evidence of a growing problem of targeted violence and
domestic violent extremism over the last several years. Former
Secretary Johnson was an early advocate of investing in this
area, and we worked with him late in the fiscal year 2016
funding cycle to establish a grant program focused on
countering violent extremism.
Unfortunately, the focus of the program took a wrong turn
at the beginning of the last administration, focusing
insufficiently on countering domestic extremism with the result
that no additional funding was appropriated for the grants
between fiscal year 2017 and fiscal year 2019.
I am glad that this effort seems to have righted itself in
the last couple of years resulting in an appropriation of $10
million in fiscal year 2020 for TVTP grants and $20 million for
fiscal year 2021.
Overall, our fiscal year 2021 bill included more than $80
million for TVTP activities across the Department, an increase
of $61 million, including a total of $16.5 million for the
Office for Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention.
This morning, we want to find out more about the
Department's role in countering violent extremism of every
kind, what you are learning about the causes of radicalization
that leads to violence, and how communities can help prevent
it.
Our hearing is particularly timely given the release last
week of a report by the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence entitled "Domestic Violent Extremism Poses
Heightened Threat in 2021."
Unfortunately, it is also highly pertinent in light of the
murder of eight people at Asian-American businesses in Georgia
last week and the targeted killing of ten people at a grocery
store in Colorado this week.
I would like now to turn to the distinguished gentleman
from Tennessee, Ranking Member Fleischmann, for his opening
remarks.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chair, and I really
appreciate your holding this subcommittee hearing at this
difficult time in our history and on this very sensitive and
difficult subject matter.
It is truly a somber and serious issue that is affecting
many in our country and our communities and, for some, even
within our families. This issue hits home for me. For some of
my new colleagues, you may not know, but, on a beautiful day in
June a few years ago, my colleagues and I were shot at and
nearly assassinated on a baseball field in Virginia by a lone
shooter driven by hate.
Almost 4 years later, I still feel blessed to have walked
off that field that day basically physically unharmed. I got a
little bit bloodied in my hands and my knees running from the
shooter and diving in the dugout, but thank God I was not shot.
Others were, including some of our Capitol Police and Members.
But I am saddened that, at this time, the same type of
extremism and hate is driving more people to commit acts of
violence. Even more alarming is that violence is coming from
our fellow Americans.
Let me say this: It is wonderful to have ideas for passions
or a cause. It moves people to lead or help others. We are in
this hearing, obviously felt a passion to run for office to
represent people in our districts and serve this great country.
We don't always agree. We debate.
However, it is a very different and dangerous situation
when a passion for ideas and civil discourse in the face of
disagreement instead turns into extremism and violence. I
support the investments that this committee has made to try to
turn that tide for the safety of all people.
I thank all the witnesses today, Assistant Secretary Cohen
and Director Picarelli with the Department of Homeland
Security, and everyone on the second panel who run some of the
organizations that have received DHS grants to work to defuse
the violence or the potential for violence.
I am eager to hear how DHS and these nonprofits are working
to identify ways to mitigate these threats. I look forward to
your testimony.
Again, Madam Chairman, thank you for holding this hearing,
and I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. I would now like to turn to the chair
of the full Appropriations Committee, Ms. DeLauro.
The Chair. Thank you very, very much, Chairwoman Roybal-
Allard, and I thank you and Ranking Member Fleischmann for
holding this hearing this morning, and I want to say a thank
you to our witnesses for testifying.
Quote, "Enough is enough, thoughts and prayers, not one
more, quote, "nevermore." Does anyone else feel like the
speaker from Edgar Allan Poe's poem, "The Raven," as he
ponders, quote, "weak and weary at the tapping, constant
rapping heard at his chamber's door"? Like the specter of
death, the Raven comes again and again, recalling the memory of
a loved one lost, and again and again the Raven repeats the
unchanging, slightly irritating, almost infuriating refrain,
quote, "nevermore."
It reminds me of the words we hear following each new
incident of targeted violence in this country: Enough is
enough, thoughts and prayers, not one more, nevermore.
Never more will the 10 families in Boulder, Colorado, see
their loved ones smile again. Never more will the six families
in Atlanta, Georgia, embrace their mothers, their sisters,
their wives. Never more will children in our schools and
shoppers in our stores, and even Members, the Congress and
staff in our Capitol, feel safe, unless we stop the spread of
violence and domestic terrorism.
We must stop our ceaseless yapping. We must stop the
constant tapping. We must stop the endless rapping at our
chamber's door. There is no question why this keeps occurring.
We already know the cause. Domestic violent terrorism and
extremism has been growing in this country for years. Fueled by
the rise of social media and the internet, extremist, violent,
toxic ideologies have spread and contributed to a growing
domestic threat from violent extremists, particularly White
supremacists.
To be clear, these attacks are certainly not all fueled by
White supremacy, but racism and far-right extremism have led to
three times as many targeted attacks on U.S. soil as Islamic
terrorism. Since 2018, White supremacist groups have been
responsible for more deaths than any other domestic extremist
group.
And, while there is certainly many contributing factors
that lead to these instances of violence and hate, often there
is a common invariable refrain: young men, young men with guns,
young men with guns radicalized by extremist ideologies filled
with hate. It was true in Atlanta. It was true in
Charlottesville. It was true at the Walmart in El Paso.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been talking a lot this
past year about how we can get back to normal, but, as I have
said before, going back to normal is not good enough. This new
normal is not normal. Violence, especially domestic terrorism,
is a disease, a disease that has been taking the lives of
innocent Americans long before this COVID-19 pandemic.
So what are we going to do about it? How are we going to
stop the tapping? How are we going to stop the rapping? How are
we going to stop the continual return of death? We are already
developing the tools to help communities, States, and local
governments understand what leads to radicalization. We already
have the tools to develop strategies and prevent frameworks for
off-ramping individuals from violent extremism.
The Congress has a duty to ensure our Department of
Homeland Security is armed with these important tools and
equipped with the funding and the resources it needs to stop
this never-ending violence. And we must also summon the will to
act to stop the widespread availability of weapons of war on
our streets.
The background check bills which passed the House last week
are a good start, but not nearly enough to keep our families
and our communities safe. And we owe it to every person in this
country who has felt the pain of targeted violence or domestic
terrorism to ensure that no more lives are lost to gun
violence. Nevermore.
And, with that, I thank the chairwoman and the ranking
member, and I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Assistant Secretary Cohen and Director
Picarelli, we will submit the full text of your official
statements for the hearing record.
Assistant Secretary Cohen, please begin your oral summary,
which I would ask that you keep to 5 minutes.
Mr. Cohen. Madam Chairwoman, Ranking Member Fleischmann,
members of the committee, thank you very much for the
opportunity to be here with you today.
I appreciate that you invited us to attend this important
and timely hearing. Based on the events of the last 8 days, the
two tragic, horrible shootings in the Atlanta area and in
Boulder, Colorado, the timing of this hearing could not be more
prescient.
Over the past 8 days, the Nation has experienced two
separate mass casualty attacks. I would like to say these
events were unusual or these events were uncommon or they were
anomalies, but, sadly, for the reasons stated by both of you
and Chairwoman DeLauro, I can't. These types of targeted
attacks have become way too common in our country.
And, while I appear before you today as the top coordinator
for counterterrorism and Assistant Secretary for
Counterterrorism and Emerging Threats at the Department of
Homeland Security, the perspectives I will share with you today
come from not only my current responsibilities but also the
work I have been engaged in over the past 10 years, both at the
Department and also outside of the Department, examining mass-
casualty attacks, acts of targeted violence, and domestic
extremism in the United States and Europe.
So, while the motives behind the two attacks referenced
earlier in the Atlanta area and Boulder, Colorado, are still
under investigation and while the motives have yet to be
thoroughly identified, we do know already that there are
striking similarities between both of those incidents and
incidents that have been experienced across the country in the
past.
And I will use my time to share a little bit of perspective
on the emerging--on the current threat environment and some
things that the Department has initiated since January 20th to
address that threat.
But we often hear from people after these types of
incidents that they can't be prevented. They are difficult. I
will tell you, as somebody who has spent over 35 years in law
enforcement and homeland security, that is just simply not
true. These types of attacks can be prevented. There are things
that we can do to make them less frequent.
There are actually examples around the country where
targeted attacks directed at schools, houses of worship have
been prevented. In some cases, they have been prevented by the
actions of a joint terrorism task force or another law
enforcement investigation and prosecution, but there are a
growing number of cases that have been prevented or incidents
that have been prevented by the actions of organizations such
as those who are going to be appearing before you later today.
They have been--these incidents have been prevented by the
actions of mental health professionals, community groups, faith
leaders. And it is those types of prevention activities that,
through the Office of Targeted Violence and Terrorism
Prevention, we are seeking to expand upon.
So, over the past several years, the United States has
experienced a number of targeted attacks by angry, disaffected
individuals. In some cases, these individuals have been
motivated by extremist ideologies or ideologies of foreign
terrorist organizations. In other cases, they have been
motivated by some form of personal grievance.
In every case, these individuals have spent inordinate
amount of time online viewing extremist, violent materials,
engaging with likeminded individuals, and ultimately
communicating online their intent to commit some type of
violent act.
In many cases, these individuals are inspired by conspiracy
theories or extremist narratives that are spread online by a
variety of foreign adversaries or domestic thought leaders.
These attacks have targeted a cross-section of our society.
People and facilities have been targeted because of their
faith, their race, their gender, or ethnicity. They have
targeted government facilities, law enforcement, Members of
Congress, as Ranking Member Fleischmann referred to. They have
also targeted simply places where people gather.
Addressing this threat is complicated. It requires a
multidimensional approach, and the Department has taken a
number of steps to expand our ability, working with the rest of
the administration, our State and local partners in the private
sector and nongovernment entities. We are conducting a 60-day
review of our posture. We are expanding our intelligence and
analysis.
We issued a bulletin under the National Terrorism Advisory
System. We have expanded and prioritized domestic violent
extremism in our FEMA grants. And, just today, we issued a
notice of funding opportunity for prevention grants that will
be awarded by the Office of Targeted Violence and Terrorism
Prevention.
So I look forward to answering your questions, and thank
you again for the opportunity to appear before you today.
[The information follows:]******** COMMITTEE INSERT
********
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. Thank you.
Director Picarelli, please begin your 5-minute statement.
Mr. Picarelli. Thank you, Chairwoman Roybal-Allard,
Ranking Member Fleischmann, and distinguished members of the
subcommittee, and thank you for holding today's hearing about
the Office for Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention, or
OTVTP, and this incredibly important topic.
My name is John Picarelli, and I am the Director of the
office. I have served the office since December 2016 and have
worked in the prevention space or over a decade.
Prior to joining DHS, I established research and evaluation
grant portfolios that focused on radicalization of violent
extremism, trafficking in persons, and transnational organized
crime at the Department of Justice. Much of that work focused
on prevention.
All forms of terrorism and targeted violence, as we have
already heard, weaken the fabric of our society. They inject
trauma, fear, mistrust, and despair into the body politic.
OTVTP seeks a resilient America where communities are united
and empowered to bring an end to the tragedies of targeted
violence and terrorism.
Building from you generous support in the last two budget
cycles, OTVTP is poised to bring and scale prevention efforts
nationally. But this will require continued congressional
engagement and support.
The office focuses on local prevention frameworks. Rooted
in the public health approach to violence prevention, these
frameworks address societal conditions promoting targeted
violence and terrorism while offering help to individuals
before they commit a crime or violence.
Research shows time and again that these individuals often
exhibit behavioral indicators that are best understood by those
closest to the individual, such as peers, family, and friends.
So OTVTP consists of five teams that support these local
prevention frameworks. The regional prevention coordinators of
our field operations team cultivate trusted partnerships among
the many local stakeholders that are needed to build
multidisciplinary teams that form the backbone of these local
prevention frameworks.
Our first and most developed local prevention effort is in
Colorado, where our coordinator in Denver has worked alongside
colleagues from Federal agencies and numerous State and local
partners to build frameworks that now blanket the State.
Another team oversees the Targeted Violence and Terrorism
Prevention Grant Program, which invests in local prevention
frameworks, in specific programs that support these frameworks,
and in innovative projects that craft future prevention
approaches.
Last year, we worked with our partners at the Federal
Emergency Management Agency to award the full $10 million to 29
grantees in 15 States, and that included financial support for
10 new local prevention frameworks. This year, thanks to the
support of this subcommittee, our office will double that
investment in these programs to $20 million, and, as Secretary
Cohen--Assistant Secretary Cohen--sorry--noted earlier, we just
released the notice of funding opportunity for this year's
competitive grant program just this morning.
My office also has a team that educates society about
prevention. This education team is developing a curriculum that
supports the full knowledge requirements of our local partners.
It is also updating our courses to better reflect the public
health approach I described earlier, while also capturing the
evolving threat landscape that we face today.
The fourth team in our office engages national
representatives of prevention stakeholders. We do this so that
they understand, validate, support, and champion local
prevention efforts. For example, this team enhances awareness
of harmful online activity, increases digital literacy, and
offers a platform for innovative approaches in the digital
space by hosting digital forums on targeted violence and
terrorism prevention.
Another important effort we are working on is to ensure the
public has easy access to prevention-related materials and
resources. For example, the fifth team in my office is drafting
comprehensive baseline capabilities that outline the
recommended and necessary minimum functional requirements for
effective local prevention frameworks. We will also launch a
nationwide public outreach campaign designed to provide
practical information on how to participate in local prevention
efforts later this year.
My office understands that prevention efforts have the
potential to impinge on protected speech or on other civil
rights and civil liberties. We are now establishing an ongoing
community engagement process to further address this topic with
the CRCL community, and we continue to work closely with the
DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties to ensure all
programs consider the potential impact on such rights and
liberties prior to implementation.
Our office has made significant progress towards bringing
prevention to scale, yet our goal of ensuring that all
communities have access to prevention frameworks will take more
time, effort, and resources. We look forward to continuing this
work with you and other Members of Congress to ensure we
properly resource and implement this critical effort.
Thank you again for the opportunity to testify today, and I
look forward to your questions.
Thank you.
[The information follows:]******** COMMITTEE INSERT
********
Ms. Roybal-Allard. [inaudible] Extremism in particular,
violent White supremacism--is one of the most prevalent and
abhorrent of these anti-American ideologies. There is no moral
ambiguity on this issue, end quote.
The ODNI report released last week confirms that ethnically
motivated violent extremists and militia violent extremists
present the most lethal threat of mass-casualty attacks against
civilians and government entities, respectively.
Can you please elaborate on what the intelligence is
telling us about the domestic extremist threat, what is
motivating it, and what leads someone to take that last step
from alienation to violence?
Mr. Cohen. Thank you for your question, Madam Chairwoman.
As I stated earlier, what we have experienced in this
country is a growing level of violence by lone offenders or
small groups of people who are inspired and motivated to
violence by extremist ideologies or a combination of ideologies
or some type of personal grievance.
Essentially, the way it has been described to me in the
past by members of the intelligence and law enforcement
community is we have angry, disaffected individuals in this
country who are seeking an excuse to use violence as a way to
express that anger, and they will spend time online consuming
large amounts of extremist material, material about past
violent acts. They will become susceptible to being influenced
by disinformation and conspiracy theories.
They ultimately will self-connect with an extremist
ideological cause or formulate in their mind a personal
grievance or a combination of both and use that as the
justification for going out and committing mass murder.
In that total population of those who have committed acts
of violence motivated by extremist ideologies over the past
several years, the most significant number of those attackers
have been motivated by White supremacist, antigovernment
militia, or a combination of both of those extremist
ideologies. So, from a lethal attack perspective, the
overwhelming majority of people who have committed lethal
attacks have been inspired by those extremist ideologies.
What is driving this, in large part, is two factors. One,
the angry polarized nature of our society, coupled with the
fact that social media and other online platforms provide the
opportunity for these disaffected, angry people to consume and
come in contact with a large amount of information that
ultimately serves as the source of inspiration for their act of
violence.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. This question is both for Secretary
Cohen and Director Picarelli.
And, Secretary, I think you have just touched on this a
little bit.
The ODNI report indicates that, quote, "domestic violent
extremist attackers, often radicalized independently by
consuming," as you have said, "violent extremist material
online and mobilizing without direction from a violent
extremist organization, making detection and disruption
difficult," end quote.
So, given the centrality of the internet for spreading
extremist ideology, are you working with social media companies
to reduce the amount of radicalizing content, and what do you
think they can--the role that they can play in countering the
extremist narratives?
Mr. Cohen. Yes. I will answer real quickly and then turn
it over to Director Picarelli.
Yes, this is a major part of our efforts, Madam Chairwoman.
We are engaging with the tech industry, with academia, with
other nongovernment organizations who are doing extensive
amount of research into narratives, the toxicity of these
narratives, how those narratives influence violence.
And some of the analysis that we are looking to be able to
do more effectively at the Department is to work with those
outside entities, understand the narratives that are emerging,
whether they are being introduced into the ecosystem by a
foreign intelligence service, an international terrorist
organization, or a domestic extremist group, and then assess
which of those narratives are most likely to result in violent
activity, and then the potential targets of that violent
activity so we can work with the communities to take steps to
mitigate that risk.
I will turn it over to my colleague, Director Picarelli,
for additional.
Mr. Picarelli. Thank you. I will be brief and echo what
Assistant Secretary Cohen said.
In my office, we are working on this issue with significant
focus. And I will give you four brief examples of the breadth
by which we approach this issue.
First, we are looking to use our innovative grant portfolio
to focus on it. And, last year, we funded projects, one or two
of which you will hear later today, but another one at American
University that has been in the public eye of late focuses on
inoculation theory, trying to get as early as possible to reach
folks who may consume this online hate and inoculate them
towards it. So that is one approach.
Another approach was one I mentioned, and that is the
Digital Forums for Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention.
Our most repeat digital forum was held earlier this month. We
had over 350 participants for 4 days who focused on how the
gaming industry and eSports can work with local community
partners to better understand how radicalization to violence
could be occurring through those platforms but also to empower
local community partners to use those platforms in order to
enhance digital literacy and to be more proactive about being
safe online.
We are also about to launch, as I mentioned, new digital
literacy campaign materials. And we also, just earlier this
year, launched a program to fund a competitive approach among
college-age students at 25 universities and colleges across the
country to tap their innovative spirit and have them help us
think about new ways we might be able to address this online
space through this competition.
So we will look forward to keeping you informed of all of
these as we proceed forward.
Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Fleischmann?
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Assistant Secretary Cohen and Director Picarelli, I want to
thank you again for your testimony today and for your serious
attention to this issue that is facing our country.
I have a few questions.
In your written statement, I note with interest that
combating domestic violent extremism is a national priority
area for fiscal year 2021 State Homeland Security Grants and
the Urban Area Security Grants.
How are you working with States and localities to best
identify practices or effective and competent groups to partner
with in order to craft a successful grant application, and,
more importantly, implement a successful program with the grant
funds?
I am going to ask you a followup if I may. How many States
already have established systems or organizational structures
to address domestic violence extremism in their States or
assist localities to address these issues?
And I will wait for both of your responses.
Mr. Cohen. Thank you, Ranking Member, for the question.
On the first question, we are working closely, meaning my
broader office of counterterrorism and emerging threats, and
also Director Picarelli's office are working closely with FEMA
and therefore through FEMA with the State grant administrative
agencies, law enforcement, the State and local fusion centers
to help them better identify programs and resources that are
potentially available to support those needs.
One of the areas we are very interested in providing
greater support for is training, technical assistance in the
area of threat assessment, investigations, and threat-
management strategies. These are capabilities that have been
used for decades by the Secret Service and by the Behavioral
Analysis Unit of the FBI, where they combine mental health
expertise with law enforcement expertise to evaluate the risk
posed by an individual who comes to their attention.
As we have learned from a number of these attacks, these
potential attackers don't always fit into a neat definitional
box when they first come to the attention of law enforcement,
so understanding whether this person represents a risk of
violence is critically important.
So expanding those opportunities for State and local is a
major part of our priority.
I will turn it over to Director Picarelli to address the
other parts of your question.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Mr. Secretary.
Mr. Picarelli. So thank you for the questions. They are
great ones.
In terms of the grants, I will keep my answer brief. One of
the concerns that we always have when it comes to grant
programs is ensuring that the barriers to entry are as low as
possible. So, in that regard, we are working through a number
of mechanisms, by regional prevention coordinators, by grants
teams. We are using webinars to provide assistance to
applicants to ensure that we get as large and robust and rich
of an application group as we possibly can.
This is a competitive grant program that we have run, so
more competition is better. And so, last year, I think we had
close to 100 applications. We are hoping to see a significant
increase on that this year. A hundred applications, given we
had been paused for at least 3 years, was a great number to see
last year, and it is a good foundation, and we hope to be
continue to drive that number up this year through all of our
efforts.
In terms of your other question, which is, again, another
great question, I did mention, through grants, we have funded
programs in 15 States. We also, through one of those grants,
are working up a better picture of what kinds of capabilities
do State and local partners have for what Assistant Secretary
Cohen mentioned? What are the existing resources that we can
build off of and supplement through our regional prevention
coordinators and through our grants? That is something that is
underway.
So it is certainly something that I think would be great
for us to continue to get you that information to your staff as
we proceed so that you have a more comprehensive picture of
just, where are the capability gaps and how is my office
addressing those in the future?
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you for your comprehensive answers,
gentlemen. Very helpful.
I will be brief. My time is ticking down, so I will just
ask one question.
In your testimony, you mentioned that you are working with
science and technology offices on metrics and a method for
evaluating the effectiveness of grants. When do you hope to
roll out an evaluation?
Mr. Picarelli. Sir, I believe that question was for me.
We are currently running those evaluations right now. We
are finalizing and updating a more comprehensive plan for
evaluations as we speak, but we have already started working
with the Directorate of Science and Technology to start
selecting grantees from last year's competition, and will again
this year, to do thorough impact evaluations on those awards.
We also will be rolling out more robust measures to assess
the entirety of the grant program to ensure that we are doing
the best job possible in order to get those grants out to the
folks that need them and that we are building the right
programs.
So, again, we will be continuing that throughout the year
and in the years to come because impact evaluations is
something that is very, very important to me and is exactly how
we can come back to you in the future and tell you what is
working and what is not and why.
Thank you.
Mr. Cohen. And, Ranking Member, if I can just add very,
very quickly, that--
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Certainly.
Mr. Cohen. --this is such an important issue because what
our goal is to take the lessons learned from last year's
grants, this year's grants, and then take that knowledge and
feed it into the broader grant program so we can replicate
those programs that work in communities across the country.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, gentlemen.
I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay.
Ms. DeLauro?
The Chair. Thank you. I thank the chair, and I want to
thank the witnesses, Secretary Cohen, Director Picarelli.
Let me just--and, first of all, I just want to get more
information and knowledge about the grant programs in terms of
intervention and prevention, I think which is very helpful. But
let me just ask you--and this first question is kind of, if you
will, a yes or no. Do you agree that this country has a problem
with or danger, if you will, from private unauthorized militia
groups? Yes or no?
Mr. Picarelli. Yes.
Mr. Cohen. Yes.
The Chair. Director? I can't hear you, Director.
Mr. Picarelli. My apologies. Yes.
The Chair. Thank you. Okay.
Now, it is also my understanding that, under Federal law,
there is no criminal or civil statute that prohibits the
existence of private militia groups. Should we have a law that
prohibits unauthorized private militia groups? There is now no
Federal law, no criminal or civil statute with regard to
private--unauthorized private militia groups.
Can I get each of you to comment on that, please?
Mr. Cohen. I will. I will start, Madam Chairwoman.
Your question actually hits at a core issue because part of
the challenge in addressing domestic violent extremism is being
able to distinguish between behavior that may be
constitutionally protected under free speech and assembly
rights and that behavior which is tied to violence, to illicit
activity.
And so simply joining a group may not be unconstitutional
or illegal, but joining a group that has the intent to commit
violent acts is. And what we have to do is make sure that we
have the information, the intelligence capabilities, the
investigative abilities, to be able to distinguish between an
individual or group's actions that may be constitutionally
protected speech and when that transition to be illegal or
violent behavior. And, as it relates to militia groups, that is
exactly the point.
The Chair. Uh-huh. And do you believe that--just further
question here now, and I want to hear from the Director. Do you
believe we have the tools, the intel analysis, or what we need
to be able to identify the nature of the group that proclaims
they are patriots or whatever they are, and then they--you
know, anyway, I am just trying to get at that core issue. Do we
have the capability to be able to discern with these groups?
Mr. Cohen. This is exactly the question that I have been
asked to answer within the context of the Department of
Homeland Security by the Secretary. My sense is that we have a
lot of the tools, but we need--
The Chair. Okay.
Mr. Cohen. --to be ready to use them differently.
The Chair. Okay. Okay. I want to then--and what do you
mean about using them differently?
Mr. Cohen. So one example includes how we monitor and
evaluate online content. We, across the Federal Government,
multiple Federal agencies operating under different
authorities, have the ability to monitor what occurs in the
online space.
The Chair. Uh-huh.
Mr. Cohen. However, it is not the same as collecting
intelligence between two foreign terrorists who are
communicating with each other on forums or encrypted platforms
or through other communications devices because a lot of the
speech or a lot of the activity that occurs on those online
forums, even domestic--even forums that are known to be
locations where domestic violent extremists congregate, much of
that speech is constitutionally protected free speech.
So providing our analysts the training so they can
distinguish between speech that is simply somebody expressing
their anger or their disagreement with the government, or
whether it is a threat-related activity is important.
The Chair. Okay. Thank you, because I want to get to
Director Picarelli. My time is running out.
So, if we had--looking at the tools and the training and
what we need, should we have a law that prohibits unauthorized
private militia groups, in your learned opinion?
Mr. Picarelli. Thank you for the question.
The Chair. Well, let me get--Director, let me get the
Secretary to answer the question outright first, and then I
will move to you.
Mr. Cohen. Any group that engages in illegal activity and
violent activity should be a group that is in violation of the
law. Depending on your question--I mean, based on your question
specifically, it very much would depend on what the language of
the law is.
The Chair. Yes. Got it. Okay.
Director Picarelli?
Mr. Picarelli. Sorry for stepping on the Assistant
Secretary.
The Chair. No. It is okay.
Mr. Picarelli. I will just add that, in the prevention
space, ma'am, everything that the Assistant Secretary just said
is true. What we are most concerned about are behavioral
indicators that we can provide to family and friends of
individuals so they understand when someone may be radicalizing
to violence.
The Chair. Okay. I am sorry, because my time has expired,
and the chair is going to, you know--
Mr. Picarelli. I understand.
The Chair. --call me out of order here.
But, again, given what you have said, what the Secretary
has said about the training, the law, should we have a law,
carefully crafted, carefully written, dealing with what the
nuances of that prohibit unauthorized private militia groups?
Mr. Picarelli. I believe the Assistant Secretary already
answered that, so I will defer to him in case he has any
additional comments.
The Chair. This is yes or no in terms of making laws,
which is what our responsibility is in this body and in this
subcommittee, to protect the people of this country.
Mr. Secretary, do you want to venture a yay or nay answer
on this?
Mr. Cohen. Yeah, Madam Chairwoman, I am not trying to be
evasive. I think I operate in a very concrete world. I am a law
enforcement professional, and I certainly think that, if there
is interest on the Hill, on Capitol Hill--
The Chair. Gotcha.
Mr. Cohen. --in establishing that type of law, we would
work closely with you to do so.
The Chair. Fine. You have answered my question, and I say
that to you, Director, as well. I think it falls within the
purview of the Congress, of our looking at this in a new and
different way, with a new tool that deals with unauthorized
private militias who are engaged not in free speech but in
violent activity vis-a-vis whether it is the Congress of the
United States in a January 6th insurrection or whether it is
what was going on in this country for the last number of years
and puts families in jeopardy and in fear of their lives.
Madam Chair, I yield back. I apologize for going over the
allotted time. Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Rutherford?
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Listen, first, I want to thank Secretary Cohen and Director
Picarelli.
And I would like to address very quickly the issue that
Chairwoman DeLauro just brought up about these unauthorized
violent militias. In fact, gentlemen, I want to ask both of
you--we have laws against that. We have RICO statutes,
Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations. We have gang
statutes.
Now, I want to say this to both of you as well before I
make any other comments, and that is: I want to congratulate
you on the great job you are doing because people don't realize
it is hard to talk about what doesn't occur, but when I see the
efforts through 15 States, $10 million, over a hundred people
who have been identified as having, you know, this bizarre
behavior that could lead them into mass violence, that is a
pretty good--that is a pretty good number.
Now, I have the same situation in Jacksonville. When I was
sheriff there running a very large organization, I knew how
many incidents we prevented through our initiatives like Eye
Watch, through SARs reports that--Suspicious Activity Reports--
that were coming through from citizens.
And what I wanted to ask was: Are those initiatives, like
SARs, like Eye Watch, which drives those SARs reports, going to
the fusion centers or the JTTFs, do--are you guys beefing that
up? I mean, I saw where you are talking about adding $20
million to these initiatives next year, and I think this is the
key. On prevention and intervention, it goes to intelligence.
Intelligence is always the challenge, and it is usually not
that police don't have enough information. They usually have so
much information that the real intelligence gets lost in all
the mega data. And so are you guys working on tools to give you
an analysis versus just data dumps because there is a big
difference between data and intelligence.
So can you comment on that, please?
Mr. Cohen. Yes. Congressman, thank you for that question.
A very important point, and I am not surprised, being a former
sheriff, that you would raise this issue.
In addition to--in the current grant guidance for UASI and
State Homeland Security Grant, in addition to prioritizing
domestic violent extremism, Secretary Mayorkas also prioritized
intelligence and information sharing specifically for the
reasons that you said.
We have spoken to fusion centers, police departments, major
county sheriffs, you know, small--small county sheriffs, and
they all say the same thing that you do, is that, if we are
going to be more effective in preventing these acts of
violence, we need to do--we need to have more tools so we are
better able to identify those individuals who are experiencing
the warning signs, exhibiting the suspicious activities,
whether they appear online or in the community.
We need to make sure our officers and analysts are trained
to recognize and place those behaviors into context. We need to
have more tools at the local level so, once we identified
someone who is high risk, we may not have enough to arrest that
person, but we still need to address the risk that they pose,
so whether it is mental health services or other programs.
So this is a core part of the Department's efforts--
Mr. Rutherford. And I will tell you very quickly, too,
that, after the Parkland shooting, I had a piece of legislation
that was the STOP School Violence Act that we were able to get
signed into law. It really is about collecting this information
that you just mentioned.
You know, after almost every one of these shootings,
including Parkland, after these shootings, people said: You
know, I always thought something like this. But, you know,
there is always those telltale signs that they knew about.
Now, in Parkland, it went way beyond telltale signs. Law
enforcement down there dropped the ball, local law enforcement
to begin with. And it was a chain all the way up to the FBI.
But the point is--and I think you just touched on it--once
we identify these individuals, we have got to have laws that
allow us to help these people until they are ready to go back
to society because I tell you, it is just like sexual
predators. You know, it is not what they do; it is who they
are. You know, robbers rob banks, but that is not who they are.
These guys, it is who they are because it is--they inculcate
this stuff so much.
So can you talk a little bit about how can we, number one,
slow down this indoctrination that is going on online? And I
also throw out our jails and prisons.
Mr. Cohen. So, Congressman, a great question again.
A number of police departments and sheriffs' offices around
the country have put in place threat management units. They are
working closely with their communities to make community
members aware of sort of the warning signs that may be
exhibited. You know, one of the things that I have found
personally frustrating being a former police officer is the
number of stories I have heard from members of the community
who said: I picked up the phone and called my local police
department. I expressed concerns about, you know, my son or my
brother or my friend, and they said: Well, if they haven't
committed a crime, there is nothing we can do.
There are things we can do. So we have a big responsibility
to make sure not only the community is aware and the community
has confidence and trust in the police agency or law
enforcement agency to make that call, but that the law
enforcement agency is working with the right disciplines and
know what to do.
As far as the indoctrination, another extraordinarily key
point. And, in fact, it is actually the tech industry that is
beginning to do quite a bit of work and research in figuring
out how individuals who are susceptible to being influenced by
toxic narratives, things that can be done to prevent that.
So a big part of this is social media literacy, having
parents understand that their kids are spending way too much
time online and they are consuming violent material. It is
establishing programs in our schools, and it is working with
the tech sector and others to make sure that they use their
skills to reduce the potential of this indoctrination, as you
call it.
Mr. Rutherford. Great answer. Thank you, Mr. Cohen.
And I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay.
Ms. Underwood?
Ms. Underwood. Well, thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you
for calling today's hearing.
I know that the threat of violent extremism has received
renewed attention in the wake of the January 6th insurrection,
but those of us who have long been sounding the alarm about
this problem are eager to finally see it be taken seriously.
Domestic violent extremists, and particularly violent White
supremacists, pose a deadly threat to our homeland. To save
lives, Federal law enforcement and their partners must seize on
opportunities to intervene before violence begins in ways that
preserve civil rights and civil liberties.
Mr. Picarelli, can you briefly explain to the committee why
the grant programs and other work supported by the Office of
Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention are a good
investment of Federal resources and how they fit into the
Department's efforts to counter domestic terrorism in
particular?
Mr. Picarelli. Thank you for the question. It is an
excellent one. And I will hit a lot of points very quickly.
So, in 2019, the RAND Corporation published a study where
they looked at this comprehensively, how to proceed with
prevention. And their two key findings were that, first, they
saw great value in building local programs through financial
assistance, through educational assistance, through technical
assistance.
The other was to urge the government to invest in local
field staff to be there with communities to help them through
the challenges as they stood up these programs.
As you have heard already today, this is a very complex
situation that is fraught with potential for overstepping
boundaries of privacy or civil rights and civil liberties.
Having staff there present with these programs to then harness
this education and financial assistance was the key.
So the prevention efforts like ours are really the first
opportunity to dissuade someone from committing targeted
violence and terrorism. And, when fully functional, it reduces
the number of individuals progressing to violence. It eases the
burden on the protection efforts that have gone into hardening
houses of worship or schools, or reduces the workload that is
already there for counterterrorism and investigation resources.
And, in an era, as you have heard, where individuals are
mixing personal grievances with the tropes of domestic
terrorism, often seen online, our programs are usually the
first and only chance these individuals have to hear about an
alternative to using violence to find some significance in
their lives.
That is where we exist. We are the very first point of
contact for these individuals. And, if we are doing our jobs
right, everything that follows us that we have talked about
here today has less work to do and will result in less
violence.
Ms. Underwood. Thank you. I agree that the TVTP grants are
a good investment in the safety of our communities. And, in our
second panel, we are going to hear even more about the
critically important work that some of these grant recipients
are doing.
But, as I am sure you are both aware, some communities are
wary of engaging with DHS at all, particularly those who
already receive a disproportionate amount of negative attention
from law enforcement.
Mr. Cohen, what civil liberties protections are currently
in place as part of the Department's counterterrorism work, and
what additional steps is the new administration taking to
strengthen those protections?
Mr. Cohen. Good. Thank you, Congresswoman. A very
critically important question.
I mean, you know, after 35 years in law enforcement and
homeland security, I know that we can't do our job to protect
our communities if the communities don't trust us. And, if I am
just going to be candid, I would have to say that, at the same
time we are experiencing this diverse and dynamic threat, there
are a number of communities, particularly communities of color,
that simply do not trust local government, do not trust the
Federal Government.
So we have to change that. And the way we change that is by
establishing lines of communication, by engaging, by listening
to people and taking what they say seriously, by understanding
that there are decades--sometimes decades of experiences that
are influencing their attitudes toward us.
During our transition period, we met with a variety of
community groups, faith-based groups, you know, and other
community-based organizations. And, since January 20th, we
have--I have already personally met with a broad representation
of community, immigrant, and faith-based representatives.
Ms. Underwood. Mr. Cohen?
Mr. Cohen. Yes.
Ms. Underwood. My time is expiring.
I just want to emphasize that we want to encourage the
administration to pursue new options. Those sound like existing
outreach opportunities, which are important, but we know that
this is not going to--this problem will not be solved by doing
the same things we have always done.
I am particularly concerned about this issue because the
same communities of color who have been historically targeted
by DHS are now targeted by actual terrorists, and the
Department has repeatedly been sued for subjecting Muslims to
unwarranted surveillance. And, just last year, DHS agents
participated in the appropriately militaristic Federal response
led to--or Federal response to protests led by Black activists.
And we have seen Secretary Mayorkas in a Washington Post
op-ed say that domestic violent extremism poses the most lethal
and persistent terrorist threat to our country today. And the
FBI Director reiterated that.
And I just want to remind everybody that DHS has a mission
to protect Americans from that threat, but it has been made
more difficult by the Department's past abuses of the public's
trust.
And, with that, I yield back.
Thank you. RPTR DEANEDTR ROSEN[11:00 a.m.]
Mr. Cohen. Congresswoman or Madam Chair, if I could just
respond very quickly to the Congresswoman.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Sure.
Mr. Cohen. Everything we do in my world at DHS, whether it
is OTVTP or anything we are doing from a counterterrorism
perspective, we are working closely with our civil rights and
civil liberties office, and we are working closely with our
office of privacy. We take the concerns of the community
seriously. And I will say on a personal level I am the
brother--my sister is a civil rights lawyer, her husband is a
civil rights lawyer, they would not allow me to do anything
different than to respect the issues that you have just raised.
So, this is a top concern for the Secretary. It is a top
concern for me. And I can guarantee you that any operational
actions we take are going to take the concerns you raised into
mind.
Ms. Underwood. Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mrs. Hinson.
Mrs. Hinson. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. I appreciate you
holding this very important hearing today on an issue that I
think we clearly can work together to improve here as a
committee.
My first question this morning is for you, Assistant
Secretary, Mr. Cohen. Thank you for coming before us today. I
went to point out that in your opening testimony, you really
gave us hope for prevention of many of the things we have
talked about through your office and the hardworking law
enforcement officers around the country, putting their lives on
the line every day. So thank you for coming before us today.
I want to start off by asking you about prevention
activities of our Border Patrol agents. And I want to reference
today a recent Axios report, which I would like to enter into
the record with your permission, Madam Chairwoman.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Certainly. So be it.
[The information follows:]******** COMMITTEE INSERT
********
Mrs. Hinson. Thank you. Customs and Border Patrol and
Protections, which falls under DHS, arrested four people on the
terrorist watchlist attempting to cross our southern border.
In your expert opinion, would you agree that it is a threat
for several of these who are on the FBI terror screening
database to come into our country that way?
Mr. Cohen. So, thank you for your question, Congresswoman.
So, I have to tell you, after September 11, in my earlier days
in the Department of Homeland Security and when I worked in the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence during the Bush
administration, I assumed that we would see a large influx of
terrorists coming in from south of the border, and seek to
enter the country through the southern border. And we developed
over the course of years extensive measures to be able to track
individuals who are coming from terrorist safe havens, who are
coming into Latin and South America, and to be able to identify
when they were trying to cross the border.
What we found is, it just wasn't happening as much as we
thought it would. In fact, it was happening very rarely. So on
the one hand, we haven't seen the development of that threat to
the degree that we anticipated. And secondarily, we couldn't
[inaudible] Extensive security measures to be able to detect
any potential terrorist who would enter that region, and seek
to enter the United States through the southern border.
Mrs. Hinson. Well, I would say, though, that four getting
across the border is a threat, and those people were clearly on
the watchlist for a reason. So what would you say we should be
doing then to address the emerging threat, because all it takes
is one, as you know?
Mr. Cohen. Absolutely. And I would be happy to provide you
additional it details in a more secure setting. But what I can
tell you the derogatory information associated with those four
individuals may not have been as significant to cause a high
degree of concern.
People are on the watchlist for a variety of reasons. Some
of it is that they may have had contact with someone who is
potentially a known or suspected terrorist. In other cases, it
may be that they are actively involved. We use the watchlist to
provide a broad range of potential actions, ranging from simply
tracking someone's travel, to putting more scrutiny on them as
they are traveling, to no-flying those people. Simply being on
the watchlist does not mean the person is a terrorist.
Mrs. Hinson. Understood. Well, I think we definitely need
to take all of it very, very seriously, as we are aware of
whether it is homegrown or out of this country, it is still
definitely a threat to our national security.
My next question is for you, Mr. Picarelli, according to
your website, obviously, you support mandates beyond extreme
terrorism to include targeted violence. I would ask that you
may share some examples of targeted violence which could be
based on some of the ideology we have heard today, just so my
constituents have a clear example of what you are targeting.
Mr. Picarelli. Thank you for the question. And I am having
some technical difficulties, so I believe [inaudible.] examples
of targeted [inaudible]. What [inaudible] According to
excellent example is the shooting that we saw a year or so in
[inaudible].
Ms. Roybal-Allard. I think we lost connection with Mr.
Picarelli.
Mrs. Hinson. Okay. I will submit some questions for
follow-up then, so we can make sure we can get some backup and
have a chance to ask questions, too. But I think we need to be
very targeted. I wanted to ask questions about reconnecting
with communities [inaudible] Where procedures are happening
[inaudible].
Mr. Picarelli. [inaudible].
Mrs. Hinson. So I will follow up, but we need to make sure
we are targeting our resources to rural communities as well.
And with that, Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. And we will get your questions to him
and he will be able to answer them.
Mrs. Hinson. Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Price.
Mr. Price. Thank you, Madam Chairman. And thanks to our
witnesses today for some useful, very useful information about
efforts that are underway, and what might be in prospect.
I want to explore, if we might, the connection between
these White nationalists and other extremist groups and
weaponry, both as organizations and at the individual level. I
guess partly this would be a question of what kind of
coordination you have with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and
Firearms and other relevant agencies in terms of what kind of
weaponry these groups are assembling? What they--what kind of
checks, if any, they are subject to? What kind of enforcement
efforts are indicated, or new laws are indicated with respect
to the arming of these groups, and what they might do with
those arms?
And I think there is also a question at the individual
level. I will give you a quick example. We had a hate crime in
my district 6 years ago with three Muslim university students
were killed by a neighbor of theirs. And in retrospect, there
were plenty of signs of trouble with that neighbor. He had an
arsenal in his apartment, and he had been engaged in menacing
behavior.
On the face of it looks like a situation where a red flag
law, for example, might well have prevented that tragedy. But,
of course, there was no red flag law, and no attempt to prevent
him from assembling that arsenal.
So I ask you to explore, this is obviously an important
connection. It is on our minds right now for obvious reasons.
What is the nexus between violent extremism and weaponry? And
what kind of mechanisms do we have to enforce present laws? And
what kind of new laws might be indicated? And I am asking this
at both the collective and the individual level.
Mr. Cohen. Congressman, thank you for the question. It is
a very relevant question. So part of the dynamics of the
current threat is that these individuals, and I think it was
the chairwoman who brought this up, these individuals, who once
they have connected with an ideological cause, may go from
anger to violent--to mobilization to violence in a relatively
quick time period.
For those individuals who follow that progression to
violence, they will typically acquire a weapon that is easy to
acquire. If they don't already own a gun, or a knife, or a car,
or a vehicle that they are going to use at the attack, they
will go out and acquire a weapon that is easily accessible. And
if they are not on the--if they are not precluded from buying a
firearm, they can walk into a gun store, and essentially, as
long as they don't have an adjudicated mental health case, or a
felony criminal record, they can purchase the gun.
In the cases where we have groups of individuals who have
adopted an extremist ideological belief, they tend to have more
sophisticated weaponry. They have been meeting for a period of
time. They may have military or law enforcement background, or
at least they are wannabe military and law enforcement types,
they do their research. They may--we have seen them in
possession of high-powered weapons, large capacity clips, some
even obtaining silencers.
So the question of what type of weaponry are they using
varies into what part of the threat environment they fall into.
Are they an individual who is upset who connects and moves
rapidly to violence? They may have a pistol or some other type
of weapon of convenience. If they are an organized group that
has been planning for a significant period of time, they may
have more sophisticated weaponry.
Mr. Price. My question is about the adequacy, I guess, of
the present information that you have, and also, of present
enforcement. Is anything happening to prevent the amassing of
these arsenals by these groups, if not by you or by other
agencies?
Mr. Cohen. So we work closely with the FBI, with ATF, with
others. Part of the challenge is that unless those individuals
fall within one the specific categories under law that preclude
them from being able to acquire a gun, it is very difficult to
prevent them, unless we have an articulable reason why they
shouldn't be able to get a gun.
As far as your point about the red flag law, I am a huge
fan of red flag laws, not because of my current position, but
because of my background in law enforcement. I have actually
seen those laws leveraged by local law enforcement, and local
communities on multiple occasions to prevent acts of violence.
I know that there have been some concerns raised by some at a
local level about red flag laws, but as a law enforcement
professional, I think they are one of the most important tools
we can use as part of a multidisciplinary threat management
strategy.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Quigley.
Mr. Quigley. Good morning, thank for being here. Thanks
for your service. As you know, I serve on the Intel Committee
as well. I would like your perspective, maybe give us a report
card. You reference that there are multiple agencies that
monitor activity, including online activity. What is your
assessment of how we are doing sharing that information within
agencies, across agencies that is, and with local governments?
Mr. Cohen. I think there is an area of improvement. The
Secretary has asked us to take a hard look at how various
elements of the Department are engaged in assessing online
activity. We have some organizations within the Department that
conduct that type of work within their law enforcement
authorities; others that do it under their screening and
vetting authorities; and then elements of the Department, like
intelligence and analysis, which do it under their intelligence
responsibilities.
So, we are looking at, are there more effective ways for us
to leverage all of that lawfully gathered data to conduct
analysis. And what are the challenge--how do we overcome the
challenges about sharing that information with State, and
locals, and others, particularly when we are talking about some
information that may be constitutionally protected speech.
We have to make sure that in that analysis we are very,
very careful about distinguishing between constitutionally
protected speech, and threat-related activity in the online
environment.
Mr. Quigley. How can you distinguish? I mean, something
can be constitutionally protected speech, but at the same time,
to be vital information piecing things together to understand a
threat?
Mr. Cohen. Absolutely. And it is that piecing things
together, which, I think, we need to do a better job on. So
just because someone posts something online doesn't necessarily
give you the complete picture. You have to look at other
indicators, other pieces of information that relate to that
post in order to assess whether it is potentially a threat-
related activity.
Mr. Quigley. No. And again, how it pieces with something
else that some other agency or local government may have that
makes something make more sense and constitutes an overall
threat.
Mr. Cohen. Absolutely. And the Secretary has given
directions for us to look at three things: One, how can we do a
better job sharing within DHS and use the information we gather
at DHS to conduct analysis; second, how do we connect with what
is going on across the Federal Government; and then third,
working with outside the Federal Government, State and locals,
there is a lot of work going on in fusion centers across the
country where they are looking at online activity. And there is
a lot of work going on in the nongovernment sector as well. I
have been directed to look the all of that and come up with a
strategy very quickly on how we are going to do a better job in
assessing that type of information.
Mr. Quigley. If you could pass that on to the committee to
share, I would certainly appreciate it. And, finally, in the 2
minutes I have left, I think, the report also talks about lone
wolf, the lone offenders. You touched on that through answering
some of the other questions, but just a little bit deeper dive
on how you are addressing that and the unique threat that it
poses?
Mr. Cohen. Yes. So just real quickly, what we have found
is the majority of these attacks are individuals who don't
necessarily have longstanding relationships with an ideological
cause, or an ideological group, but these are people who
exhibit certain consistent behavioral characteristics, and they
spend a lot of time online. And as their anger at society
increases, they ultimately self-connect with some ideology, and
they conduct an attack on behalf of that ideology.
In some cases, it may be an individual who decides they are
associated with ISIS. In another case, it may be somebody who
has decided they are now a White supremacist, or antigovernment
militia, or they believe that the government is illegitimate,
or that they are upset because they are self-proclaimed
involuntarily celibate, or sometimes it is a combination of all
of those.
But the point is, if they spend time online, they consume
lots of material, they consume material about past attacks,
they ultimately decide what ideological, or group of
ideological causes, they are going to use to justify their act
of violence. The issue here, though, is that while these people
may not engage in activities consistent with past terrorists,
people who are associated with terrorist groups, they aren't
under the radar. They exhibit behaviors that other people
observe, whether in the community, their family, or local law
enforcement, or even other people online. So the challenge here
is being able to gather and assess all that information and
identify those people who are high risk, even if they are not
engaging in what I would call traditional terrorism-related
activity. They are not in contact with a foreign terrorist
organization, or a known or suspected terrorist. They are not
traveling to training sites. They are not engaging in
terrorist-type travel. They aren't receiving materials, or
supplies, or resources from terrorists, financiers, or
terrorist suppliers. They are different, but their behaviors
can be detected and their violence can be mitigated.
Mr. Quigley. Thank you. I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Before I go to Mr. Aguilar, I
understand that Director Picarelli's technical problems have
been fixed, so I would like to give him a minute to answer Ms.
Hinson's question. Ms. Hinson, do you want to repeat the
question?
Mrs. Hinson. Absolutely. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Basically, my question, Mr. Picarelli, was specific to--I heard
you reference, you know, having those conversations with
community partners and sharing information. So, I am just
wanting to know how you are looking at targeting specifically
in rural areas where our law enforcement agencies may not have
the major infrastructure in place as some of our major cities
in the 1st District in Iowa. For example, Cedar Rapids is a
major police department, right? They are big. They can handle a
lot of this versus smaller communities, like Belle Plaine might
not be able do. So I just would be interested on your take on
that.
Mr. Picarelli. Thank you because that is an excellent
question. And I apologize that the internet decided not to
cooperate when you asked it earlier. So, the approach we take
is to call it a local prevention framework, but we base that on
the type of infrastructures that are present. And so, we have
done a lot of work actually to look at how to expand local
prevention framework, so that they are as applicable to an
urban neighborhood, to a suburban town, to a rural county, or
whatever is the method of organization.
And where I come to this is, when you look at law
enforcement, in 19,000 State law enforcement agencies across
the country, you have some with an incredibly small
geographical footprint with a large law enforcement presence,
and, then, you have counties that are incredibly large and they
are a sheriff's office with four or five sworn officers
covering that.
We need our prevention programs to scale just to that
infrastructure. So we are working through our regional
prevention coordinators in rural areas to understand and map
out how are behavioral help services provided? How are schools
provided? And working within those infrastructures to have
prevention overlay them.
We also did a grant with the Nebraska Emergency Management
Agency in 2016 to look at this very question, asking them how
to take this idea, and now, let's look at it in different rural
contexts. And in last year's awards, we actually pushed that
even further, so now we are looking at Tribal authorities. And
so, we are looking at how does this work in Indian Country,
which is yet another challenge from our perspective in terms of
a different jurisdiction, a different sense of sovereignty and
so forth.
So we are definitely trying to ensure that whatever we
establish isn't tied to geography, it has to be scalable.
Mrs. Hinson. And I appreciate that. I have Iwaki Tribe as
well in my district as well, so I appreciate the reference to
Tribal as well. So I look forward to following up with you and
working with you on these issues. Thank you.
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Aguilar.
Mr. Aguilar. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Director Picarelli, since my district was targeted, just
like Mr. Price had mentioned, so many of our districts have
gone through similar circumstances. Mine was an act of domestic
terror in December of 2015. And I have been committed to
looking at ways that we can continue to work with local
governments to give them the tools necessary to prevent this
type of tragedy.
This year, I introduced the PREVENT Act, Preventing Radical
Extremist, Violent Endeavors Now and Tomorrow, that would
require DHS to provide trainings to State and local governments
to learn how to counter the threats of terrorism, violent
extremism, and White nationalism. This type of work falls
within the line of the mission of your office, and DHS'
strategic framework for countering terrorism and targeted
violence.
Director, how has the Office--how has OTVTP, the Prevention
Office, worked with their field offices and adapted that
outreach, kind of building off of the last answer that you were
talking about, to ensure that we were including these
radicalized domestic actors as well?
Mr. Picarelli. Thank you. It is a great question. We
focused first and foremost on ensuring that all of our
educational products that we push out through our regional
prevention coordinators and other methods of technical
assistance, adopt accurate behavioral indicators that captures
much of the targeted violence terrorism prevention space as
possible. Many of these are aspecific, they will be applicable
to all forms of targeted violence and terrorism, but some are
very specific to incel violent extremism, or violent White
supremacy. So we build that in as well.
We then, of course, use all-of-society approach. We are
trying to ensure that we bring all partners to the table that
we get this information to the entirety of the locality, so
that we can then work with and get access to behavior threat
analysis and management from anyone who wishes to access it.
Mr. Aguilar. Gentlemen, building off of Ms. Underwood's
questions as well about civil liberties, and how we ensure that
folks receive the proper information and aren't excluded, but
these are the same communities in the past that have hesitancy
toward working with DHS. You talked about this a little bit,
Mr. Cohen. And could you elaborate on the new strategies that
we could employ to ensure that civil rights were front and
center of what we are doing?
Mr. Cohen. Thanks, Congressman. We--while I realize that
this may sound similar to what was done in the past, I think
part of what I have learned is that there is never too much
collaboration and partnership, and communication with these
groups. And it is not just simply holding meetings, and us
telling them what we are doing, and how we need them to help
us, but it is engaging with those groups on a regular basis,
those communities and groups and organizations, on a regular
basis, and using their input, their observations, their
insights into the development of programs, into the way we talk
about programs, in the language that we use, and in the way
that we will allow programs.
Separate and aside from that, I can meet with groups all
day long, but if they have an encounter with a CBP officer, or
an ICE agent, or a TSA agent, or somebody else that is
negative, then that will potentially undermine any good words
of any good interaction that I have.
So, in large part, part of the change and part of our
ability to be able to more effectively work with communities,
particularly those communities who feel that they have a
negative view towards DHS, or they feel like they have been
targeted by DHS, is, in part, based on how the Department is
changing the way it deals with these communities. It is what
all of us do. And that comes from the culture at the top.
And the Secretary has made it very clear that no matter
what we do, whether it is an interaction at an airport
checkpoint, or it is the way that ICE and CBP behave in the
field and conduct operations, it will be done in a respectful
way; it will be done in a way that recognizes the humanity and
the moral issues associated with these activities, and it will
be done in a way that absolutely is consistent with the
Constitution and law.
Mr. Aguilar. Thanks, Assistant Secretary. Director?
Mr. Picarelli. I would just add that one of the concerns
that I have had, and I have started working with our Office of
Civil Rights and Civil Liberties on, in fact, we have a detail
from their office with us right now to work on this and a
number of other issues, is, because of the distributed nature
of what we are establishing, we are relying on State and local
partners to implement prevention.
I want to ensure that there is always a way that anyone who
feels that there is an infringement on civil rights or civil
liberties has a way to contact us, or a neutral third party, to
ensure that that is identified and corrected as soon as
possible. And we will continue to use that and other mechanisms
to ensure that our actions meet our words when we say, We put
civil rights and civil liberties at the forefront of everything
we do in the office. Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Ruppersberger.
Mr. Ruppersberger. I want to thank the two gentlemen, Mr.
Cohen, Mr. Picarelli--is that the correct pronunciation?
Whatever, with a name like Ruppersberger, I try to get it
right.
First thing, over the last decade, a few decades, White
supremacists and other far right extremists have made almost
three times as many targeted attacks on U.S. soil as Islamic
terrorists. Since 2018, the White supremacist groups have been
responsible for more deaths than any other domestic extremist
groups.
Now, I was recently on a call with the leadership in the
Baltimore FBI office, field office, and talking about what
happened on January 6. And during this discussion, they spoke
at length about the storming of the Capitol, including what
went wrong, how to prevent it from ever happening again. One of
challenges that they highlighted was the increased tendency for
bad actors to use the dark web to communicate with
coconspirators.
When I was a prosecutor investigating crime organizations,
it was easier than it is now, we secured a warrant and got to
work. Now, those who wish to harm can fly under the radar
completely invisible to law enforcement.
Now, with encrypted messaging applications, virtual private
networks, and anonymous browsers such as Tor, they are able to
be downloaded within minutes. I fear that we will only see more
communications being pushed to the underbelly of the internet.
Now, my question is to either Mr. Cohen or Mr. Picarelli,
is Federal law enforcement technologically and statutorily
capable of tracking domestic terrorists on the dark web, or
does the trail immediately go cold? Now, also, with the
temporary closure of the social media website Parler, by the
way, are you familiar with these names that I am giving to you?
Mr. Cohen. Yes.
Mr. Picarelli. Yes, sir, Congressman.
Mr. Ruppersberger. Oh, okay. --which some have dubbed the
right-wing Twitter, have you seen more malcontents and
dissidents move underground to the dark web? And basically that
is my first question.
Mr. Cohen. The short answer is yes, while there is a large
level of activity that occurs on public facing sites, and that
is actually an element of the playbook that these extremists
thought leaders and terrorist groups, and foreign intelligence
services use to incite violence by people, what we have found
is that as more and more law enforcement activities have
focused on scrutinizing that activity, these extremist groups
who are engaging in operational planning are moving to
encrypted sites in particular, and using encrypted applications
such as the ones you described. It is very difficult for law
enforcement to monitor those conversations on those encrypted
sites.
Mr. Ruppersberger. What are we going to do about that?
Because it seems that is where they are going now, and we are
dealing in this new world of technology. And if we don't find a
way and we have [inaudible] pursuant to our Constitution, our
laws in the United States. What are your recommendations going
to be to go forward?
Mr. Cohen. So Congressman, not to date myself, but I think
you and I began having these conversations back in the 1990s.
And I think that is the million-dollar question. I know that
the Justice Department is developing a series of
recommendations. We are working closely with them on how to
best address this issue. But you identify a real problem, and
it is something that is not only impeding our ability to deal
with domestic extremism, but other areas of criminal activity,
the use of these platforms. The easily acquired, encrypted
applications make the monitoring of communications very
difficult.
I mean, I used to be concerned when drug traffickers were
using pay phones. The environment today is so much more
complicated because of the ease of access and use of these
encrypted platforms. So we looked forward to working with you
in trying to figure out a solution to that.
Mr. Ruppersberger. And the one thing you need here is
teamwork, Federal, State, and local. I think, looking back in
my days years ago in law enforcement, that the JTTF probably
was the best team where you had Federal, State, and local; not
only did you receive intelligence, collect intelligence, but
you had intelligence analyzed. And if you don't have that
moving forward, and this is--I see my time is running out, but
we also have to talk about how, from a constitutional way, that
we can get more from NSA to help you all, because they have no
jurisdiction in the United States. So that is something we are
going have to investigate and look at. So thank you and I yield
back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Can this concludes our first panel.
Assistant Secretary Cohen and Director Picarelli, thank you
very much for your time this morning. You have provided us with
some very valuable insights and important information. And we
want to continue to work with you to better address and prevent
radicalization that leads to violence.
We will now take a short recess to make sure that the
second panel is ready to begin. Thank you, again, Secretary
Cohen and Director Picarelli.
[Recess.]
Ms. Roybal-Allard. The subcommittee will now come to
order. We will now go to the second hearing panel, which
includes Richard Aborn, the president of the Citizens Crime
Commission of New York City; Tyler Cote, director and cofounder
of Operation250, and Sammy Rangel, executive director and
cofounder of Life After Hate. We appreciate your joining us
this morning to discuss how each of your organizations is using
DHS grant funding to counter radicalization that leads to
violence. We will submit the full text of your official
statements for the hearing record.
Mr. Aborn, please begin your oral summary which I ask that
you keep to for 5 minutes.
Mr. Aborn. Thank you so much, Madam Chairwoman. And thank
you for not only calling this hearing, but for all members of
panel for attending, it is a very important topic, and we
really appreciate your attention.
My name is Richard Aborn. By way of background, I am a
former violent crime and homicide prosecutor from the Manhattan
D.A.'s office, and I have also done an enormous amount of work
on the illegal gun issue in the United States, including having
had the privilege leading Jim and Sarah Brady's gun control
group at the time, called Handgun Control, now called the Brady
Center, and led, at the time, during the legislative fights
over the Brady bill, the ban on assault weapons, and the ban on
large magazines. In that context, permit me a moment to offer
my deepest condolences to the victims of the families--the
survivors, sorry--of Atlanta and Boulder. It is a terrible
tragedy and I particularly want to point out the heroism of
Police Officer Eric Talley. Eric Talley embodies the best of
the American police officer who gives him and herself
selflessly every day to protect us in our communities.
In the Crime Commission, which I now run, we practice
something called precision prevention. That is, we try to
identify those who are most likely to commit acts of violence,
and try to intervene in those acts before they actually happen.
Our mandate is to develop innovative ideas around the most
vexatious forms of violence. So in that context, we work on
gangs, high-risk gang members, illegal guns, illegal gun
trafficking, kids and guns, and, of course, domestic and
international terrorism.
The way we got involved in this program that I am going to
describe now was that we received a phone call from the head of
the national security division in the Eastern District of New
York who asked a rather straightforward question. He conveyed
that he had adequate tools to respond to serious acts of
terror, both domestic and foreign.
However, what he lacked were tools to help intervene with
those cases that might not rise to the level of meeting a
terrorism charge, or if a terrorism charge was required, not
requiring a lengthy jail sentence or any jail sentence at all.
He literally did not know what to do. So we was very worried
about those cases not receiving attention.
In response to that, we looked at the intervention we do
around gang work. We intervened with gang members, and looked
to see whether or not we could adapt that work into the
terrorism space. And it turned out that we could. We spent well
over a year studying the behaviors associated with
mobilization. We spent well over a year understanding those
emotional drivers that could be moving somebody to engage in
this sort of ideologically driven violence, and developed a
program which we call DEEP, which is the subject of this grant,
which is now a custom-tailored program that tries to understand
and identify those emotional drivers that may be moving
somebody to mobilize towards ideologically driven violence.
What we are not is a deradicalization program. By that I
mean we believe that people in America are entitled to their
beliefs, we may not agree with the beliefs, but we believe
people are entitled to their beliefs. However, we do not
believe that people are entitled to engage in violence based on
those beliefs, and that is where we come in. We look at the
pathway to mobilization and try and stop the mobilization. And
we do that through a multi-tiered process.
So the way the operation works is the prosecutors, we work
with the Eastern District of New York, the Southern District of
New York, Manhattan District Attorney's office, and the
Brooklyn District Attorney's office, as well as the FBI, and
NYPD intel. They will refer matters to us. These matters can be
either prearrest; postarrest; they can be preconviction; post
conviction; it can even individuals who have done short amount
of time in prison.
They will be released to us, they come into our program and
we engage them with a therapist who has been trained in this
specialized methodology, which we call DEEP. That methodology
is applied in a therapeutic session for as long as 9 to 12 to
18 months, if need be.
Assuming that person successfully completes the therapeutic
interventions, we then pass that person along to a role we call
a transitional specialist. That transitional specialist helps
the person understand and actualize the lessons that they have
learned in the therapy and get back into their normal lives.
We then have a specialized job-training unit, which helps
place high-risk individuals--and these can be high-risk
individuals, they also do that in the gang space--into jobs.
Now, we have just launched this. We are just getting off
the ground; we are just taking our first cases. But that is the
plan that we intend to implement with the assistance of this
grant. We will be evaluating as we go along.
The DEEP program, in my mind, and frankly all of the work
that is being done around this issue very nicely incorporates
both the issues of understanding of the intersection between
mental health, and potential criminal offending, which is a
critical component to any sort of crime-fighting apparatus in
the United States. We must focus on the mental health piece.
And it also very nicely ties in a public health approach. So in
government, government's very fond of saying we have a whole-
of-government approach, this really is, as John Picarelli said,
a whole-of-society approach. And it is really a critical way to
try to respond to this growing threat we face in the United
States.
There is no doubt that this will need to stay in funding.
And I am very pleased to see that DHS, just today, has
introduced another round the funding. And I hope Congress will
continue to fund this very critical work. It is not easy work.
It is not something that with have years and years and years of
experience doing. We are all learning in some ways as we go
along. But there is an enormous amount of skill can I applied
to this, now which is very, very good for the future, because I
think as we build out across the country, a framework, to use
DHS's term, that allows citizens to turn to various individuals
who understand the mental health side of this issue, we will
begin to build more and more resiliency across the country,
which is obviously very important.
Before I conclude, I do want to mention three people in
particular: I want to mention Seth DuCharme, who was the U.S.
attorney in the Eastern District, who actually helped us get
this program off the ground. It was very good of Seth to
understand the role of prevention in terrorism. That was a big
step, and it was an important step, and I think it is going to
pay off, and pay off very handsomely.
And I really have to mention John Picarelli and his unit at
DHS. Long before Congress began thinking about these grants, as
far as I know, John and his group were there supporting us,
helping us making connection for us, acting a sounding board.
They simply could not have been more support, and we are really
indebted. And I am, frankly, very indebted to Congress for
putting up this money, because we could not operate without
this support. Thank you.
[The information follows:]******** COMMITTEE INSERT
********
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Cote.
Mr. Cote. Chairman Roybal-Allard, Ranking Member
Fleischmann, and members of the subcommittee, thank you for
inviting me to testify on the Office of Targeted Violence and
Terrorism Prevention's grant program today. I am Tyler Cote,
cofounder and director of the nonprofit organization,
Operation250, and I am honored to appear before you.
Operation250 is a preventative, educational organization,
headquartered in Massachusetts that works with students and
educators with the ultimate goal of keeping it safe from
threatening materials and individuals while online.
Our work is through a series of educational workshops and
training with students, ranging from the age of 9 to 18, and
with educators from elementary, middle and high schools. The
pillars of our programming are focused on using online safety,
antihate and antiextremism, and problem-solving education, to
impact the threat and the level in online materials and
individuals compose on youth.
Starting in 2016, as part of the Department of Homeland
Security and Adventure Partners, peer-to-peer challenging
extremism innovation program, myself and my colleagues
developed Operation250. Upon the completion of that program,
which we finished third in the country, we formed a partnership
with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health to begin the
process of evaluating our curriculum. Then, starting in 2019,
the University of Massachusetts Lowell, researching Georgia
State University and researching Harvard T.H. Chan School
Public Health and Op250, received funding from the National
Institute of Justice to evaluation the Operation250 student
workshop models efficacy.
Such workshops are original research-based lessons designed
and delivered by the Operation250 team that combine two skilled
acquisitions lessons with one skilled application activity for
the students to engage with. The goals of these workshops are
for the students to acquire skills about recognizing unsafe
online behaviors, the psychology of online decisionmaking,
enhancing their understanding about hate and hostile out-group
attitudes online, and identifying risks and threats when they
are on an online space.
These skills have been applied by the students in an
activity at identifying how these issues might impact their own
community, their own school, and their own friend groups, and
for them to develop potential solution ideas that they can all
then participate in.
Over the course of these evaluations, we have found that
our student workshop programming has shown significant
improvements in students' ability to identify online
disinhibited behaviors, and the effects of them, which is a key
element of our online safety education. Toxic online
disinhibition is the phenomenon of when an individual loosens
up, and feels more comfortable because they are online, causing
them to be more willing to engage and participate in more
hostile and toxic material on the online space.
The ongoing evaluation also has shown they are approaching
significance in student's ability to correctly identify risks
while online. Organizationally, we find measuring and fully
understanding the impact of our educational programming has to
be critical in our effort. In 2020, we were awarded the funding
from the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Targeted
Violence and Terrorism Prevention to replicate our student
workshop, student lecture, and educator training programs. This
funding offers us the opportunity to replicate this program,
and throughout Massachusetts, and to extend into new school
systems in New Hampshire. The funding will allow us to reach an
estimated 930 students through our workshop; another 1,000
through our lecture series; in addition to being able to
deliver teacher training to approximately 630 educators, school
administrators, and school counselors as well.
This funding will also allow us to grow our team by
training more educational program trainers who will be able to
deliver the variety of operations for program offerings for the
organizations to communities and schools.
Since 2017, Op250 has delivered programming to
approximately 1,100 students, and over 1,000 educators in
Massachusetts through our workshops, lectures, and trainings.
With the funds granted by the OTVTP, our organization has the
opportunity of doubling our reach, and ultimately expanding our
impact to new communities and schools.
With our focus of online safety, we are able to offer
prevention education to communities. As a nonprofit in the
space, this funding grants us the opportunity to work with, and
be flexible to communities and schools to ensure that our
programming uniquely suits the audience it is working with, and
to be a preventative in ongoing efforts against terrorism and
extremism, such of that as White supremacy online.
This grant program offers organizations, like Op250, the
opportunity of being a preventative solution. Prevention is
about readiness, preparedness, and acting ahead before
something happens.
In striving to improve youth online safety and digital
literacy skills, and educators' confidence and understanding,
and teaching strategies, and improving youth online behavior,
youth will be better equipped to critically think, analyze, and
ultimately be protected from malevolent influences online.
Thank you for affording me the opportunity to speak today.
And I look forward to questions the subcommittee may have.
[The information follows:]******** COMMITTEE INSERT
********
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you. Mr. Rangel.
Mr. Rangel. Thank you, Chairwoman Roybal-Allard, Ranking
Member Fleischmann, and members of the subcommittee, thank you
for the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss how
the Department of Homeland Security is supporting our work,
disrupting the threat of White supremacist violent extremism.
My name is Sammy Rangel, and I am the cofounder and
executive director of Life After Hate, the first nonprofit in
the U.S. dedicated to helping men and women leave the violent
far right. Our vision is a world that allows people to change,
and contribute to society without violence. We extend our
condolences to Atlanta and Boulder.
Life After Hate's story begins in 2011, when a group of
formers, that is the term we use to describe former violent
extremists, came together knowing two things: We had each gone
through the complicated work of exiting violent extremism
without peer or professional support. And we were committed to
making sure that anyone wanting to exit would never have to do
it alone.
Four years later, we have launched ExitUSA, the
intervention program of Life After Hate. Last year, ExitUSA
managed more than 220 new cases, a sharp increase over the
previous 2 years. We expect this trend to continue during the
current grant program and beyond.
Life After Hate is built on the belief that anyone taking
steps towards accountability for their journey creates the
possibility for redemption. I want to share a story of one of
our colleagues, Thomas Engelmann, an example of the potential
strength of this program, as well as the obstacles formers
face. Thomas overcame great odds to become the person he was.
He spent much of life engaged in violent White supremacy, and
it nearly cost him his life at the hands of his group when he
left.
Sadly, Thomas passed away unexpectedly in August 2020. He
lived the ideals of compassion, and he continues to inspire us.
Thomas once said, I really want to help people. The fact that I
survived getting shot in the face is my motivation. I am doing
my best to dedicate the rest of my life to becoming the person
I should have been all along.
How the world viewed Thomas after he changed his life was
not the same as how Thomas viewed himself. That is important
because when formers attempt to make amends and reintegrate
into society, they face many obstacles.
In addition to violence, death, and incarceration, formers
face many emotional obstacles to exiting, including shame,
guilt, and a loss of identity. These are the problems that our
organization was founded to solve, easing the sense of
loneliness and mending disconnection from society. We have
learned is that individuals are more likely to disengage and
begin the process of deradicalization, if there is a community
waiting for them with support to help them through the process.
We have identified three key areas of focus to achieve our
mission and vision: ExitUSA intervention aftercare services;
training and capacity building; and community engagement. These
three areas are supported in part by the Department of Homeland
Security's 2-year grant.
Our first focus is to expand ExitUSA by hiring additional
staff, as well as enhancing existing roles. Second, we
recognize that alone, we cannot assist every person who wants
to exit, every family concern about a loved one, or every
professional struggling to work with formers.
In response, we developed an initiative with ExitUSA to
train and support local capacity, and develop cultural
competency for government and civic organizations. This grant
will promise to scale that training.
Finally, community engagement is a critical component of
Exit. Communities that are informed and engaged are more likely
to support formers, and, in turn, to promote disengagement and
exit as a viable option. This grant will give us the resources
we need to optimize existing, and introduce new outreach
strategies to raise awareness and drive more at-risk
individuals to ExitUSA.
Many of these men and women will, at times, experience a
flicker of disillusionment when their expectations about the
ideology clash with reality. Some White supremacists cycle out
without confronting their involvement. Without guidance, where
does that leave them, and where do they go from there? If we
are not in the position to offer them the support they need to
recover, we have missed a critical opportunity.
Through the support of the Department of Homeland Security,
we are better positioned to scale our mission and contribute to
the whole-of-society approach to make our country healthy and
safer. Thomas escaped White supremacy barely clinging to life.
He could have stayed away, but he came back to help others find
a way out. This is the ultimate expression of our ideals, and
that is the work we continue today.
Thank you.
[The information follows:]******** COMMITTEE INSERT
********
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you, Mr. Rangel.
My first question is for Mr. Aborn. In your opening
statement, you covered a lot of what I was going to ask with
regards to the DEEP program. But by the time a participant is
placed into the program, as I understand, they are already
engaged with law enforcement and may have already been
convicted of a crime. And although your testimony indicates
that community outreach and referrals could be part of the
future program phases, how much more difficult is it to help a
participant demobilize after they have already crossed into the
line of criminal activity? And how long do you anticipate it
will take to see results from the program's intervention with
participants?
Mr. Aborn. Thank you for that question. It is clearly more
difficult once a person has crossed the line into committing
actual criminal acts, but they are not by no means beyond
redemption. We know from lots of experience in traditional
crime space that people who have committed even violent acts,
can be treated, can be helped to understand why they have done
what they have done. They can be given the skills to not repeat
that conduct, and to reenter a more, for lack of a better term,
normal life.
So we are very optimistic about this program. We have done
an enormous amount of research. We have consulted with some of
the top forensic psychologists and general psychologists in the
country, as well as people throughout law enforcement, to
understand the behaviors. We believe we have a very good
understanding now of what those behaviors are that drive this
ideological-driven violence. And this program is deemed, it is
designed to address precisely those.
Our next phase, which we are now contemplating, trying to
figure out how to do, is to reach out into the community. But I
want to make sure that when we do that, we don't commit any of
the past mistakes that have occurred in this area. And I am
also, because we do a lot of work in the police reform space, I
am very mindful of some of the distrust that now exists between
communities of color, and law enforcement. So I want to make
sure that when we do this, we do this in a way that is received
well by the community.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Rangel, Life After Hate's approach
is focused on helping individuals who, at some level, may have
already begun to be illusioned, or disillusioned, with a path
that they are on. Are there common factors, either in
personality or experience, that help predict which people will
be more open to exiting violent extremism, and when they might
be more open to it?
Mr. Rangel. Thank you for the question. We do know that
for each person that is coming to us, they have a unique set of
circumstances, and a unique set of outcomes. And each of them
do require a different set of assistance skills, or direction,
or focus. So it is difficult to say that there is a singular,
or even just a common thread. But we do see, across different
populations, that some cases, there are issues where they need
needs met, and so we try to pair them with mental health
professionals that are within our own service's ability to
provide for them, or we refer them out.
But it is difficult to say whether or not there is a
straight line, it is not a straight line. And often, we have to
spend some time trying to understand all the different
variables that each of those unique individuals bring with
them.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Well, you have mentioned that there is
a degree of correlation between violent extremism and past
drama, mental health problems, and addiction. For those who
don't have those factors, either in the past or present, what
seems to drive people to extremist violence in those cases?
Mr. Rangel. One of the things that has really stood out to
us since we have started doing this work is that it doesn't
always start with the ideology. I think that is often what
surprises us most. A lot of times, there are real or perceived
grievances, that are real or perceived fears. And I think there
are groups that are out there who are ready to exploit those
vulnerabilities through a number of ways. But one of those ways
is making a message that seems relatable to them, and then
drawing those individuals further in and eventually leading
towards a path of adopting those types of violent extremist
beliefs.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Cote, Operation250 approaches the
problem of violent extremism from a different vantage point,
before it has a chance to take hold. What factors, in your
experience, make you particularly vulnerable to extremists, and
towards--particularly online?
Mr. Cote. Thank you for the question, Chairwoman. So what
we see and what we focus on in our work is predominantly focus
on kind of those online behavior and online decisionmaking in
youth. So, in terms of vulnerabilities as I understand your
question of what maybe--may happen, or what youth may come
across, and what we are seeing is just general exposure to hate
messages online can come with--come at great risk.
It could be something as though youth are--it will
reinforce discriminatory views that individuals may already
have. And it also, one example that we have used in classrooms
is visiting a hate website; that type of behavior is correlated
with, or connected to, potentially serious violent behavior as
well.
So, we really try and focus on some of those online
decisions that youth are making, recognizing what it is that
maybe they are more willing to take a risk online than they
would be offline, and recognizing when that happens, and then
how to stay clear of making those types of decisions.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Fleischmann.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chair, and to all of the
witnesses. Thank you very much for addressing this situation
that needs our attention, I think in all of our communities, at
all levels of government, and a very, very good hearing.
I want to say that your written testimonies have been very
compelling, and I thank you all for your hard work and
commitment.
Mr. Cote, you state in your testimony that 57 percent of
students come across online hate messages in the past 2 months.
This is a frightening statistic. What can parents do to protect
their kids from being exposed to hate online, especially since
they are spending more and more time online until the schools
go back?
Mr. Cote. That is a phenomenal question, and thank you for
asking it. It is one thing, and some of the research that we
have been included in with some of the research partners that I
had mentioned in my testimony, is we are seeing that some of--
one big correlation is the time the youth are spending online
increases their likelihood of coming across something online.
Of course, during the COVID-19 pandemic, youth are online at a
rate higher than we have probably ever seen before, and it was
already quite high before the COVID-19 pandemic as well.
For parents, I know that what we have seen in some research
is that the more their parents are involved in youth online
behavior, trying to be some sort of ally, and trying to
understand what it is that they are looking at online, trying
to be as much of a help in terms of if they have any questions,
to be able to come to them, to be that, because that can really
make a difference in terms of youths becoming susceptible to
hate messages online.
The hate messages may coming across just normal social
media platforms, or places where a lot of young individuals may
be spending time online. So, it is becoming more and more
challenging to keep them safe from becoming exposed to such
content. But for parents, the more that they can attempt to be
involved to try and be as much of a help to their youth, in
having conversations with them, we are seeing that that can
definitely play a helpful role.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you. And please continue to get it
this message out. Thank you so much, sir.
My next question is for the panel in the time remaining,
and time is winning, but what have you all been able to
accomplish with the DHS grant funds that you were not able to
do before? And how has your program become more effective and
reached more people? And let me address that to the entire
panel, please.
Mr. Aborn. Well, I am certainly happy to start,
Congressman, thank you. We, frankly, would not be able to
operate without this funding. It is very, very hard for a not-
for-profit to raise money to do this kind of work with the
criminal justice system, and without support from the
government, frankly now and probably going forward we would not
be able to do it.
We have launched a program essentially 3 weeks ago now, we
already have three participants in. I received just another
email while this hearing has been going on. So I expect that
number to grow. We now have evaluation methods in place. And as
we build a greater body in number of cases, we will be able to
give you some real feedback on how well this is working.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, sir.
Next.
Mr. Cote. I am happy to take it next. As I mentioned in my
testimony, we are going to--with the DHS funding, we are going
to be able to nearly double our reach in terms of the
individuals that will be able to--over double our reach, in
terms of the individuals that will be able to run online
programing with, so it certainly helps with our online safety
programming. So it certainly helps with our scalability, and
being able to fund our time, and effort, and planning, and
prep, and everything that gets involved with that to be able to
deliver that programming to schools. RPTR GIORDANOEDTR
SECKMAN[12:03 p.m.]
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, sir.
Mr. Rangel, do you want to take a shot at it?
Mr. Rangel. Yes. Thank you.
I think one of the things we do know is that we anticipate,
like, our online campaigns developed with Moonshot will lead to
additional cases coming to us and which is why we have
increased staffing in the grant year to assure appropriate
caseload coverage, so that we have the right capacity there to
respond.
We are also looking forward to developing counter narrative
video campaigns. I think we are going to do at least five under
this grant to help direct new at-risk individuals and concerned
family and friends to ExitUSA. And then, in part, the support,
you know, is part of what we are trying to do is extend our
referrals through avenues like through our toll-free telephone
number and the help phone that we have located on our website
to direct people towards us.
So those are just some of the things that we might be able
to do, that we will be doing under this grant.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, sir.
And, gentlemen, thanks again for your very important
testimonies.
Madam Chair, I will yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. Ms. Underwood?
Ms. Underwood. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to
our witnesses for sharing their expertise with us.
I am particularly pleased that my colleagues had the
opportunity to hear from Mr. Sammy Rangel about the work he is
doing with Life After Hate, a leading national organization
based in the great State of Illinois.
It is so good to see you again, and I hope the next time,
it can be in person.
Mr. Rangel, your organization has brought healing and peace
to many families in Illinois and across the country. How will
you use the Federal resources that you are receiving through
the TVTP grant program to scale up your work so that you can
reach even more people?
And if you can quantify it--I know that you just responded
to Mr. Fleischmann similarly, but with a quantification, it
would be helpful.
Mr. Rangel. Thank you. And it is good to see you again,
too.
Well, the grant helps us in three ways. First, we are able
to hire additional staff. We are building the capacity to do
that. I mean, immediately upon receiving the grant, we started
to develop that capacity and--so that we could adequately staff
for what we know is an increased number of people that we see
coming to us, and those numbers have continued to increase over
the years, as I mentioned in my opening statement.
Second, we are going to expand individual and community
outreach to reach more at-risk individuals. We have to get the
message out. There are people who are unaware that services
like this exist, and, as I heard one of our panelists answering
a question earlier, before 2017, families didn't know we were a
resource. Today, they make up half of our caseload. They are
reaching out to us.
And, finally, we are going to train co-responder and local
prevention networks to help us scale our work beyond. One of
the things I recognized right away when coming on as the
executive director is that, while we wanted to make referrals,
not many of the professionals that we could refer to knew
anything about this space. And so scaling that work, scaling
our education and what our approach--what successes we are
having with our approach becomes critical to this point.
Ms. Underwood. Thank you. I am so glad to hear that you
are working to expand your reach at this important time.
The FBI identified violent White supremacy in particular as
a leading threat, and I have heard from my own constituents
they are concerned about the rise of so-called militias and
other extremist groups in our communities.
Mr. Rangel, do you have the resources you need to meet this
high-level demand for the type of services you provide? And, if
not, what additional resources would be helpful?
Mr. Rangel. The short answer is, no, we aren't fully
resourced. Intervention is resource-intensive, and it is so
intense with the--intensive with the person-to-person component
and also knowing that these services, as we have heard from
other panelists, can take months and years.
Ms. Underwood. Uh-huh.
Mr. Rangel. And, because we are serving at a national
level, we have to be able to provide those services wherever
those people are at.
I think, in addition to hiring more social workers and
mental health practitioners, which I will make a note that
there aren't very many of us in this space just yet.
Ms. Underwood. Right.
Mr. Rangel. I am often alone in rooms where we are having
these same discussions. We also need to invest in activities
that fall outside the current scope of the grant, including
research that informs our work.
Outside the grant, we are working on developing a risk
assessment tool for this population because there currently
isn't one that has been validated in the U.S. context. Those
are just a couple of things I would say to that answer.
Ms. Underwood. Thank you. And, Mr. Rangel, Life After Hate
has established a partnership with Facebook to redirect users
who search for extremist content towards information that can
help them disengage from violent groups and ideologies.
What remains to be done to intervene in online
radicalization, and how would additional Federal resources help
you to advance your work in this area?
Mr. Rangel. I think one of the primary points I would like
to make here is that content moderation alone does not work.
The power of social media in particular is to connect people
who need help with resources that they need.
Radicalization to violence may occur, in part, online, but
the violence is real. We know this. We are here to help with
that off-ramping part of the process.
So part of that process then becomes costly to scale. It is
having--we need resources and programs to support those
disengaging from violent extremism and also create a meaningful
relevant content that speaks to their specific needs.
We are also working with Moonshot CVE through this grant.
We will be able to use their redirect model to reach at-risk
individuals. One of the most--one of Moonshot's cofounders,
Vidhya Ramalingam, is often talking about leveraging the same
ad technology that big brands use to sell people to reach these
groups online.
And we have a similar challenge creating persuasive content
to sell people on the idea that White supremacist violent
extremism does not support their well-being or meet their
personal needs. That content is both the message that gets them
to ExitUSA, but also it is the program itself.
Ms. Underwood. Well, I certainly am so grateful for your
leadership in this space and your dedication to helping folks,
you know, recover and reengage in our community in healthy
peaceful ways, and I certainly look forward to continuing to
work with you in the days to come.
With that, Madam Chair, I yield back.
Mr. Rangel. Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Rutherford?
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And I want to thank the panel. You all are involved in what
I think are the most important segments of what I call the PIE
for fighting crime or protecting communities. And that is
prevention, intervention, and then enforcement comes third. And
you all are out there doing the yeoman's work on prevention and
intervention.
And I want to ask Tyler about Operation250. You know, in
2018, as I mentioned in the former panel, we passed the STOP
School Violence Act of 2018, and there is grant money available
there to help teach students how to recognize not the focus of
online threats and dangers but the dangers of the student that
might be sitting in the classroom with them.
And, actually, it also provides dollars for schools' mental
health providers and law enforcement that come together to
create a network so that, when these students see this kind of
behavior, they actually have somewhere to report it and
something gets done about it.
So my question, Mr. Tyler, is number one, did you know
about the STOP School Violence Act, and have you accessed any
of the dollars that are available there because it seems like
it would plug right into your program?
Mr. Cote. Thank you for your question, Congressman.
Yes. So, actually, this is very timely as well. Recently,
over the last--forgive me. I forget the exact timeline, but
over the--pretty recently, over the last handful of months, we
have received funding as a subaward, as a small part of a
larger grant to a school system up in Massachusetts that they
received funding through the STOP School Violence Program, and
we will be running teacher trainings to kind of help educators.
So what we are seeing in our--in some of the research and--
the research that isn't connected to us, but wider research, is
that educators are not prepared to talk about online safety in
the classroom. If they are not prepared, they are just not
comfortable talking about it in the classroom.
Mr. Rutherford. Right.
Mr. Cote. So what we are aiming to do with that project is
to work with the health teachers of that school district to run
training programs on, you know, these are some of the
strategies that we have seen and research that worked with
online safety education. These are a lot of the topics that we
as an organization focus on and that we have seen impacts in
student behavior, and then these are some of the strategies
that, importantly, have shown not to work in terms of actually
educating about online safety.
So that is something--STOP School Violence funding is
something that we are aware of, and it is something that we are
obviously going to be participating on projects over the next
few years.
Mr. Rutherford. Good. Great to hear that.
Listen, Sammy, you are--Sammy, you are in an entirely
different place in this chain, this progression of people being
indoctrinated, people moving into extreme violent--domestic
violence entities and then coming out.
What I would like to ask you, Sammy, in the Life After Hate
work and the work that you do with people to leave these
communities of violence, based on your work, you mentioned
earlier that it is not linear, this radicalization, and I think
it is important--you mentioned how to do those risk assessments
and that sometimes you are the only person in the room.
You know, I will tell you DOJ has some great risk-
assessment tools that were developed, you know, by the--
developed--I think the Domestic Violence Intervention Program
way back, but there is some great risk assessment tools there
that you could look at.
But my question is for you: What are you--what forum do you
see most people being radicalized in? I know it is not linear,
but what proves to be the most dangerous forum for them to be
radicalized?
Mr. Rangel. That is a question that makes me try to
reflect on what it is that we are seeing. I think what your
question makes me think of is the state that they are in when
they come to us, and the state that seems to be leading to this
idea that they need to maybe reflect and reconsider their
choices is that it is when they hit a point of disillusionment
where what they thought they were getting into, what they
thought they were following or subscribing to at some point
doesn't match up with the reality of the situation they now
found themselves in.
After these large events, they are often questioning
themselves as to whether or not that is what they really signed
up for. And I think we even saw in more recent times people
questioning how did they end up in the predicament that they
are now in because that is not who they originally saw
themselves as.
And I think that--
Mr. Rutherford. More importantly, I guess, how did they
get out of it?
And, Madam Speaker, I see my time has run out.
But, Sammy, thank you again for everything you all are
doing. God bless you.
Mr. Rangel. Thank you, sir.
Mr. Rutherford. Yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. I have several questions. We are almost
out of time, but I would like to try and get some of these in.
Mr. Rangel, I understand that the Department is increasing
the number of cases that it takes--that you take to expand your
outreach. How much demand is there for what you are actually
doing at this time?
Mr. Rangel. Well, since our profile increased in 2017, our
numbers have--annually have grown exponentially. We continue to
meet new heights. I think, within the last couple of years, we
have actually surpassed what we did in all the years prior to
those couple of years.
And, as I mentioned before, after 2017 events, families
became aware of our program, and those numbers went from zero
to half of our caseload where they are looking for assistance
and guidance on what to do with--about the person that they are
concerned with, that they are close to or loved ones, so it is
exponential. And what we do--as I mentioned earlier, we do
predict that those numbers will continue to increase monthly,
annually.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. You talked about the importance
of a sense of community. What is it about community that can
make the difference between a path of violence and one of
reconciliation?
And, also, you also talked about--and I was struck by the
fact that you talked about compassion and empathy in helping
people exit from violent extremism. Given all the public anger
toward hate groups and extremists, what challenges do you have
convincing the public that yours is the right approach?
Mr. Rangel. I think, as long as we also include
accountability with compassion and empathy, it can help the
community understand what we are trying to do. The sense of
community, I believe, is innate to all human beings. We all
want to belong. But what has happened is that oftentimes we
have to consider what we belong to and what those groups that
we belong to profess or want.
And, oftentimes, I think, through our work, right, we are
using motivational interviewing and trauma-informed care as the
basis of our theory around what is effective, and those
theories are really rooted in understanding that the person in
front of us is not broken beyond repair, is not incorrigible or
disposable. And, although they might need an enormous amount of
help, they are worthy of that enormous amount of help.
But it also supports this idea that, when it comes to
public safety, we are all better served if we have alternatives
other than condemnation for someone who has committed violent
acts.
I think our founders are prime examples of that, including
myself, where that redemption is possible, but it can be made
more possible when the community is there to receive them when
working through their issues and their concerns with support.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. I see that Mr. Rutherford--no.
Mr. Ruppersberger has returned. Mr. Rutherford, you had another
question. I can go to you before I go to Mr. Ruppersberger.
Mr. Rutherford. Okay, Madam Chair. Thank you.
I will follow up on--one of the things that we discussed
during the last panel was a report that was outlining some of
the violent extremist groups--antigovernment, antiauthority,
violent extremism; racially, ethnically motivated violent
extremism; even animal rights and environmental rights violent
extremism; abortion-related extremism.
Sammy, during your time in trying to get--help individuals
who are extricating themselves from these violent extremist
groups, is there one of these that seems more dangerous to you
now than the others?
Mr. Rangel. Well, our cofounders are particularly tuned in
based on their own personal experiences to violent White
supremacy extremism, sir. And I think a lot of the partners on
this call would support the fact that most of the data points
towards perhaps the single most threat that we all face is
coming from these violent White supremacist extremist groups.
Mr. Rutherford. Yeah.
Mr. Rangel. And so that is where we choose to try to
leverage our experiences and our methods to make the biggest
impact for our country.
Mr. Rutherford. So, to follow up on that, Sammy, so do you
see this population, then, as somehow being--you know, when you
look at the fact that it is not linear, as you mentioned
earlier, but it is a combination of things that occur to them--
sexual violence, family violence, those kind of things--are you
seeing more of that in these White supremacist--the
environments they are coming out of?
Mr. Rangel. Thank you for that.
I do think certainly that is a part of what we see, but we
also see people who have very real or perceived grievances and/
or fears. And, to be honest, while listening to some of the
grievances or fears that these men and women share with us,
some of them appear to have valid basis, and so it is not all
as if they have no actual grievance or actual fear to be
concerned about.
What we do try to focus and redirect our attentions to is,
how do we address that through prosocial methods? How do we
take into account that there are other ways, peaceful ways, to
address those issues without having to condemn a group or use
violence?
Mr. Rutherford. And so, Sammy, let me ask you this: Is
that kind of an indictment, then, of a system where someone
is--for example, these--the antigovernment folks, White
supremacists who are against, you know, government, the
sovereign citizens, that sort of thing, are these--do you find
a lot of these folks are people who have a grievance that has
not been properly addressed after they raised it, and then they
have kind of hit this dead end in the system, and then they
decide to go outside the system?
Is that a pretty common occurrence?
Mr. Rangel. I would say that I relate to what you are
asking there in the sense that, in the days before my change, I
felt violence was the only voice I had, and I think that that
is oftentimes the end result of feeling you are not being
heard, that you are perhaps being dismissed or discounted or
invalidated or not taken seriously.
And, of course, there are many other factors, but I do
suspect that--and our experience in listening shows us that
many times it--the one thing that we are doing that is working,
if I may start over, is listening, which is an uncommon
occurrence today, especially to these populations.
And so I do believe that is the basis for a lot of the
success that we are having, is that we find that listening is a
part of the validation that they have been screaming for and a
part of the process towards developing a meaningful
relationship that will allow us to engage with them in a
meaningful way.
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you. And I appreciate that answer.
And I tell you, that is why I think--coming from the law
enforcement community particularly, which often creates some of
these grievances, I think it is so important that individuals
have a way to address those grievances with those agencies
where it has occurred. And that was one of my main concerns
when I was a sheriff, was making sure that people knew they
were being treated fairly and that they had that voice.
So thank you for all you are doing.
Mr. Rangel. Thank you, sir.
Mr. Rutherford. And, Madam Chair, I see my time has run
out. I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay.
Mr. Ruppersberger?
Mr. Ruppersberger. Yes. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Executive Director Rangel, I have to admit that, before
this hearing, I was unfamiliar with your organization. However,
after reading about your programs, I am already a huge
supporter.
Your work is quite similar to groups in my district like--
or my State, like ROCA, R-O-C-A; Safe Streets in Baltimore; and
the Violence Intervention Program at the Maryland--University
of Maryland Shock Trauma, by the way, which is rated one of the
top trauma systems in the world.
I believe mental health counseling and support groups go a
long way, especially if it is being led by those who were once
victims of trauma and indoctrination themselves.
In fact, I trust your strategy so much that I introduced a
bipartisan bill with Representative Adam Kinzinger to establish
grant funding to hospital-based violence intervention programs.
Now, these operations offer wraparound services to victims
of violent crime while they are recuperating on hospital beds,
effectively making them a captive audience. Now, patients are
offered counseling and support that can include substance abuse
treatment; job training to help find--really find them jobs;
and, finally, affordable housing, which really would--if they
can get to that level, would take them out of the environment
where they came from.
Now, at Shock Trauma program, that program I just talked
about, the participants have shown an 83-percent decrease in
rehospitalization due to intentional violent injury and a 75-
percent reduction in criminal activity and an 82-percent
increase in employment. And those are pretty good numbers.
Now, while the demographical groups may be different, the
experiences are quite similar. Most individuals are a product
of their environment. And my question for you is something that
I want to take back to the groups I just mentioned.
How do you make the initial connection and build trust with
individuals who have been radicalized? And then, also, to what
extent is socioeconomic conditions a factor in who gets wrapped
up in hateful and violent groups?
Mr. Rangel. Thank you for that.
You know, I want to make sure I understand the first part
of your question. Could you please repeat that?
Mr. Ruppersberger. Yeah. Sure. I wanted to take back to
these groups, okay, that I mentioned in my area or my State,
how do you make the initial connection and build trust with
individuals who have been radicalized?
Mr. Rangel. Sure. Part of the experience that I am
leveraging here at Life After Hate comes from a planning and
implementation grant I participated with in reentry, working
with some of the groups like the--that you mentioned. And what
we learned there is that the approach that any organization or
agency uses is often a bigger predictor of outcomes than the
actual ability of the person to change.
So basically--and that is one of the reasons we are using
MI. So, while MI works with clients, it also informs those of
us at--you know, leading the charge into helping--how to
approach these spaces, so how do--that approach is what is
effectively establishing the relationship that you are asking
about.
So it comes from respecting the person regardless of what
they have done and demonstrating that respect through your
policies, through your administration, through your
partnerships, through the advocacy work that you are doing.
They need to see that not only are you addressing risks and
needs that they have but also barriers that exist in the
community. That is a major part of our model right now.
Aside from that, once they are talking with us, as I
mentioned earlier, that listening--the onset of listening for
them is often enough to kind of shake through their defenses,
because they are prepared for a fight. What they are not
necessarily used to getting is acceptance and that acceptance
of them as a human being who is still worthy of assistance, not
necessarily anything that they have done or said.
And I think, when you can preserve that part of the
interaction with an individual, then they start to trust you
enough to open up and start sharing the parts that you actually
need to work on with them.
Mr. Ruppersberger. That is why this is so important.
The other thing is that to what extent is socioeconomic
conditions a factor in who gets wrapped up in hateful and
violent groups?
Mr. Rangel. I do think it is a factor that we should take
in, but, even as of late, and maybe even perhaps since 2017, we
recognized that not all of these men and women fit that older
model of broken homes and separated families or poverty or lack
of education because quite a few of these men and women were
coming from wealthy families that were intact, who have college
degrees, or who have professional careers.
And so I think there are many factors that we need to be
taking in, and some that maybe we haven't historically
considered before.
Mr. Ruppersberger. Well, thank you for what you are doing.
It is needed, and it is necessary. Thank you.
Mr. Rangel. Thank you.
Mr. Ruppersberger. I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. I have a question, and, in the
interest of time, I have a question for Mr. Cote, and I am
going to put them all together.
Is there a particular age at which young people are
particularly vulnerable to extremist influence, and is there a
case for developing appropriate programming for kids younger
than nine, and what kind of reception are you getting from
school administrators and educators?
Mr. Cote. Thank you, Chairwoman, for the question.
We--so, in our work, we haven't come across--there--just in
the work we have done specifically, we haven't come across
anything that would suggest a certain age is the most
susceptible.
Now, of course, as I had mentioned in a previous question,
the more individual--the more time individuals are spending
online, the more likely that they are to become exposed to
potentially harmful material.
So, with that understanding, the idea--the older you get,
the more attention that you may want to start paying to--in
terms of the types of questions that we have run, we talk about
the time that youth are spending online, their relationship
with their technology and such.
Now, in terms of developing workshops and some sort of
toolkit with--for younger than nine, we ran a--it is the only
time we have ever run programming with youth younger than the
age of nine. It was a part of a Girl Scouts Cybersecurity Day
with students as young as, I believe, seven and eight.
And we ran programming just specifically on online
disinhibition, and the way that we did it was we gave all of
the Girl Scouts 3D glasses, and we said: Well, if you have
these 3D glasses, it is as if you are indivisible, or
invisible--pardon me--and, if you are invisible, what are you
more likely to do?
And so you have all the students coming out or all the
girls coming out with things: Well, I am going to sneak
downstairs when I am not supposed to. I am going to be doing
things, you know, taking a few more risks.
And then we lent that back to, when we go online--and it
may not be something that they are all doing right now, but it
may be something that they do in the future--they may end up
feeling more comfortable to do something online than they would
offline, just like they would if they were invisible in the
real world. So trying to work with them to try and identify
when they have that feeling.
So that is our experience with working with youth younger
age. Now, youth are coming into contact with technology quicker
than they were really at any other point in human history, I
would say. So I definitely think that there needs to be age-
appropriate programs and workshops and toolkits, anything of
sort to really sort of help youth be introduced into technology
in a very healthy way, something that we would love to do
moving forward.
Unfortunately, we don't have the resources to be able to do
everything, but it is something that definitely would be
helpful for youth of a younger age, even younger than nine.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. And what kind of reception are
you getting from school administrators and educators?
Mr. Cote. Oh, right. So apologies for missing that
question.
So the reception that we have been receiving, of course
during COVID-19, it has been a challenge. School districts are
trying to maneuver on the virtual or hybrid platforms and
classroom management. So that has been a challenge in terms of
actually being able to work with as many schools as we would
like to, of course.
Now, in the past, with the partnerships that we have had
with schools, very receptive, very interested in online safety
programming. Of course, like I had mentioned, a lot of research
is showing that teachers aren't feeling as comfortable talking
about online safety in the classrooms, so whenever they can
have individuals--of course, our team is a team of young
individuals, so being able to come in and connect with the
youth to talk about online safety is something that a lot of
schools have expressed a lot of interest in and they are fans
of, yes.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay.
And my final question is for Mr. Aborn and any of the other
panelists that may want to chime in, and I don't mean to put
anybody on the spot, but what recommendations do you have for
the Department in terms of how it is implementing the grant
programs? And what recommendations do you have for this
committee as we think about how to prioritize funding for the
coming fiscal year?
Mr. Aborn. Well, I think that is probably the critical
question for this hearing and certainly is a complicated one
because there are so many factors at play here.
Obviously, scalability is something you are going to hear
over and over and over again. There are lots of good programs
out in the country, but they struggle, frankly, to maintain
their day-to-day existence and to expand to meet the need.
In our own particular case, as soon as we get our
evaluations in, I know there is interest in just--in the
Department of Justice and districts across the country,
prosecution districts, to do this work there as well.
We have to be very mindful of the fact that we know from
the traditional crime space that recidivism is a big issue. The
last thing in the world we want is recidivism in the terrorist
space. So we need to confront that head-on.
So we need to be thinking about evaluations, as the
Department is doing; target populations; and also building
interlocking circles of support out there so that the members
of our society know they have resources to go to when they
confront the particular problem.
There are--we want to reach out to families and loved ones
of people who are known to be mobilizing, particularly when
those family members will not necessarily pick up the phone and
call the FBI or call the NYPD or any other local law
enforcement agency. We need to make sure they have access to
the kinds of services that can help stop that mobilization
process.
And that is the key, and that is why I say we want to focus
on precision prevention. We want to understand who those
individuals are who are beginning to mobilize towards violence
and break that cycle. That, to us, is the challenge.
Mr. Roybal-Allard. Okay. I have just been told that our
Webex time has run out, so I apologize to the other two
panelists. If you have some suggestions, please submit them to
the subcommittee.
And, with that, I want to thank the witnesses for joining
us today, and I look forward to hearing about further progress
on your TVTP programs. And the best of luck to all of you for
the work that you are doing.
The Subcommittee on Homeland Security stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:37 p.m., the subcommittee was
adjourned.]RPTR WARRENEDTR ZAMORADEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND
SECURITYAPPROPRIATIONS FOR 2022Wednesday, April 28, 2021COAST
GUARD READINESSDEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY APPROPRIATIONS
FOR 2022Wednesday, April 28, 2021COAST GUARD
READINESSWITNESSESADMIRAL KARL L. SCHULTZ, COMMANDANT OF THE
UNITED STATES COAST GUARD
Ms. Roybal-Allard. The Subcommittee on Homeland Security
will come to order.
As this hearing is being conducted virtually, I want to
remind members that you are responsible for muting and unmuting
yourselves. When you are recognized to speak, if I notice you
have not unmuted yourself, I will ask if you would like the
staff to unmute you. If you indicate approval by nodding, the
staff will unmute your microphone.
To avoid inadvertent background noise, the chair or staff
designated by the chair may mute participant microphones when
they are not recognized to speak. If there is a technology
issue during a member's speaking time, we will move to the next
member until the issue is resolved, and you will retain the
balance of your time.
We will be operating under the 5-minute rule. When you have
1 minute remaining, the clock on your screen will turn yellow.
When your time has expired, the clock will turn red, and it
will be time for me to recognize the next member.
We will follow the speaking order set forth in the House
rules, beginning with the chair and ranking member, followed by
members present at the time the hearing is called to order, in
order from seniority, and we will alternate by party. Next, we
will go to members who were not present when the hearing was
called to order until every member present has had a first
round.
As a reminder, members can submit information in writing
for any of our hearings or markups to the email address that
was provided in advance to your staffs.
Now let's begin.
I welcome everyone to this morning's hearing on Coast Guard
readiness.
Admiral Schultz, we are pleased to have you testify before
us today. I would like to start by extending my gratitude to
you and all the men and women of the Coast Guard for your
service to our Nation.
This past year has been difficult for so many. The Coast
Guard in particular has shown once and again to be a resilient
force in protecting our Nation. The Coast Guard has been a
critical Federal asset in response to the COVID pandemic.
From the early days of the COVID virus, the Coast Guard was
at the forefront of disembarking nearly 300,000 cruise ship
passengers and crew, coordinating the deployment of medical
staff and supplies, as well as safe medivac, and later,
delivering vaccine to communities in Alaska. The Coast Guard's
role is one that only can be performed and built by this
incredible service organization.
The COVID pandemic also required the Coast Guard to pivot
from its everyday operational requirements. In some cases, to
maintain safety protocols, ship crews had to forego port calls
and multiple times isolate for 2-week periods. The Coast Guard
also endured distressing events such as fires on the national
security Waesche and the icebreaker Healy. In both cases, the
crews mitigated damage to the cutters and quickly began
repairing the fire damage. The Healy also required moving a
100-ton motor from Baltimore to California and installing it
onto the ship. This was no small feat.
In addition to its normal workload and these extraordinary
challenges, the Coast Guard was also faced with responding to
the largest number of named tropical storms and hurricanes
ever.
I am pleased the subcommittee was able to maintain our
commitment to support the men and women of the Coast Guard by
providing over $12.8 billion in our fiscal year 2021 funding
bill. This amount was above the request and included funding
for an extensive number of items on the Coast Guard's unfunded
priorities list. Many of these items directly support the well-
being and readiness of the men and women of the Coast Guard.
I am also pleased we were able to fund important
investments to recapitalize the Coast Guard's air and marine
fleets. This includes four additional fast-response cutters to
finish the FRC's program of record, an additional HC-130J
aircraft, additional MH-60T helicopters, and continued support
for the offshore patrol cutter and Polar Security Cutter
programs.
Unfortunately, the preliminary budget document for fiscal
year 2022 makes no mention of the Coast Guard. We can only
glean from this that the request is unlikely to include any
substantive enhancements for the service. I hope next month
when we get the full budget request this will not be the case.
Admiral Schultz, we look forward to your testimony and how
you are executing current funding. We are also interested in
hearing your thoughts on the future of Coast Guard readiness.
While some of our questions may be oriented toward activities
anticipated for the coming fiscal year, we understand at this
time you are not at liberty to specifically address most 2022
budget requests.
Thank you again for joining us, and I look forward to your
discussion.
I now turn to the distinguished gentleman from Tennessee,
Ranking Member Fleischmann, for his opening remarks.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And, Admiral Schultz, I want to begin with a sincere and
strong thank you to you. I have always had a great, warm
relationship with the Coast Guard, but, sir, your service and
outreach to me with your staff has been nothing short of
exemplary, and I appreciate that. It has allowed me to get to
know more about the Coast Guard, and your veterans are so proud
of what you are doing, but thank you. Your work has allowed me
to do my job in a much better fashion, sir.
I would like to extend a warm welcome to all of our Coast
Guard folks. It is always a pleasure to hear about the many
successes of the Coast Guard and the many important mission
areas covered by the men and women of the service, all with the
goal of protecting our country and her people.
I am hopeful that your people are well, considering the
challenges and demands of fulfilling the mission of operating
during a pandemic. It is a credit to the Coast Guard men and
women and their families for the resilience they have shown in
their service.
Normally this time of year, we would be discussing the
budget request for the next fiscal year, and it is unfortunate
that we are unable to have that discussion in this hearing. I
believe there is value in hearing directly from the agencies
about the initiatives and investments that are proposed for the
coming year.
For the Coast Guard, the budget request is often centered
on readiness. Looking back at your written testimony, sir, over
the past few years, readiness is in the front and center in the
message you deliver to the Congress about your goals for the
Coast Guard, from the people to the planes.
I recommend--or I commend you for looking across the
service to identify what your workforce needs, how they can be
successful and representative of the people in our Nation, as
well as looking at the assets and infrastructure to ensure that
the Coast Guard remains a modern military and law enforcement
force, first responder, and maritime steward. I am hopeful that
we, the subcommittee, can continue to be partners in these
endeavors.
I am going to apologize. I will be briefly stepping out. I
am going to stay with this committee, leave, because we have
got another subcommittee hearing going on concurrently, but
then I am going to come right back after my questioning. And
during that time, I am going to ask my dear friend and
colleague, Mr. Palazzo, to serve as the ranking member in my
absence, but I will be back.
But again, Admiral Schultz, thank you, sir, for your
service to our country, to your service to the great United
States Coast Guard. I look forward to your testimony, sir.
I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you, Mr. Fleischmann.
To ensure everyone has ample opportunity to ask questions,
I ask each member to keep their turn to the allotted 5-minute
per round.
Admiral Schultz, we will submit the full text of your
official statement for the record. Please proceed with your
oral testimony.
Admiral Schultz. Well, thank you. And good morning,
Chairwoman Roybal-Allard and Ranking Member Fleischmann and
members of the subcommittee. I appreciate the opportunity to
testify before you today, and I appreciate my written testimony
being entered for the record.
Let me begin by thanking you for your unwavering support of
the United States Coast Guard. The fiscal year 2021
appropriation provides critical momentum for Coast Guard
service and aviation fleet recapitalization, it injects much
needed funding to improve our aging shore infrastructure and
information technology, and makes essential investments in our
most critical asset, our people, our workforce.
With your assistance, we must sustain momentum in our
efforts to restore readiness, and we must continue to transform
into a 21st century Coast Guard, one that stands ready to meet
an increasing demand for our services and is able to operate in
an increasingly complex, interconnected, and technologically
advanced maritime domain.
Readiness is not achievable without deliberate action. With
your support, we continue efforts to build the Nation's first
new heavy polar icebreakers in nearly a half century. The
engineering casualty, our medium-endurance--excuse me--medium
icebreaker Healy last summer highlights the lack of resilience
in the U.S. icebreaker fleet and reinforces the importance of
our ongoing polar security cutter acquisition efforts.
Additionally, the funding provided in fiscal year 2021
appropriations allows us to continue our offshore patrol cutter
acquisition. Continued progress on this program is essential to
recapitalizing the capability provided by our fleet of 210- and
270-foot medium-endurance cutters, some of which have over 55
years of service under their belts. Despite extraordinary
effort, our medium-endurance cutter fleet has lost nearly 500
annual patrol days over the last 2 years due to unplanned
maintenance and repairs. Replacing this fleet is absolutely
essential for the Coast Guard to effectively carry out its
missions in the future.
Any effort to address readiness must also include the Coast
Guard's aviation fleet. Our fleet of MH-65 Dolphin helicopters
is increasingly difficult to maintain, and the rapidly
declining availability of parts for these aircraft is affecting
our ability to field this capability. Accordingly, the Coast
Guard must take immediate actions to begin transitioning our
rotary wing fleet towards a single airframe comprised of MH-60
Jayhawk helicopters.
Additionally, I want to thank you for the $110 million
provided in fiscal 2021 for the purchase of our 18th HC-130J
Hercules long-range surveillance aircraft. This highly-capable
modern aircraft improves our interoperability with the Navy,
Marine Corps, and Customs and Border Protection, and allows for
real-time sharing of critical mission-related data, enhancing
maritime domain awareness and mission effectiveness.
To improve our readiness, we must continue targeted
investments in our shore infrastructure and our information
technology systems. We greatly appreciate the $363 million
provided for critical shore facility and housing projects in
2021. Our shore facilities serve as the basis for all of our
operations, and these investments provide modern facilities
that enhance the resilience of our shore infrastructure
portfolio against both natural hazards and climate change.
Moreover, the $185 million provided between the CARES Act
and the fiscal 2021 appropriations have allowed us to begin
vital technology upgrades to our network, hardware, and
software that serve as the first investments in our technology
revolution initiatives.
Technology enables every facet of Coast Guard operations,
and improving technological readiness is an imperative for
successful mission execution and our ability to recruit and
retain a capable, talented workforce, moving into the future.
While cutters, aircraft, and infrastructure are mission
enablers, the Coast Guard workforce engages in essential
people-to-people interaction at the local, national, and global
levels. Readiness requires empowering this workforce with the
information, knowledge, skills, and support systems that allows
them to excel across the full spectrum of Coast Guard
operations. And I am incredibly grateful to the Congress for
your tremendous support of our people.
As the pool of Americans eligible to serve in the Armed
Forces become smaller, the Coast Guard must provide parity with
the other military services. Readiness is also about the
attractiveness of our service in a highly competitive job
market. This includes bonuses and retention pay, modernized
training, expanded educational benefits such as tuition
assistance, and access to reliable childcare.
In closing, I would like to thank you again for all that
you do for the Coast Guard. Your unwavering support is
essential for the building and supporting the Coast Guard our
Nation needs and enabling our dedicated workforce to remain
Semper Paratus, "always ready."
Thank you for the opportunity to testify this morning, and
I welcome your questions.
[The information follows:]******** COMMITTEE INSERT
********
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you, Admiral.
I would like to begin on one of the things that you
addressed in your opening statement, and that has to do with
readiness and diversity.
As you know, the subcommittee has a history of investing in
recruitment and retention aimed at increasing diversity, and we
have discussed many of your efforts to encourage a more female
and family-friendly environment and there is no better way to
encourage diversity than by modeling it.
So I want to congratulate the Coast Guard for recently
announcing the President's intent to nominate Admiral Linda
Fagan to be the first commandant. If confirmed, she will be the
first woman four-star admiral in the history of the Coast
Guard.
So could you please spend a few minutes to discuss the
outcomes of your diversity initiatives and investments and your
ideas on how you can continue the progress in this area?
Admiral Schultz. Chairwoman, thank you for the question.
And we are excited for Vice Admiral Linda Fagan's nomination to
be our first four-star female officer and future vice
commandant, 32nd vice commandant. She is a fantastic officer,
and we are excited for that to move forward in the Senate.
Ma'am, to answer your question, you know, so my goal--and
you know that since day one, 1 June 2018--is a Coast Guard more
reflective of the Nation we serve, and we operate in a very
competitive environment for talent. I am looking for about
4,000 young enlisted men and women on an annual basis and about
500 officers, and we compete with the other Department of
Defense Armed Force services that are out there, looking for
about 1,000 folks every few days.
And for us there is--I have 54 recruiting officers across
the Nation. We scoped that down in the sequestration period of
2013 from 104. We have got 320 or so recruiters. You know, on a
comparative basis, the Marine Corps recruits about 30,000
recruits a year. We recruit 4,000. Our recruiters average about
12.5 recruits, the Marines about 7.5, and they do it with a
workforce that is exponentially bigger than ours and they have,
you know, about 48 recruiting offices, but then they have
depot-level sub-offices in the hundreds.
So we are working hard there, ma'am. I think our progress
is that, you know, we commissioned a RAND study, holistic
study, to look at women and retention issues a couple of years
back. We have actioned that. We are waiting for our RAND study
that looked at underrepresented minorities in the service, and
I will take receipt of that report in July. I think what we
have worked hard to do is knock down those inhibiters, you
know. When we were retaining women, somewhere between 5 and 10
percent, depending on what point, you looked into the career
trajectories at a lower rate than their male counterparts and
we are addressing some of those things. We have initiated
programs where we bring in reservists. So first-time moms or
people that had additional members of their family, they can
maximize the available leave to them, maternity leave, which is
up to 84 days.
But if you are in a small operational unit, stepping out
when you are in a left and right forward or starboard rotation
is very difficult for 84 days, but we have brought in a
reservist to sit in the seat, to run the boats those 90 days so
our people can maximize those programs and understand what
first-time parenting or an additional person to your family
looks like.
We have made a commitment where we have many of our female
colleagues also have spouses that serve in the Coast Guard or
other Armed Forces, and we made a commitment when we assign
them places. Sometimes in the past, one member would have a 4-
year assignment, one would have a 2-year assignment. How do you
reconcile that in your decisions for living, your decisions for
childcare? We have aligned those on the front side for E-6 and
below and lieutenant and below. We try to do that for folks
senior to those ranks where we make a guarantee for folks in
those more junior ranks. So we are looking at more stability in
areas.
We put out a diversity inclusion action plan the summer of
2020 as a build-out of our efforts that have been, you know, 24
months leading up to that. And we have about 20 of 125 what we
call diversity inclusion action plan change agents that will
finish up their training in June. The remaining 105 will be
done by the end of September, and these individuals will deploy
across the Coast Guard. They will plug in at the Leadership
Diversity Advisory Councils. They will have the conversations
to elevate at the field level just how important being a more
inclusive Coast Guard is, and they have the training. They have
the skills to engage in the difficult conversations.
We have also brought on board--and I am winding down,
ma'am. We brought on board five new officer recruiters that
will be linked to minority-serving institutions, Historically
Black Colleges and Universities. And they will be in Atlanta.
They will be in Norfolk, Virgina; New Orleans and Hampton
Roads, and one programatically in Washington. I think this is
the start of an increasing footprint there.
But we are trying to take our recruiting efforts to parts
of America that will allow us to grow the ranks. You know, one
good news story: In an organization that is 15 percent women,
our academy graduating class this spring will be about 40
percent women. And then it is not just bringing them to the
accession points, getting them through the training; it is how
do we retain them in the service.
I think holistically, Madam Chair, we are looking across
all that and I think we are making progress, but it is slow. If
I did nothing but bring women into Cape May, 4,000 a year for
the next 4 years, and every single woman I brought in stayed in
the service, we would only move 15 percent to probably 18
percent. And I can't go find 4,000 women right now at that
pace, but our goal is 25 percent women, 35 percent
underrepresented minorities.
So as we go out and recruit that difficult space, we are
getting those targets up. So I think we are on a good
trajectory, ma'am, but this is going to be a little bit of long
ball to really see the movement. But I think we win when we can
retain members and they see themselves rising to whatever level
success looks like in the service to them as individuals.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. My time is up. But I do--I believe
you did mention it, but I am certainly pretty sure that our
investments also in expanding childcare for the Coasties has
also been a very positive factor in being able to retain the
women in the Coast Guard.
Admiral Schultz. Madam Chair, we have 10 child development
centers. You have been to some. The childcare subsidy and you
amplifying that dollar amount is where we went. That has been
fantastic, and that has made a difference. We are located in
major metropolitan areas--Seattles, Miamis, L.A., San
Francisco, New York City--all high-cost areas, and we don't
have childcare centers other than in those 10 locations. That
is how we win and retain our families, ma'am. So thank you very
much to you and the committee for that critical injection.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Fleischmann.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Good morning again, Admiral Schultz.
In your testimony, sir, you referenced many of the
investments, including in the fiscal 2021 Appropriation Act, to
recapitalize assets across the board for surface, air, and
shore facilities. Some of these assets, like the refurbishment
of helicopters and new icebreakers and the replacement of older
cutters with the new OPC, are very important to readiness and
response, especially since the delivery timeline for some of
the new assets are racing against the usable life and age of
the older equipment.
Sir, how has COVID impacted your acquisition timelines? And
have you had to adjust any schedules to reflect the challenges
of the past year?
Admiral Schultz. Well, Ranking Member Fleischmann, thank
you for the question. I think the good news story is our major
acquisitions programs are on track, on schedule. The U.S.
shipbuilding industry, like many other, most other U.S.
industries had some impact. We have not adjusted any
contractual dates yet on any of our shipbuilding programs. We
have--list some of those challenges here down at Elizabeth City
where we do overhaul people of the maintenance on our
helicopters and we found some learned--some resiliency lessons.
Some places we are one or two employees deep. And when we had
some folks that we had to quarantine or tapped out for COVID,
we had to shut some product lines.
So we have done some internal learning on our own
capabilities from a maintenance sustainment standpoint. But
with industry, we have seen HII, Huntington Ingals Industries,
down there maintain, you know, progress on the NSCs. Could
there be some dates that we haven't, you know, fully understood
and manifest yet? And these shipbuilding programs are long-
term, you know. The tenth and the eleventh NSCs, national
security cutters, are under construction.
We are imminent on the award of OPC production number three
and long lead on four, and we will be--you know, we are in that
process of communicating with the committees this week on that.
So I think we are tracking there. Polar Security Cutter, we
still hope to start cutting steel in the coming months.
And you mentioned aviation, one of the things I had
mentioned in my opening statement. We are really finding some
challenges with our 98 Dolphin helicopters. Aerospatiale
Airbus, the parent company, stopped making those aircraft in
2018. We have the biggest fleet in the world at 98. And things
like gearbox, it is very difficult to get the parts. So right
now, we are flying them at about 70 percent of programmed hours
just because none of the parts are supported, and we are going
to have to make some tough decisions. We have got six on the
beach right now that are down for lack of availability of parts
but probably 10 by the end of June. And as the chairwoman
mentioned, heading, you know, into the last year's hurricane
season, this is the time of year come hurricane season that
kicks off on 1 June. We really want every available asset ready
in the barn or out doing other missions and ready for the fight
on that front.
So thank you, sir.
Mr. Fleischmann. Yes, sir.
Creating a new type of cutter, Admiral, must always present
challenges to the Coast Guard and the shipbuilders as you bring
the next generation of cutters to the sea. The offshore patrol
cutter, however, has seen more than its fair share of
challenges on the road to delivery. Can you please provide an
update, sir, on how the delivery of the first hulls is coming
along? Will we see delivery by 2022, sir?
Admiral Schultz. Congressman, thanks for that question. And
as I mentioned briefly, we anticipate announcement here this
week on OPC number three and long lead time materials on number
four. So that is a good story. OPC number one, the Argus, is
more than 40 percent complete on her build. OPC number two, the
Chase, is in the low teen digits on her build. So I think the
2022 delivery, latter half of the calendar year, late part of
2022, I think we are still tracked. There has been no
contractual modifications to that.
You alluded to some of the challenges. You know, we awarded
a contract for the first build early on my watch in the fall of
2018, and then within 10 days, Hurricane Michael, after the
fact recategorized as a Category 5 hurricane, smashed through
Panama City down there where Eastern Shipbuilding Group is
located. And we did some work with the Department and oversight
from the Hill, some extraordinary contractual relief, but I
think that program is progressing forward very positively. And,
you know, that contract was for up to four ships, and we have--
we will be looking at a potential re-award here with many
different vendors in the coming months. So OPC, sir, I feel
confident is in a good place.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, sir.
Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Price.
Mr. Price. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Good morning, Admiral. We appreciate your testimony this
morning and your leadership in so many ways. We appreciate your
being here.
I want to raise some questions initially about Coast Guard
base Elizabeth City here in my home State of North Carolina. In
2019, before the curtain, the pandemic curtain, fell, you and I
were able to visit the base. It does contain, as you know, a
joint civil- and military-use airport. The Coast Guard has done
an outstanding job in that region, and I just want to
acknowledge that. We have a prized HBCU, Elizabeth City State
University, that has benefited greatly from the Coast Guard's
presence and partnership, including being able to use the
runways at the Coast Guard base for their flight training
program. It is the only 4-year professional flight training
program in the north--in the State of North Carolina, and it
has grown by 50 percent over the last 2 years. So it is
important to us.
Unfortunately, the growth has been stymied by the need for
an additional working runway at the air station. So that is
what I wanted to just ask you how we are doing on that. Without
a renovated runway, student pilots aren't going to be able to
log the hours and earn the FAA licenses they need for their
degrees.
The December omnibus bill provided $25 million for the
Coast Guard to renovate and recapitalize this runway, allowing
the airport to provide better service to the Coast Guard, to
university flight students, and to general aviation. Along with
that $25 million, December's conference report encouraged the
Coast Guard to work with the State and local partners,
including institutions of higher learning, to mutually benefit
the enhancements, to undertake mutually beneficial enhancement
to this runway.
So that is what I want to focus on here for a few minutes.
Can you provide an update on these discussions, the plans for
repairing this critical runway, including any cost estimates
that we should know about, the estimated timeframe you have for
completion, and any financial or operational partnerships,
commitments that you have made?
Admiral Schultz. Well, Congressman Price, good to see you,
sir, and I appreciate our chance to go down there. And as you
noted, sir, the 2021 appropriation does have that $25 million
for runway 119, and we are absolutely excited about that.
You alluded to our strong strategic partnership with
Elizabeth City, that university, and the aviation program
there, the shared use of that runway. That runway has suffered,
you know, crosswind challenges here. And that is a critically
important runway for us, sir. So where we are, I think we are
in the planning phase for that. I will have my team circle up
with your staff to give you a more detailed location. I don't
have fidelity on exact on that planning process. The
appropriations, you know, rolled in a few short months ago. It
takes us a while to spool up. There is many partnerships here
at the county and local level, sir. But I will make sure we
circle back and give your team the real fidelity on where we
stand today and projected timelines. I have not heard anything
to indicate the appropriated funds does not get us out of the
gate where we need to be, Congressman.
Mr. Price. All right. I will take you up on that. We would
appreciate that kind of update, and we will--we need to take
stock of this and see where we are and what might be required
from our side going forward. So I appreciate that offer, and we
will be conferring with you immediately on this. It is
important to us, and I know you understand that.
Admiral Schultz. Yes, sir.
Mr. Price. In the time I have remaining in this round, I
want to pick up on the chairwoman's line of questioning having
to do with the workforce. I know this is a major focus of
yours. It has also been a major focus of the subcommittee, and
we have had some challenges because these items were flatlined
for many years, but I know we have these investments underway
now. The latest budget gave you the ability to address some
workforce readiness issues, including childcare subsidies,
recruiting initiatives.
Let me just ask you to back away a bit and see if there are
major needs you would identify. In fact, let me just ask you
this way: What do you see as the greatest unmet need in your
workforce?
Admiral Schultz. Well, Mr. Price, I appreciate that
question. Just one last--circle back on just the last question.
So E City State University, we use that as a feeder for our
CSPI, our College Student Pre-Commissioning Initiative. That
has been a great feeder program for that. So just really thank
you for that partnership.
In terms of our workforce, I think the way forward, sir,
there, the committee picked up--there was many things in the
budget and they picked up many key issues off the unfunded
priority list, as Madam Chairwoman spoke to, and things--
behavioral health technicians, psychologists, sociologists--we
have hired about 11 of 13 slots. We are still trying to make
some final two hires up in Alaska where it is a little bit more
challenging to find people to go to some of those remote areas,
but that is a big deal.
Training and course development, the $6.4 million there
helps our workforce that is highly professional. They don't get
a ton of training.
Those key training interventions, we are doing blended
training. Where we used to send somebody for a longer school,
we are trying to figure out if we can shorten that up, keep
them at their operational unit longer, do some training online
to shorten the period. It is a little more targeted. Someone
that is at a small boat station that goes to boatswain mate A
school has already gotten many of the skills that the first few
weeks of that training involve. So we are getting more
strategic, smarter. Those funds have been helping there.
Recruiting and retention, that was an unfunded priority list
pickup to the tune of $6 million.
I think the key part of that, Congressman, is sustaining
momentum, you know. So these one-time injects are helpful. A
couple of them got folded into the future-year budgets. The
ones that come off the UPL, not all of them, get moved forward.
So where we can get on a healthy trajectory of 3 to maybe 5
percent annual growth, I think that is where we continue to win
in the competitive space.
And I will just go back to my comment about recruiting in a
very difficult environment. You know, retention bonuses, we
have given about 2,000--not retention--session bonus, about
$2,000. The bleak season for bringing recruits into Cape May,
New Jersey, is January, February, March. So we sweetened the
pot. We actually went up to about $7,000 because it was hard to
find young Americans to get on the bus and show up in Cape May
this past winter in the COVID environment.
We use it about $2,000. We cap out at $10,000 for, you
know, certain skill sets. The Army starts that conversation at
about $12,000. If you ship out in the first 30 days, it is a
$12,000 bonus. If you ship out 31 to 60 days, it is a $5,000
bonus. They go upwards of $40,000 to $60,000 for certain skill
sets. The Marine Corps is most common to us. They are about
3,000 recruits. They go up to about $12,000 for targeted skill
sets.
So it is about 27 percent of Americans viewed eligible to
serve, 10 percent with a propensity, and we are in that
difficult space. And I will tell you we don't have a big budget
for marketing and you don't see a lot of Coast Guard big
marketing during major sports events and the gaming
conferences. So we have to be very targeted through those 54
recruiting officers.
I think it is steady, continued partnership on the 3 to 5
percent growth. I think that is what puts us on the healthiest
trajectory with respect to workforce, sir.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. Mr. Palazzo.
Mr. Palazzo. Well, thank you, Madam Chair and Ranking
Member Fleischmann.
Thank you, Admiral Schultz, for being here today to discuss
the readiness of the Coast Guard and for your dedication to the
men and women you lead within your agency. I believe you have
done an extraordinary job with making sure the Coast Guard is
ready for what the future has in store. I am proud to have
worked with you and your team last year to ensure Coast Guard
retirement benefits are protected from future government
shutdowns. I am a huge fan of the Coast Guard. I believe that
they are the jack of all trades within the Department of
Homeland Security.
And as many of my colleagues also know, I do not miss a
chance to talk about the Coast Guard in their new and improved
national security role. Today, the Coast Guard has taken on a
bigger role than just securing ports in our maritime border. In
fact, it now has a global mission. The Coast Guard's vessels
and aircrafts are constantly deployed around the world to
protect America's economic prosperity, national security, and
borders, while also having a presence in cyber.
One of the biggest missions of the Coast Guard is their
role in the tri-service maritime strategy that focuses on the
threats from China and Russia. Along with the Navy and Marine
Corps, the Coast Guard's capabilities expand the options to
joint force commanders for better cooperation and competition.
The Coast Guard's mission profile also makes it the
preferred maritime security partner for many nations, and at
the cornerstone of this all is the national security cutter.
Since the first commissioned cutter in 2008, the national
security cutter has been a vital deepwater asset to the Coast
Guard. They have partnered with numerous countries in fighting
illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, which directly
impacts my district's economy on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, as
well as many other coastal communities.
NSCs have seized billions of dollars, billions with a "B,"
in drugs. And most recently, in around December 2020, the NSC
James offloaded $365 million worth of drugs that would have
entered our country, our communities, and found a way to harm
our kids.
NSCs have also been tasked to northern waters to monitor
Russian activities. The NSC Stone, the newest to the fleet, has
been tasked to work with the Navy's Fifth Fleet and Central
Command. One NSC has recently been deployed to the East China
Sea, partnering with a Navy destroyer to enforce U.N. sanctions
against North Korea. And just yesterday, the NSC Hamilton
transited into the Black Sea in support of our NATO allies.
Now, when it comes to a price tag, the national security
cutter absolutely pays for itself within the first year of the
deployment. And when it comes to capabilities, it is second to
none, an extremely capable, multi-mission ship. Now I have said
it many times before, but I won't hesitate to say it again: A
further investment for a twelfth NSC would ensure our Coast
Guard stays ahead of our adversaries and meets the military
needs hoisted upon them.
With that, Commandant, my first question for you today is:
As the United States looks at our near-peer threats like Russia
and China, what role do you think the Coast Guard will have
deterring these new threats?
Admiral Schultz. Well, Congressman, thank you for the
question, and thanks for highlighting, you know, sort of the
global stage that the Coast Guard is finding itself
increasingly a relevant instrument of national security upon.
Our National Security Cutter Hamilton, as you mentioned, did
enter the Black Sea, first time since 2008, and they got some
very exciting partnerships with NATO allies in the region. That
is an incredible class of ships.
You know, I think the Coast Guard brings a unique--I look
at the world of this flat table surface, you know, zero to 180
degrees. You know, our continuum: We will cooperate, compete,
and lethality. I think that zero to 150-degree arc is the
cooperate and compete base. And then lethality, we are written
into the war plans and we will support our DOD brethren and
sisters here in the high-end flight with national security
cutters, fast-response cutters, and port security capabilities.
In that day-to-day world of competition and cooperation, I
believe the Coast Guard, the world's best Coast Guard, can call
out a nation-state like China that, you know, they use their
Coast Guard, their people's maritime military militia to run
down, you know, Philippine or other Malaysian fishermen that
are in disputed regions. The world's best Coast Guard doesn't
operate that way. We champion a rules-based order, maritime
governance. I think our racing stripe, which you see replicated
across the globe, it is iconic and it denotes, connotates, you
know, rules-based order and adherence to all those right things
about facilitating commerce in what are free and open parts of
the ocean. So I think we bring an interesting voice.
The Stone was off the East Coast of South America. First
time we have been down there. We partnered with the Uruguayans,
the Argentinians, the Brazilians on IUU, illegal, unregulated,
and unreported, fishing. The largest--the largest deepwater
fishing fleet in the world is under the China flag state. There
was about 350 of them a year ago, and we are watching to see
what shakes out this year on the East Coast or--excuse me--the
West Coast of South America.
350 of them are operating around the Galapagos Marine
Reserve, a critically important maritime habitat. The
Ecuadorians asked us to come in and help them understand what
was going on. We sent the national security cutter there. In a
short few days, we identified some portion of a couple of dozen
vessels that seemed to be potentially spoofing their AIS's,
which connotates illicit activity.
So that deep water fleet is off the coast of Africa, East
and West. It is off the eastern coast of South America, and
there is no flag state oversight. So I think what we bring to
that is I don't have enough cutters to be the world's fish
police, but we can take a global leadership. We can integrate
academia, nongovernmental organizations, and like-minded
partners with their maritime capabilities and we can call out
that behavior.
So I think it is an increasing role. You mentioned sanction
enforcement against the DPRK back in 2019. We had two national
security cutters 5-month heel-to-toe deployments there. We just
got back with the Kimball out in Oceania, working out with the
Fijians and others.
There is--I will stop with just saying there is four law
enforcement detachments on Navy ships as we speak this morning,
two in the Pacific, two in the Oceania and Maritime Security
Initiative Patrols, and two in the Caribbean on that vector
between Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, Haiti.
Hispaniola, there has been two drug interdictions in the last
36 hours on that vector alone with airborne use of force, Navy
helicopters employed by a Coast Guard precision marksman. And
we are working closer than we ever have, sir. And you mentioned
the Hamilton. And those two fast response cutters are on their
way to Bahrain right now to join the Fifth Fleet, sir.
Mr. Palazzo. Thank you, Commandant.
Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Quigley.
Mr. Quigley. Thank you.
And that touched on an issue I was going to ask about, the
illegal, unreported, unregulated fishing. I mean, as deep a
dive as you want to take, I wouldn't mind--I don't know how
close you are to where we can actually go out there and see how
this work is going, just how this problem has grown, and what
else we can be doing to help you.
Admiral Schultz. Congressman, thank you. You know, I will
turn the clock back to the fall of 2018. The Navy in Newport
every other year has the International Seapower Symposium, and
I went up to talk about the work of the Coast Guard to
international partners. And many of the world's navies and
maritime forces look a lot like the United States Coast Guard.
So we have a connection there that just sort of forms
naturally. I was ready to take a lot of questions on counter-
narcotics and other threats, violent extreme threats. What I
heard the most about in 2018 was their concern with IUU
fishing, and I think we have processed that. We have upped our
game and put out a strategic outlook, a 10-year strategy this
past fall that talks about an elevated role for the Coast
Guard. Again--
Mr. Quigley. If you could send that to us, to my office
again. We have probably got it, but if you could send that to
us again, I would appreciate it.
Admiral Schultz. Congressman, we will send it up, and I
would be happy to come up and if your team would like a
briefing, offer that as well.
Mr. Quigley. Absolutely.
Admiral Schultz. Essentially, sir, it is a food sustainment
issue. It is a maritime governance issue. What we see is these
fishing states, these large states--you know, the IUU schema,
China is the largest fishing water fleet. Taiwanese, number
two. It is South Koreans, Japanese, Spain.
What the downside is, a lot of legitimate fishing goes on,
but the folks that are violating fishing norms, they come into
areas. There is ecological damage. We have seen what has
happened off the nearshore waters of China. Essentially, they
have been forced to push their fleets further. Jinping said,
hey, build bigger ships and go across the globe to find fish.
About a third of the fish we consume in this country comes in
through probably IUU-sourced fisheries.
So it is an issue at home. It is a competitive
disadvantage. We hold our American fishermen to standards. We
are an active flag state. There is also, you know, when you
look at the African Continent and you project out population
growth, you know, 40 percent of the protein on that continent
comes from the ocean. The Chinese are operating off the East
and West Coasts. There is backroom deals with no transparency.
Mr. Quigley. How close are they on those coasts?
Admiral Schultz. Sir, they are--they should be working
outside the exclusive economic zones of these nations, but
these nations have very little organic capacity to patrol their
waters. So, arguably, they are probably working as close to
their shores as they are not visible, and those catches get put
on processing ships and they go back to China. There is very
little local benefit derived economically from these large-
scale fishing operations.
Mr. Quigley. But how close to our shores are they?
Admiral Schultz. Well, sir, our shores, we have an active
presence. So we try to stymie, you know, illicit fishing inside
our EZ. And we are pretty darn good at that. It is at the end
of the day we have very few forum violations.
Where we see some challenge is we have some illegal Mexican
panga fisheries down in the Gulf of Mexico, and we thwart that.
And there is some, you know, challenging things with
neighboring partners and things that, you know, we are managing
that. That caseload is up and we are working with our NOAA
counterparts and State Department counterparts. But we are
large, sir. This is large-scale, industrial fishing. It has a
deleterious impact to the coastal state. It has a deleterious
impact to legitimate fishermen that are doing things by the
rules. And we would be happy to educate you and your staff,
sir, if you would like to learn more on that.
Mr. Quigley. Yeah, please do. And I am going to yield back.
But if you could reach out to my office, they are aware that
you will. We would like further briefings and try to see some
of this firsthand.
Admiral Schultz. Yes, sir.
Mr. Quigley. Thank you so much.
I yield back.
Admiral Schultz. Thank you for the question, Congressman.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Rutherford.
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And thank you, Admiral Schultz, for being here with us
today, talking about the men and women of the Coast Guard, and,
you know, the important role and the growing role, I think,
that the Coast Guard is going to play in our national security
interests.
And I want to echo too the comments that the chairwoman
made earlier in her opening statements. I was really concerned
when I didn't see any mention of the Coast Guard in the skinny
budget, which is a little disconcerting to me when, you know, I
know recently you mentioned that you need to see a 3 to 5
percent growth to close the readiness gap over the next 5
years. And so I am asking if the President's administration
understands the importance of closing that gap and, I think,
recognize the growing role that the Coast Guard is playing
around the globe in our national security interests.
And so I want to ask this, Admiral, because when you say 3
to 5 percent over the next 5 years and we look at where we need
to go, moving forward, I think with the growth of the mission,
and then we also look at, you know, the fact that we already
have, I think, a $2 billion backlog of infrastructure needs,
shore infrastructure needs, is that--is that 3 to 5 percent, is
that really going to be enough, Admiral? I just want to make
sure you are not selling yourself short here. And what does
that include? Does it include the Jayhawks? Does it include the
$2 billion?
Admiral Schultz. Well, Congressman, thank you for the
question and for your assessment of the landscape. I believe
the demands on the Coast Guard are unprecedented at this point.
There is a good news story in there, and there is a challenge
in there.
The good news story is I think people are seeing the unique
capabilities of our people and our platforms and our new
capabilities that we are building out with the support of the
committee.
On the infrastructure piece, I will start there, then I
will backfill on sort of my forecast of the budget without, you
know, crossing lines I shouldn't cross at this stage.
You know, when you look at our infrastructure, the average
age of our shore facilities is 38 years. Our housing average
age is 45 years. You know, a healthy organization recapitalizes
somewhere between 2 and 4 percent of their infrastructure on an
annual basis. We are somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of
that healthy rate in the Coast Guard, which, you know, if you
kind of project that out, we would be recapitalizing our
infrastructure every 267 years. So that is unsustainable, and
we pull a huge backlog.
With the help of the committee, we are making some
progress. When I turn the hands of time back to the 2018
budget, the former administration came in and identified
challenges in the readiness of the Nation's Armed Forces. There
was a 12 percent budget growth there. Outside of the
Department, we didn't win in that space, but we have been on a
much healthier trajectory with the support of this committee
and your senatorial counterparts, and that is a, you know, a
positive slope in the right direction. I think we need to
continue that.
You know, with the support of this committee, we have
raised the narrative about Coast Guard readiness, and I had
more conversations than I suspect many of my predecessors in
the previous administration with the national security
apparatus, and that has translated to the new administration.
So we have--I have been in the room with the National Security
Advisor and Jonathan Winer and subordinate elements, many phone
calls. I think folks recognize the critical importance of the
Coast Guard in the Arctic, to the Indo-Pacific. You know,
cooperate, compete continuum I alluded to earlier in Mr.
Palazzo's questions.
Congressman, I am guardedly optimistic that we are, you
know, pushing out a compelling narrative. And, obviously, till
the budget reaches the Congress here, you know, I am
sequestered on that, but we have had a chance to put our voice
into that, more so than in the past, and this committee has
been, you know, paramount to those efforts.
So I remain guardedly optimistic that we are on a positive
trajectory. You can certainly accelerate that. And you asked
about the helicopters. That is a big, evolving need. We didn't
anticipate that urgency and that is not a tomorrow urgency, but
as we wait for future vertical lift coming out of DOD, you
know, 15, 20 years down the road, we are going to have to press
into that. And we have already got some help with replacement
hulls, service-life extension hulls--yes, sir.
Mr. Rutherford. So, Admiral, if I could ask specifically
about the Jayhawks, so were they part of that 3 to 5 percent
growth or is that on top of?
Admiral Schultz. Well, sir, we had some funding in the 2020
appropriation, the 2021 appropriation for new hull service-life
extension program. We have the capability in Elizabeth City,
Congressman Price's district, at the Aviation Logistics Center.
We can take former Navy hulls. They take a 60 helicopter with
$8,000, $10,000. They put it out to the boneyard.
We can take the good hulls. There is about a 6 or 8 percent
failure rate. But 92 percent of those hulls, we have got
somewhere north of three, four dozen hulls on site now. We can
reconfigure those hulls almost like the overhaul show, the car
show. We can do some remarkable things. Now, there are only a
few a year. Now there is a program Senator Shelby has been very
much championing with some new hulls, new cabins, and I think
between a blend of those sundowner former Navy hulls, some new
hulls that have been appropriated in 2021, some running room
ahead to still bring some more in and some maintenance for
manpower, we can build that fleet out I think in the coming
years. We owe more fidelity to the committee on that, but I
think we are on the start of that but there is some additional
funds to support that, sir.
Mr. Rutherford. Okay. Admiral, thank you very much for that
answer and clarifying that situation.
My time has expired. I will yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Aguilar.
Mr. Aguilar. Thanks so much, Madam Chair.
Good to see you, Admiral. Thanks for joining us.
And just piggybacking off of those last comments, I
appreciate that you feel you have more visibility into the
budgeting process moving forward than you have in the past.
I wanted to ask you, in your 2021 State of the Coast Guard
address, you talked, just as you talked to Mr. Palazzo, about
the national security threats and some of the tonnage that you
have captured of illegal drugs over the last few years, 2.4
million pounds of illegal drugs over the last 5 years this year
alone. Coast Guard Cutters Bertholf and Munro seized 7,500
pounds of cocaine in San Diego in March, and the Coast Guard
and Navy jointly interdicted over 11,400 pounds of cocaine in
February.
It is clear that the U.S.'s efforts to fight drug
trafficking and prevent these illicit drugs from reaching our
soil are conducted mostly through the Coast Guard. What
capabilities most assist you in these drug interdictions? And
what additional capabilities or resources do you feel would
ensure that you would continue to have effective counter-drug
trafficking visibility into these transit zones?
Admiral Schultz. Well, Congressman, thank you for the
question. And there is a lot of parts to that. But we
historically have been averaging about 460,000 pounds, you
know, about 200, 210 metric tons a year removed by Coast Guard
forces. There is a good news story. As the work of U.S.
Southern Command working through the Coast Guard flag-led Joint
Interagency Task Force South, we see partner nations here in
the Western Hemisphere contributing to about 65 percent of the
cases. And about 40 percent of those cases, they are
responsible for endgame. You know, it is below the tear line
information provide those nations and their forces supported
through the Department of State initiatives, Department of
Defense initiatives. There is some places where you buy boats
to support. You know, theState Department might buy a boat for
the Guatemalan forces of Special Naval. Then SOUTHCOM can layer
in some outboard engine repair, some communications
capabilities, some Coast Guard training, maybe some special
force training. Then those forces go out and they conduct law
enforcement operations with good success.
Where that hasn't matured is, as those forces go out and
interdict, they don't have the same level of prosecutorial
success. You know, we interdict folks at sea, high seas. We
bring them back. We bring them into what we call the
interdiction cycle. They go before a--you know, they go--turn
them over to another agency. We detain them. They effect an
arrest. They appear in the U.S. criminal justice system. You
know, there is a deal copped, so they do a sentence. Then they
turn some information. That feeds the interdiction cycle.
Our operations, counter-narcotics operations, are
increasingly informed by intelligence. So what are those key
partnerships? It is national intelligence capability. We
compete with, you know, the ongoing China pacing threat. We
compete with the VEO threat, you know. So there is a finite
amount of national intelligence capability, and we try to get
some portion of that satellite-based information, et cetera.
Our Navy colleagues, I mentioned the two law enforcement
captions onboard Navy ships. We did have an enhanced counter-
narcotic operation last year with more naval presence. I am the
last guy to say the Navy should or shouldn't be doing more
counter-narcotics work. They have many competing demands, you
know, with that increasingly aggressive Russia and the Med and
the Black Sea where we are operating now with China pacing it.
But when there is a Navy surface combatant, I will put a
law enforcement detachment. I will put a precision marksman on
their helicopter. We will expand our capacity. DOD contribution
to maritime patrol aircraft, those P-8s, high demand across the
globe. But when we get those P-8s in the SOUTHCOM region, the
eastern Pacific, the Caribbean Western Center Security, those
are the best detection platforms out there.
Customs and Border Protection inside the DHS team fence
line, they support a lot of the maritime patrol aircraft. So
support for CBP Air and Marine, that is a key enabler. And we
are looking to build out some more capability in our long land-
based unmanned aero systems. So right now, we are partnered
with CBP on what we call the MQ-9 maritime Guardian. There is a
bigger model out there that Insicha (ph) has and we would like
to continue to partnership with DHS S&T, with CBP, with
SOUTHCOM.
And, sir, it is capacity game. You know, we are effective
and, again, on target. We just got a finite amount of capacity
to put against the challenge.
Mr. Aguilar. The administration has talked about addressing
the root cause of migration in Central and South America. Much
of the instability is caused by gangs and other criminal
organizations in that region.
You talked a little bit about the coordination with Latin
America partners, but what other roles can we expect the Coast
Guard to play as the administration engages in Latin America?
Admiral Schultz. Yeah, Congressman, I would tell you, you
are spot on. I would tell you, you know, the Central American
quarter, the Northern Triangle countries--Honduras, El
Salvador, Guatemala--they are absolutely the corruption, the
instability, the squalor that takes--you know, sends people to
send their children north to try to cross the U.S. southwest
land border is very much tied to the counter-narcotics work.
I think where you see increasing roles is we will continue
to partner. We will continue to build out that success of the
partners in the region and their capabilities. I think when we
can stop those drugs from making landfall in those areas, we
can, you know, help drive down the instability. I pay keen
attention to what is going on, you know, what the
administration discussions are down there.
Iota and Eta, the two hurricanes that, you know, ravaged
the region, close proximity, close proximity on the calendar
and geographically. You know, on occasion we have Coast Guard
assets that will send helicopters in or support our southbound
colleagues, to offer some immediate relief and, you know,
immediate food, water, rescue type work. I think it will be
capacity building, sir. It will be continued counter-narcotics
work.
Mr. Aguilar. Thanks, Admiral. My time is up. I am so sorry.
Thanks, Admiral.
Admiral Schultz. My apologies, sir. I was a little long on
your time. My apologies.
Mr. Aguilar. Thanks, Madam Chair.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. That completes the first round, and we
do have time for another round in which, Admiral, you will be
able to expand on many of the questions that have been asked.
I know that there are several issues that have been touched
on that I was going to ask some questions about, but I would
like to talk a little bit about some of the items that were on
the unfunded priorities list which we funded. And these items
fall under the category that you designated as the technology
revolution, and includes investments in cybersecurity readiness
and the next generation underway in cutter connectivity.
Could you describe some of the technology challenges the
Coast Guard has faced and how these appropriated funds are
making a difference? And, in addition, if you could please
describe other investments that you would prioritize to
continue modernizing the Coast Guard's technology
infrastructure.RPTR MOLNAREDTR ZAMORA[11:01 a.m.]
Admiral Schultz. Yes, Madam Chairwoman, thank you for that
question. And the funding and the funding items off the
unfunded priorities list have been usually impactful and
helpful. Phone system monitorization at our 35 sectors--we have
a antiquated phone system--this allows us to go to modern
voice-over-internet protocol. So this is basic stuff, that we
can't hear the mariner in distress and have a functional
system, you know, we can't respond in a timely manner. And we
are getting after that with the funding there, the $6.5 million
in many of our sectors.
And now as I have traveled the Coast Guard in the last 24
months, a little less so the past year than I typically do, I
have heard that in many sectors and we are actioning that as we
sit here today.
Next generation cutter underway connectivity, and that is
to the tune of $15 million. So you think about those deployed
ships that are down range, particularly in a COVID environment,
the only liberty, time off, or port visit they see is to go in
and get fuel and groceries. So our men and women have been at
sea 185 days, you know, broken into 70-, 90-, 60-day chunks of
that with no port call. So the ability to do their job, link
back to mother Coast Guard and do their work, which is all
computer-based today, it is enhanced by connectivity, to have
some reach back to their families, when they, you know, can't
get to a cell phone or pay phone or go shore, hugely impactful.
Cutter connectivity allows us to optimize the productivity
of our ships. It is the high-end information to do operations.
It is the day-to-day business of the ships. So when a sailor is
back at the dock, they can take some time off after, you know,
an arduous 90-day patrol, get a 72-hour, 96-hour break, then
come back to the workplace. They don't have to hold all that
workload and batch load it at the dock here when they should be
home spending time with families or with their interests.
Cyber readiness, absolutely. We are building out our second
cyber protection team with funding, our cyber--CMT, Cyber
Mission Team. We are building that workforce out that is really
going to allow us to excel as a regulatory net cyberspace. So
our 365 or so ports, we fielded people at our two area commands
in our nine districts this year that will interface on cyber,
bring some expertise to the field because that increasingly
complicated landscape--out in your State, ma'am, California, 40
percent of all America's goods come from the ports of L.A. and
L.B., the containerized traffic.
And they come up through the rail system to the hard haul.
You go about 72, 96 hours from some kind of a man-made cyber
intrusion that shuts the port down, [inaudible] Back here a
couple of years ago, you know, that can cripple that port, and
we will feel that on the shelves of Walmart and Macy's and
Target in less than a week. So there is a cyber element that
the funding has helped us get after.
Cyber retention. Those are bright young men and women.
Bringing them in, keeping them in, we have got to think about
different agility and permeability for that workforce. But,
ma'am, those big data platform, I had a team in yesterday. We
have our senior leaders holding a conference this week, and we
need to inform our decisionmaking with that analytics.
So we have, you know, followed data streams. We need to
clean up our data. We need to get it into a clean data lake,
and then we could start harnessing that data, that information,
to really be a data-informed, agile, decisionmaking
organization.
So, ma'am, that tech revolution, as I sort of coined the
term a couple years back, and the dollars against that have
been hugely impactive. In our young workforce, we are fielding
mobility. You know, those inspectors in Los Angeles, Long
Beach, they go out and they spend 8-, 10-hour day, doing, you
know, Act C (ph) inspections, regulatory inspections, for
safety, environmental compliance, make sure if it is a cruise
ship, that someone's aunt or grandparent goes out there, the
crews is trained, the lifeboats are certified.
They have to come back and fat-finger all that inspection
work for hours at their desks. It is mobility that enables
that. The inspect application just rolled out. We started with
a mobility solution, about 600 iPads, and we didn't have the
technology to really enable them.
We have been talking about this for years. Now--it started
off like a Kindle. They didn't have to bring a backpack of
books. Now they actually have the inspect application, they are
doing the data upload in the field. We are going to do that for
our law enforcement team.
So the funds, ma'am, have enabled us to really compete for
the smart young minds and keep them in the Coast Guard because
they don't have more mobility on their personal device than
they have in the Coast Guard-provided solution set from a
technology standpoint.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you.
Mr. Fleischmann.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chair, and I am back. I
want to thank Ranking Member Palazzo for sitting in for me
while I asked my questions of the Labor Secretary.
Commandant, you and I have gone up to the Arctic together,
and I really appreciated that trip. We have seen over the past
few years a rise in military activity by the Russians and the
Chinese in the Arctic, sir.
I know we talked about this at length with Admiral Bell
when we were in Alaska almost 2 years ago, but recently, we are
seeing news of greater activity and Russian military investment
in the Arctic. How is the Coast Guard responding or preparing
for this emerging threat? And are you getting support from the
Department of Defense and through budget to get resources that
you need to continue with your frontline position in the
Arctic, sir?
Admiral Schultz. Well, Congressman, you spoke to the
increasing geostrategic importance of the Arctic, and that is
absolutely critical. I just came back from Alaska this past
weekend and had the privilege of meeting with Governor Dunleavy
and the two Alaska Senators. We talked a lot about what is
necessary in the Arctic.
You know, I have used the phrase that presence equals
influence in the high latitudes, both Antarctica and the
Arctic. And we haven't had much presence up there. You know, we
lost the Healy last summer, and that was unfortunate.
But the Healy is back. We will send the Healy, working
closely in collaboration with the Canadians across the
Northwest Pass. So they will enter through the Bering, transit
across North America. We will push the Healy out to the
Atlantic, probably up to Greenland. I wish I could push her
further, but the amount of available days--she will have
scientists on board. We will have international partners. We
will have Navy sailors on board. We will be building out our
Arctic capabilities.
What we saw last year--and this is open-source
information--you know, China has an increasingly repetitive
presence in the Arctic. Probably 6, 7 or the last 8, 9 years,
they have been up there with one of their two research--they
started with one Ukrainian-obtained research vessel, the Snow
Dragon I. They built a second ship--
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Admiral? Admiral, I am going to have to
ask you to stop. That phone call was that apparently we have
lost our live stream, so we have to pause for a few minutes so
it can be reset.
Admiral Schultz. Yes, ma'am. We are holding here.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay.
[Recess.]
Mr. Palazzo. Madam Chair?
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Yes.
Mr. Palazzo. Madam Chair, I am going to have to jump off at
10:30, and I think it is 10:30 right now.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Right.
Mr. Palazzo. I just wanted to--I wanted to thank you for
the hearing, and also Ranking Member Fleischmann. I would like
to say my colleagues had some outstanding questions and
comments today. But I also would like to just thank the
commandant for his service and commitment and dedication to our
Nation. He is the right man--or the right person, you know, to
be politically correct, for the job to lead the Coast Guard.
And we look forward to the new vice commandant as well. I
hope, you know, she will be making some Hill visits in the
future after she is confirmed. But really, I just wanted to
thank the commandant, and please tell your Coasties and their
families how much we appreciate their service and sacrifice as
well. But I have to go.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. Thank you, Congressman. And if
there is any additional questions that you would like to
submit, please do so.
Mr. Palazzo. I sure will. There will be some questions for
the record.
Commandant, have a great day.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. Thank you.
Admiral Schultz. Thank you, Congressman.
Mr. Price. Madam Chair, I have got the same problem. I had
a good question for the second round, but we will submit it for
the record.
Commandant, glad to see you. Appreciate everything. Hope we
will be able to sit down in person before long.
Admiral Schultz. Thank you, Congressman Price, sir. Good to
see you, sir.
Mr. Price. Yeah.
Thanks, Lucille. Good hearing, though--
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. But--
Mr. Price. --apart from the disruptions. What are they
telling you about the--
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Apparently, it is systemwide. All the
subcommittees that are in session right now are having the same
problem.
Mr. Price. My staff had told me that. They were monitoring
two hearings and said that they both were out.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Yeah. So--
Mr. Price. [inaudible.]
Ms. Roybal-Allard. --I will just give it a few more
minutes, and then if, you know, members have to leave, it is
understandable. And we apologize, Admiral, for this.
Mr. Price. Thanks, everyone.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thanks, David.
Admiral Schultz. Madam Chair, I am on your schedule, ma'am.
So we are completely flexible here, and we are standing by.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay, thank you.
[Recess.]
Mr. Aguilar. Chairwoman, I am going to have to go. I am
sorry.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Can you just hold 1 second?
Mr. Aguilar. Yeah.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay.
Mr. Fleischmann. While we are all waiting, I have got some
happy news. I spoke with Director Murray the other day, and his
daughter is heck-bent on attending the Coast Guard Academy and
is going to spend, I think, a year at, I believe the Navy prep
school. But she wants to go to the Coast Guard Academy, and I
was just so tickled about that.
And we had that talk the other day. We have him, Lucille,
before us, I think, next week, I believe. But so glad to hear
that she wants to be a Coast Guard officer. And admiral
probably, commandant already probably knows that.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. That is great.
Chuck, I am calling you.
Mr. Fleischmann. Oh, you are calling me? Okay.
Admiral Schultz. Thanks for that word, Congressman. Jim
Murray is a friend, and I am excited to hear his daughter is--
that extra year is committed to coming to join our ranks. That
is fantastic, sir.
[Recess.]
Ms. Roybal-Allard. So, Pete, yeah, unfortunately, they are
not able to fix it, but I see that we have both you and
Rutherford who stayed on. So if there is anything that you
would like to ask of the admiral, even though we won't be, you
know, streaming, I want to give you that opportunity. And I
think we can thank the ranking member, Fleischmann,for that
opportunity. That was the discussion we just had.
Anything that you want to follow through with?
Mr. Aguilar. Yeah. I would just say, Admiral, real fast,
you know, just to kind of pull at that thread a little bit more
about the transnational drug trafficking. You know, you talked
a little bit about the Latin American, you know, posture and
what we can do.
You know, how can we kind of complement that on the mil-to-
mil side, you know, as well? You know, that was probably going
to be my next question.
Admiral Schultz. Yeah, Congressman, I think as I--you know,
there is--the package that allows the Coast Guard to be most
effective down there is a what we call a large cutter, a
national security cutter or offshore patrol cutter, and some of
the medium endurance-class cutters.
We are doing some innovative things with the fast response
cutters that the committee has been tremendously supportive.
Funding in the 2021 actually built out the last four hulls. So
58 domestic, four or six over in the Arabian Gulf.
But they are complemented by maritime patrol aircraft. That
DOD piece, we get a lot of support from them. So Customs and
Border Protection are inside the DHS family, Coast Guard C-130
airplanes, sometimes a CASA 235 is a little shorter range,
those DOD P-8s, other capabilities.
There is contract work, though, that SOUTHCOM does. It is a
bunch of government-owned, contract-operated aircraft down
there. All those things come together, sir.
Really it is a capacity conversation. When we can put more
in the fight, we have got intelligence to see 70, 80 percent--
Mr. Aguilar. Yeah.
Admiral Schultz. --of the activity. We don't have the
capacity. But, again, I am cautious with all the demands on my
Navy brethren here, you know, across the globe, to not sign
them up for more. But I will enable a Navy ship with a law
enforcement attachment which brings the ability to do law
enforcement there.
We will continue to work with the partner nations. I mean,
we are good at that mission, sir. It is just the--
Mr. Aguilar. Yeah.
Admiral Schultz. --you could take the entire United States
and kind of lay it in the eastern Pacific Ocean. And I make the
analogy at times, like the handful of police operating from
Columbus, Ohio, doing speeding across the whole Nation,
checking the whole Nation. They got to bring them into the
station when they catch them.
So it is a vast area, but what we have done and do does
matter, sir. It matters, as you said, in that Central American
quarter, to the instability in that region that fuels the
migration. It is all sort of interplayed, inter-tied there,
sir.
Mr. Aguilar. Okay. I appreciate it. Thanks, Admiral.
Admiral Schultz. Thanks for your interest in that too.
Mr. Aguilar. Of course.
Mr. Rutherford. Madam Chair, if I could ask just one quick
question--
Ms. Roybal-Allard. That was another call. Actually, we are
back on streaming, so, Pete, your question was live. Any other
question that you want to ask? I know you have to run, and then
I am going to turn to Mr. Rutherford.
Okay, John? Mr. Rutherford.
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And, Admiral, thank you for being here with us even through
the downtime.
I want to go back to the issue of China, the challenges
that we are going to face with China and are facing around the
globe. And Coast Guard response, you mentioned earlier, for the
Galapagos Islands and that 15 fleet that China has [inaudible.]
You know, I am very concerned when I look at this whole Belt
Road Initiative that China is really pushing their influence
deep into hemisphere now. And we see that with Ecuador, we see
that they have been in Guyana, they have been in Suriname. It
is disconcerting to see these moves.
The South China Sea is another area that I know you all are
addressing as well. Can you talk a little bit about the future
needs? You know, what can we do in Congress to help you with,
really, this global national security aspect in pushing back on
the Chinese?
Admiral Schultz. Yeah, Congressman, thank you for the
question. I would say, starting at the end with your question,
I think where the Congress can be the most helpful is
maintaining momentum on our major recapitalization program, so
those initiatives that Madam Chairwoman has led the committee--
and Mr. Fleischmann--on people initiatives. I think people
readiness, new capabilities that allows us to be the Coast
Guard the Nation needs.
I look out to the Oceania region--I mentioned there are a
few law enforcement attachments on naval combatants today--
Oceania Maritime Security Initiative, doing that. We have got
three fast response cutters that the committee has supported in
Guam. I will be out there commissioning those ships in August.
Those are tremendously capable. They are 154-foot length
over the water, crewed by 24 Coast Guard men and women. They
got about 10,000 miles of expeditionary range. I think we bring
a people-to-people way to partner.
You know, it is not as expedient as a checkbook, but I
believe that region of the world, you date back to the history
of the war and, you know, when we fought on the beaches of
Guadalcanal and throughout the Solomon Islands and other
places.
I believe they value our Western--our lifestyle, our
cultures, our democratic ideals. I think the Coast Guard is in
that space on a people-to-people basis, sir. So I think that is
important. Offshore Patrol Cutters will give us a further reach
in that part of the world, sir.
I think it is this IU fishing where we can call out those
distant-water behaviors, funding to help us link up--the tech
revolution ties to that--an enabled workforce, the ability to
do data interlinks as we look into those increasingly
complicated problem sets.
And then I think there is a piece where we see, you know,
nation states in the cyber domain. And I think, you know, we
have seen--
Mr. Rutherford. Right.
Admiral Schultz. --you know, the SolarWinds linking back to
Russia. We need to protect the 95 percent of U.S. economic
commerce that happens on the oceans. That is an increasingly
complicated threat scape. And as we build out cyber
capabilities, I think all those things are places, sir, where
the United States Coast Guard, with that 3 to 5 percent
growth--probably we will catch up--but if we stay on the
trajectory that Congress has set us on, maybe a few infusions,
continue to pick some things up, you pull above the President's
budget. So I think we have the Coast Guard that pulls us into
the 21st century, and we can be a real useful tool for the
United States, writ large, as we compete in this great power
paradigm we find ourselves.
Mr. Rutherford. Exactly, Admiral. And that is going to
require that you have the best training, the best prepared
leadership possible. And so that is one reason I am very proud
to serve on the Board of Visitors for the Coast Guard Academy.
And I want to ask--you know, one of the things that I am trying
to do is really make the Coast Guard Academy attractive to our
military service academy applicants.
Are there some things that you think we can help you with
in achieving that mission of bringing those young men and women
in? And I think the things that you talked about earlier with
the chairwoman on, you know, this diversity of outreach and all
is going to be very important in that success. Can you talk a
little bit about that?
Admiral Schultz. Sure, Congressman. I would tell you our
flagship institution for officer development and commissioning
officers, all our officer programs at the Academy, both the
Officer Candidate School and the Coast Guard Academy, it is
about a 50/50 split that we feed officers, even some direct-
commission officers maybe come in with law degrees. We bring
them in as an 03, a lieutenant, in the Coast Guard.
So that is our center of gravity, that 103 acres in
Connecticut. I think what helps us is, a lot of aging, old
infrastructure there, it is part of the infrastructure
conversation I talked about with, you know, 38-year-old
buildings, on average, and, you know, I think we just opened up
a new modern fitness facility there.
When you are competing with these bright young men and
women with a lot of choices, other service academies, you know,
other great academic institutions, it is a pretty high bar to
get in. You know, they visit, they see old stuff, you know,
maybe at the end of the day they might go elsewhere.
So I think we are on that trajectory, sir, but I think
there is a branding issue. I think some additional help and
continued help on recruiting. I think those things help.
I think, you know, broadening diversity, those 40 percent
of women graduates seeing Vice Admiral Fagan as Admiral Fagan
and then Vice Commandant, you know, bringing more women into
our flag ranks, all those things are enabled by that steady,
predictable funding, Congressman.
So I think we are on a good trajectory. And I just was
cautioning the committee earlier, say change doesn't come fast
when the numbers are small. There is a certain sort of quality
and quantity, as the Russians say, on how fast you move the
service. But I think we are on a good trajectory, and this
continued support, sir, I think, is the best way to get it
there as quickly as we possibly can.
Mr. Rutherford. Well, I am very proud to support the Coast
Guard and everything that our Coasties are doing out there. So,
with that, Admiral, thank you very much.
And, Madam Chair, I see my time is up. I yield back.
Admiral Schultz. Thanks for your participation as a Board
of Visitors member at the Academy, Congressman. That is an
important thing, and we are getting ready to sort of activate
that again here given some of the COVID time-out we had to take
this past 14 months or so, sir.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. I just want to say that I think another
thing--and we have talked about this, Admiral--in attracting
more young people to the Coast Guard, is actually helping them
in terms of the information they get to understand what the
mission is, the broad mission of the Coast Guard is, such as,
you know, the drug interdiction, protecting our country, you
know, up in the Alaska regions against, you know, Russians and
the Chinese.
I don't think that, in general, the public understands just
the critical mission that you all have and how expansive it is.
Very often it is just seen most of the time as, you know,
rescuing someone, you know, who is drowning in the ocean.
But when I have talked to young people and explained to
them about the mission, the broad mission of the Coast Guard,
there is a lot more interest in joining, as compared--because
they know what the Marines do, they know, you know, what the
Navy does. But I don't think there is a very good understanding
of what the entire mission is of the Coast Guard.
So I would say, work on the PR in helping, not just young
people, but I think our country as a whole to understand just
how critical the Coast Guard is to the security of our country.
So I just want to add that as part of the answer, Mr.
Rutherford. At least that has been my experience in talking
with young people in the district when I have my Academy day.
They really don't know just how important the Coast Guard is.
Mr. Fleischmann, I know that you had a question and that
the Admiral didn't have an opportunity to fully answer it. Is
there anything that you want to add, Admiral, that you want to
complete an answer to the question that was asked before you
were cut off.
Mr. Fleischmann. Well, I--
Admiral Schultz. I would probably come back to you on the
Academy things, but I would like to defer to the ranking
member, and we will finish that conversation, then maybe just
offer a couple just thoughts on what you brought up about our
branding and those things. I think you are right on the mark.
So, Congressman Fleischmann, I will defer to you, sir.
Mr. Fleischmann. Well, Admiral, I think you adequately and
very succinctly and very efficiently answered that question on
the Russia and China threat in the Arctic. And I know you are
involved in that, so I trust that that work will continue. But
I am satisfied with the response.
And, Madam Chair, whenever you decide to adjourn, I am
willing to do that as well.
And, Commandant, thank you. You and I are going to work
together, as we always have, and I just appreciate everything
you do for the Coast Guard and for our country, sir.
Admiral Schultz. Thank you, Ranking Member Fleischmann. It
is always an honor to work with the committee and yourself and
Madam Chairwoman.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. So, Admiral, you said you had
another response.
Admiral Schultz. Yes, ma'am. I was just going to--Madam
Chair, I was just going to comment, I think your assessment is
right, and I think that is a recruiting piece where it is a
very expensive market.
I think this program we have with some new officer,
recruiters, I have mentioned Norfolk, Atlanta, New Orleans, I
would love to grow that from four, you know, one
programatically here in Washington, the student office, and get
some folks to your district, Southern California. There are
places I can name right now, the next five or six.
So I think we are rolling that out. The bodies are en route
this summer. I think we will look to expand that. I think that
will be part of that story. And I think pressing in a little
bit on our recruiting budget--you know, I looked at the
Marines, the Army. They are going to these video conferences--
or video-gaming conferences, you know, they are in those
spaces. You see the NFL, they are there.
They are expensive. I am not saying we jump there, but we
absolutely have an organization with an incredible, you know,
portfolio of 11 statutory missions. It is hard to roll it down
to a three-byte elevator speech, but I think when we have
people in the schools, when we can, you know, get a little bit
more marketing in terms of national branding, I think that is
where we reach folks.
So that 40 or--is about a 52 recruiting officer reduction
back in 2013 and 2014, the sequestration, that hurt. And I
think strategically, maybe reopening in some places, really if
we can do this with the tech revolution, some of the funds you
gave us.
Right now, a recruiter has to meet a young man or woman,
they have to bring them back to the recruiting office to sign
them up and to actually seal the deal with the paperwork and
the Coast Guard. Doing that and the mobility--the two-in-one
mobility solutions we have given them, that is going to be
game-changing, and you have helped us on that trajectory.
So I am encouraged that we are going to do better, but your
assessment is spot on the mark, ma'am. You know, we have got to
get--we have got a great brand, we have never been more
relevant and impactful, but we got to be able to tell that
story across America, in the schools and in the recruiting
locations. So you have my commitment to continue to work on
that, ma'am, and I will continue to be frank with you on our
needs to better that.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. That is very much appreciated. And
since we have ran out of time, Admiral, I just want to say
thank you for your time. Apologize for the delay.
You know, I think just from the statements that have been
made by the subcommittee, there is the realization of the
critical role that you play in our national security, and I can
assure you that to the best of our ability, that we will
support its mission and its personal--personnel. So thank you
again.
And the committee now stands adjourned.
Admiral Schultz. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
[Whereupon, at 12:01 p.m., the subcommittee was
adjourned.]HUNT REPORTING COMPANYRPTS SOUZAHAP126.150THE
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITYAPPROPRIATIONS FOR 2022Thursday,
May 6, 2021UNITED STATES SECRET SERVICETHE DEPARTMENT OF
HOMELAND SECURITYAPPROPRIATIONS FOR 2022Thursday, May 6,
2021UNITED STATES SECRET SERVICEWITNESSJAMES MURRAY,
DIRECTORUNITED STATES SECRET SERVICE
Ms. Roybal-Allard. The subcommittee on Homeland Security
will come to order. During today's virtual hearing, members are
responsible for muting and unmuting themselves. When you are
recognized to speak, if I notice that you have not unmuted
yourself, I will ask you if you would like the staff to unmute
you. If you indicate approval by nodding, staff will unmute
your microphone. To avoid inadvertent background noise, the
chair or staff designated by the chair may mute participant
microphones when they are not recognized to speak. If there is
a technology issue during the member's speaking time, we will
move to the next member until the issue is resolved, and you
will retain the balance of your time. We will be following the
five-minute rule. With one minute remaining in your time the
clock on your screen will turn yellow. When your time has
expired, the clock will turn red and it will be time to
recognize the next member. We will follow the speaking order
set forth in the House rules, beginning with the chair and
ranking member, followed by members present at the time the
hearing is called to order in order of seniority, and we will
alternate by party. Next, we will go to members who were not
present when the hearing was called to order until every member
present has had a first round. Members can submit information
in writing at any of our hearings or markups using the email
address provided in advance to your staff. So let's begin. I
welcome James Murray, Director of the United States Secret
Service. This is the Director's first time to testify in front
of the subcommittee, and he is here to discuss his agency's
operations, particularly his protective security activities.
Director Murray, you are charged with two primary missions:
Protecting the President, key officials and foreign
dignitaries; and investigating threats to our currency and
financial systems and infrastructures. This presidential
transition year, the Secret Service has a heavy protective
workload that began with a completed presidential inauguration.
There are also several major and national special security
events tentatively planned, including high level submits and
the UN General Assembly in New York City. In addition, the
agency is protecting a comparatively large number of protectees
beyond the President, Vice-President and their families. This
includes some from the prior administration who have been
temporarily extended protection. I hope you will use this
hearing as an opportunity to provide us with a candid
assessment of whether your current year funding is sufficient
to carry out your protection responsibilities. We appropriated
extra funding in our fiscal year 2021 bill in anticipation of
these costs, but I am concerned about whether those resources
are sufficient. We also want to hear details about your
challenges related to cyber fraud, maintaining a workforce
hiring pipeline and training capacity aligned with future
staffing requirements and operations during the pandemic. While
I know you are still limited in what you can say about the
budget requests for the coming year, we will want to have a
good discussion about what it will take to address all of these
challenges, both now and in fiscal year 2022. I would now like
to turn to the distinguished gentleman from Tennessee, Ranking
Member Fleischmann, for his opening remarks.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman, and I
appreciate your opening remarks and holding this hearing today.
Director Murray, thank you very much for being with us here
today as we discuss operational priorities for the Secret
Service. I hope we get a chance at some point, sir, to discuss
the fiscal year 2022 budget requests in the near future. I do
want to say since we spoke recently about a week or so ago, I
had the privilege of meeting with your local folks from the
Nashville and Chattanooga offices as I do on a regular basis.
They are truly, like yourself, sir, outstanding, but I wanted
to convey that, that we had that meeting. As I have told you
before, I have tremendous pride working with the Secret Service
as the ranking member of this subcommittee. And it goes without
saying that you and your agents have done an incredible job
throughout this pandemic. You have successfully managed
protective operations throughout a long and contentious
election cycle under the threat of COVID and transitioned
seamlessly from one administration to another, valiantly
securing the increased number of protectees under the agency's
watch. Additionally, you have also made significant strides in
countering financial fraud and cybercrimes, a growing threat as
government COVID assistance program are hit by fraudsters and
criminals who have come out of the woodwork in an attempt to
exploit programs intended to help support those individuals
most in need during these difficult times. So thank you for
protecting both the needy from these hoaxes as well as the
integrity of our financial systems. Most impressively, all of
this work was done in a pandemic in which you took the
necessary and proactive steps to protect your frontline
workforce, laying out a comprehensive plan that you briefed us
on and then stuck to it. Through a number of your employees, or
though a number of your employees have contracted the Corona
virus to date, you have had zero casualties as a result of
contracting the virus, which considering the day to day work
your workforce conducts every day is a significant
accomplishment. So thank you for a job well done. Though the
world has changed tremendously over the past year, I know that
many of the priorities of the Secret Service remain unchanged.
But I also know that you are constantly looking to evolve with
the threat landscape, ensuring that you stay ahead of any
adversaries. So I look forward to our discussion today on how
you see the Secret Service moving forward, the challenges you
look to overcome, and the priorities you plan to put in place
to meet them. Thank you again, Director Murray. I look forward
to your testimony today, which I hope does not include any
proposals to leave the Department of Homeland Security. I
really enjoy working with the Secret Service. Madam Chair, I
thank you and I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Director Murray, we will submit the full
text of your official statement for the hearing record. Please
begin your oral summary which I would ask you to keep to five
minutes.
Mr. Murray. Thank you, ma'am. Good morning, Chairwoman
Roybal-Allard, Ranking Member Fleischmann, and distinguished
members of the subcommittee. Thank you for the opportunity to
be here today to discuss operations, initiatives, and future
planning that is ongoing here in the Secret Service. While I
understand that discussions concerning the fiscal year 2022
budget are being deferred, I am eager to share with you
examples of the vital work being performed by the men and women
of our agency. In a year beset by extraordinary challenges due
to COVID-19, I am grateful for the resiliency and adaptability
of our workforce, the active support of their families, and the
unwavering commitment to protect our nations' leaders and
safeguard our country's financial infrastructure. Despite the
global health challenges and the dynamic operational tempo of
the past year, the Secret Service continued to make progress in
a number of critical areas. Thanks to your support, we
completed work on security enhancements to E Street inside the
White House zone, and made significant progress on constructing
the permanent White House fence. We also strengthened
partnerships with state and local law enforcement through our
National Computer Forensics Institute, or NCFI, as well as
through our network of cyber fraud task forces. From a hiring
standpoint, we are actively working to achieve our fiscal year
2021 goal of 7,900 positions, a historic number for our agency
and one that moves us a step closer to our long-term capital
goals. To achieve this level of growth, while keeping everyone
safe, we did move many preemployment activities to a virtual
environment. To further our goal of building and maintaining a
diverse workforce, our recruitment branch conducted a number of
recruiting events in conjunction with historically black
colleges and universities, Hispanic serving institutions,
tribal colleges and universities as well as a number of women's
organizations and various branches of the military. With
respect to retention, the various initiatives that this
subcommittee has funded and supported over the past five years
have resulted in a steady decline in attrition. The largest of
these being the Uniform Division Group Retention program, which
is notable for its high enrollment rate and a measurable
decline in attrition over the past several years. Throughout
the pandemic our men and women worked tirelessly to carry out
our protected mission. While all campaign years present unique
challenges, COVID-19 severely altered protectee patterns of
life and required operational adjustments to keep everyone
safe. What's more, our people successfully led the security
planning for five National Special Security Events, or NSSEs.
The foundation of success when it comes to NSSEs lies in our
partnerships with agencies across all levels of the government
and the extensive planning that goes into securing those
events. While protection is inherently a no fail mission, the
Secret Service criminal investigations also have an impact upon
national and economic security. The sustained investigative
focus by our agents and analysts on cyber-enabled financial
crimes has resulted in the prevention of more than $9.5 billion
in potential fraud loss over the past several years. The
various COVID relief programs passed by Congress also
unfortunately attracted criminal activity. The Secret Service
continues to do our part to protect communities in this regard.
Over the past year the agency has disrupted hundreds of online
pandemic related scams, opened more than 750 COVID-related
cases, and seized in excess of $800 million in COVID-related
fraud. The success of our integrated mission is entirely
reliant on the world class training provided at our Rowley
Training Center. After a two-and-a-half month closure prompted
by the pandemic, RTC opened its doors again in June of 2020,
just the second federal law enforcement training facility to
safely do so. I thank the members of this subcommittee for
their support which has allowed the Secret Service to make
smart infrastructure investments at our Rowley Training Center.
I am committed to the pursuit of future projects so that our
facilities best approximate environments that our agents and
officers encounter while on duty. Madam Chairwoman, Ranking
Member Fleischmann, and distinguished members of the
subcommittee, I am grateful for your support of our people and
our mission over the years. The targeted investments made by
this subcommittee have amplified our success in many areas.
With your support we have heavily invested in measures that
have enhanced our protected methodologies and our capabilities.
Moreover, your support and concern for the men and women of the
Secret Service has been unwavering. On their behalf, I thank
you and I look forward to answering any questions you may have.
[The information follows:]********** COMMITTEE INSERT
**********
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you, Director Murray.
Director Murray, it is always challenging for an agency to
try to budget in advance for a fiscal year, but it is even
harder to do when you cannot predict whether or not there will
be a presidential transition.
In addition to these presidential transition costs, the
total number of additional protectees beyond the President and
Vice-President is higher than it has been in the past.
What have your obligations been like for protection
activity so far, and do you anticipate your current budget
keeping pace with your obligations or do you foresee budget
problems as we move further into the fiscal year?
Mr. Murray. Thank you for your question, ma'am.
You are very much correct. It is always difficult inside
and outside of a campaign year when it comes to the protective
side of the house to predict how much protective travel there
will be. And then when you compound that with a situation as
you have described where this is the first one-term presidency
in about 28 years, I believe, in order to plan for that it is
also challenging. And then on top of that you have additional
protectees that we did not participate before the end of the
year.
So those are all key considerations. While COVID has sort
of tamped down the amount of protective travel, we are starting
to see an uptick. And I think as COVID improves, we will see
that continue. And I think we will also see a rise in travel by
foreign heads of state and heads of government here to this
country along with their spouses, which is also a Secret
Service responsibility.
So right now the tempo is not overwhelming. I do think as
we go through the third quarter and into the fourth quarter it
is going to be a challenge. And I think that is going to cause
us to make some decisions. There are some critical needs large
with regard to protection, one of those being some of the
experiences we have had over the past year with regard to civil
disturbance. We found that we did not have enough of our folks
trained in civil disturbance. We did not have enough equipment
in that regard.
Likewise, with regard to our threat management efforts, our
protective intelligence efforts, we are heavily invested in
making sure that we are aware of any threats that exist out
there in open source environment, and that requires a lot of
equipment and technology which is always emerging. So those are
some areas that I am concerned about before we get into the
next fiscal year in terms of being fully funded.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. Well, please keep us abreast of
things as they happen.
And you mentioned some of the other things that have
happened that were unexpected, like the January 6 capital
attack. How has that influenced the agency's security posture
as it relates to staffing and resources?
And I am going to ask the second part of that, has the
January 6 capital attack led to a reevaluation of the process
for national security on special security event designations
and, if so, what out-year planning is taking place for future
NSSEs?
Mr. Murray. Yes, ma'am. I will try to answer that in order,
but I am also mindful of your time. So please let me know if
you need me to pause.
So we are always looking to capitalize on lessons learned.
And obviously what happened on January 6th was abhorrent. It
was an attack on our democracy, and we in law enforcement
public safety cannot let it happen again.
But, again, whether it is something as significant as that
or even something as we saw across the pond in the U.K. last
week where there was an incident over in Manchester, we are
always looking to capitalize on our own lessons learned and
observe what happens with partner agencies.
So certainly, definitely took those lessons learned and
implement them into-- implemented into the security plan that
we carried out two weeks later for the inaugural, and we will
continue to do that.
With respect to your question about National Special
Security Events, as you know, ma'am, that is not something that
the Secret Service designates. We serve as the lead operational
agency for operational security. I would imagine that there
will be conversations ongoing as to whether an event like the
one we had on January 6th, and I say the event. I do not mean
the incident. I mean the actual constitutional process, whether
or not that should fall inside the confines of something like
an NSSE. I welcome those conversations and I imagine those are
forthcoming.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. Thank you.
I am running out of time, so I am going to go Mr.
Fleischmann.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you.
Mr. Director, I know significant work has been done in
replacing and improving much of the existing fencing on the
White House grounds over the past few years, and this project
will continue through fiscal year 2022.
I also know that over the last year we have seen a
significant amount of temporary fencing erected throughout D.C.
as a result of civil unrest from the White House to the
Capitol, which not only incurs significant cost for the
installation and maintenance of these fences, but restricts
Americans from the ability to visit and observe these sites,
albeit from a significant distance away.
Do you feel the level of permanent fencing and security
measures currently in place are sufficient for the Secret
Service to carry out their protective mission?
And secondly, sir, do you believe there should be a more
permanent solution in place to alleviate the need for the
recurring installation of temporary anti-climb fencing around
the White House and Capitol, sir?
Mr. Murray. Thank you, sir, for your question.
First and foremost, thank you, sir, and Madam Chairwoman
and this committee for your support because that new permanent
White House fence, that is a gamechanger for us. We began
construction on that going back to 2019. We recently finished
up on the north side of the White House, soon expect to finish
up the south side. And by this time next year that permanent
White House fence will be fully installed.
Again, that should afford not only the Secret Service to
have some enhancements operationally, but it also should afford
the opportunity for our citizenry to come back onto
Pennsylvania Avenue and view the White House as they should.
With respect to your second part of your question, that is
a consideration with regard to whether or not there should be a
secondary screening point or secondary barrier as we push out
of the White House perimeter. It is something we do for NSSEs
as you mentioned. It is something we are doing right now with
the erection of the anti-scale fence that is up around the
White House. And that is going to be something that we are
going to have to take a hard look at and probably look to
invest in in the future.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, sir.
Based on the events of January 6th when the Secret Service
was responsible for and successfully protected then Vice-
President Pence and Vice-President Elect Harris when they were
in the Capitol as well as other civil unrest events throughout
the year, the Secret Service has undoubtedly identified areas
where they could make improvements to better prepare for and
respond to similar types of events in the future, which all of
us hope never happen, but know that we still must prepare for.
Other than improved or additional fencing, which was
already discussed, what areas do you feel, sir, the Secret
Service could either make improvements to or use more resources
to address preparations for and response to future events of
this type, sir?
Mr. Murray. Well, sir, I would like to talk about our
training facility because that comes right to my mind as we
talk about this.
So the one thing that our agents and officers do not have
at our training facility, and I should say we are extremely
grateful. We are one of the few federal law enforcement
agencies to have a training facility inside the National
Capitol region. That is a blessing. But the one thing we do not
have there is anything that replicates our permanent protected
facilities, such as the White House.
So if I can give you a clunky analogy. If everybody on this
call, if we were all on a basketball team, but we did not have
a gym to practice in and we did not have baskets, we had to go
out onto a field and practice basketball, but when we played
our games we went to a gym, how effective would our practice
be.
So long-term what I am looking to invest in is to create
and construct venues that replicate the areas of operation that
our officers and agents work in. I am looking to build things
like White House training facilities, not only structurally,
but also dimensionally. I think that is going to be something
that is going to serve the security of this country and the
Secret Service for many decades to come.
Well, thank you, sir, for your responses. And as my time is
waning, I know we have a lot of folks who want to answer
questions. Thank you, sir.
And, Madam Chair, I yield back. Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. I apologize. I am trying to find who is
next in line here.
Mr. Cuellar.
Mr. Cuellar. Thank you, Madam Chair and Ranking Member.
Thank you so much for holding this meeting.
Director Murray, I also wanted to thank you for your
service and what your men and women do.
Before I ask my question about the National Computer
Forensic Institute, I thought some years ago we were talking
about appropriating monies for a White House replicate. I
remember it was a pricey amount. Do you know what happened with
that? I thought we had talked about this some years ago.
Mr. Murray. Yes, sir. I know there was a conversation about
committing some funds to design plans, and I think there was
perhaps other choices that had to be made within the Department
and the Executive branch. I do not think we ever really got to
move the ball down the field so to speak with regard to that.
But we are eager to do so now.
Mr. Cuellar. Yeah. Well, I mean, I certainly think we need
to have that replica, at least of the White House, because you
have to-- that is one of your missions of that. But, yeah, we
will follow up on that because I know some years ago we talked
about it. It was a pricey figure.
But let me talk to you about your National Computer
Forensic Institute. One of the things, as you know, I represent
the border area and one of the areas-- you know, some of the
dynamics you see is you see it on TV, the unaccompanied kids,
the family units. But there is another dimension there, a
darker side that, you know, you have got criminal
organizations.
So my question is, what can we do to work with--and I am on
the road as you can tell in South Texas and I just made a call
to some of the border sheriffs and asked them if they were
familiar with the National Computer Forensic Institute, and
they are not. And I would ask you, what can we do to improve or
establish some of that partnership? And I know you are pulled
all over the country, but I would like to work with your
office, if you can assign somebody to work with the border
sheriffs and the border law enforcement and with their
counterparts across the river on the Mexican side so they can
become not only local and state partners, but international
partners as we have this very dynamic part of the country
called the Southwest border on that.
So I would like to see what you are doing and what we can
do together and assign somebody that we can work with you.
Mr. Murray. Yes, sir. Thank you for the question and your
interest and very eager for the sheriffs and our international
partners to participate in the NCFI mission.
As you know and the members of this subcommittee know, NCFI
opened its doors back in 2008, and since that time we have
trained more than 13,000 state, local, tribal, territorial law
enforcement officers, prosecutors and judges. So our doors have
been opened for 13 years. But, candidly, they would not have
been able to stay open without the active support of this
subcommittee.
And I am particularly grateful to not only the members, but
also the senior staff on the subcommittee who have been highly
encouraging of us to do better with regard to self-advocacy in
this regard. And I am hopeful as we get into 2022 and beyond we
will get even more budgetary consideration.
But as you know, you know, one of the great success stories
of NCFI is that we have trained all these folks from all 50
states, several territories, covering more than 2,000 agencies.
It is a give back because these are the same agencies that we
rely on when we come into town for protective services. But at
the same time, it is also symbiotic in that these same folks
are coming back and participating in our cyber fraud task
forces. So they are also enhancing the Secret Services'
investigative mission.
More importantly, we train them. We give them all the
equipment and the technology they need to go back and support
their own departments.
Sir, as you mentioned, a lot of these local and county
departments do not have the budget to go ahead and start their
own cyber investigative units. So these folks that we trained
go back into your communities and they investigate crimes that
are important to your constituents, and the vast majority of
the ones they do have to do with endangered persons and crimes
against children.
I am not sure if he froze.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. We may have lost Mr. Cuellar.
Mr. Murray. Yeah.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. So I am going to go then to Ms. Hinson.
Mr. Cuellar. Thank you so much. Thank you.
Ms. Hinson. All right. Well, thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
And I do appreciate you holding this hearing today so we can
hear from Director Murray on the agency's needs and priorities
going into the next fiscal year.
And, Director Murray, thank you so much for your service as
well and for appearing before us today.
And I know many of the questions have already centered
around a lot of the physical threats and what you do to combat
those. But I wanted to kind of focus in on the work that the
Secret Service does to protect taxpayers from financial crimes.
Your testimony that you submitted mentions transnational
cybercrimes and financial crimes specifically, things like ATM
attacks.
Can you share a little bit more about what international
bad actors most concern you at the Secret Service in addition
to the example you gave in your testimony of North Korea?
Mr. Murray. Yes.
So we are seeing--we recently, as you know, merged two
long-standing task force operations. One was the long-standing
Financial Crimes Task Force we have had in place since the
1980s. The other one was what we called the Electronic Crimes
Task Force that has been around since 1995.
We realized that the great work they were all doing was
sort of intendedly redundant, unintentionally redundant in a
lot of ways and we were plowing down the same roads. So we
decided, with your support and the support of the Department,
to merge those and create this Cyber Fraud Task Force. We would
have 44 of these across the country and some overseas as well.
And the way we combat the kind of activity you are talking
about is through that and through the NCFI as I have described.
What we are seeing is, you know, most of the complex financial
fraud that goes on right now in this country and around the
world is digital in some nature. And the vast majority of the
financial crime that we look at is cyber related and it is
being perpetrated by transnational groups from abroad. They do
exploit people here. Some people wittingly, some people
otherwise. But as you mentioned, we are seeing what we call ATM
cashouts. We are seeing a lot of ransomware issues.
One thing we have seen an uptick in during COVID especially
is something called business email compromise, which is where
these bad actors, using social engineering or sometimes network
intrusion, get into a system and they perpetrate that they are
part of a legitimate business process within an organization
and they effectuate wire transfers outside of an organization.
And then what happens is all those ill-gotten funds are
transmitted back to the transnational groups via
cryptocurrency, which is a separate and unique challenge unto
itself.
Ms. Hinson. Right. So tracking it then becomes an extra
challenge, obviously. Would you say in general, Director, that
they are using these funds to undermine the safety of America
and the security of our allies? For instance, obviously these
are going to countries that are no friends of the United
States.
Mr. Murray. Absolutely. And that is a great question. I
know that it is very easy to put these types of offenses in the
bucket of white collar crime, and I understand why they do
that. But when-- if we just take a look not so much at the
corporations, but the public utilities, hospitals, schools,
care centers. When those are attacked with something like
ransomware and they are threatened with, you know, deletion of
services, you are putting people's lives at risk.
Ms. Hinson. Uh-huh.
Mr. Murray. And, you know, it is candidly, from these
transnational groups, it is all about the money. You know, they
are not really concerned about the safety and security of our
citizenry like you are and I am. But that is why we are so
heavily invested in it.
And I think a big part of the solution is education. I
think up to this point very recently the public and private
sector both had this idea that this is nice to have, nice to
have these sort of redundancies and resiliencies and have a
plan for continuity of operations. It is absolutely need to
have nowadays.
Ms. Hinson. Right. So I guess I would close out with the
remaining time, what resources do you need to better prevent
and respond to those kind of attacks? And then who are you most
closely allied with in working with to help prevent these
attacks?
Mr. Murray. Thank you.
So the one thing we always need continual reinvestment in
is things like equipment, technology and obviously people. That
is a best practice. It is a people process technology approach.
And, you know, we kind of subscribe to the idea that the speed
and capability of technology doubles every couple of years.
So that is tough to keep up with when you are inside of a
multi-year budget cycle, but we do our best and we appreciate
the continued support of the committee.
Obviously, a big challenge for us coming up will be 5G, the
transition to 5G. That is going to have a direct impact on our
mobile wireless investigations. That is something we conduct
via our Cyber Fraud Task Forces. We conduct them in your
communities. We started it out as a part of our threat
management program. However, it is something that has
proliferated to where we actively support police officers,
police agencies in your districts with regard to locating
digital devices that belong to missing persons, children who
have been kidnapped, homicide suspects and so forth.
So as we go to 5G, it is a challenge and an expensive
proposition, but if we do not keep up with that technology we
will not be able to continue to perform that task as well as we
do.
Ms. Hinson. All right.
Mr. Murray. And lastly with regard to your question about
who are we partnering with. We partner very much with CISA
within the Department and also the FBI, and we have strong ties
through our Cyber Fraud Task Forces with academia and the
business sector.
Ms. Hinson. All right. Well, thank you very much, Director,
for answering those questions.
And, Madam Chair, I yield back. Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Ms. Underwood.
[Pause]
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Price.
Mr. Price. Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Director, thank you for the good work you do and for your
testimony here today.
I appreciated the overview that you gave of the COVID
situation with respect to your personnel. And, of course, there
is some alarming news about the levels of exposure, but also
good news that in the vast majority of cases these were not
serious cases.
I want to ask you a little bit more about the lessons
learned, though, and not that this is over, but we are
hopefully past the worst of it. You are certainly past the
point of the protection required in a presidential campaign.
I wonder if you could reflect on that a bit. There were
some incidents through the campaign period which we all
remember. I guess the one that was the most obviously alarming
was the President's decision to, when he was actually
hospitalized with the COVID virus, the President's decision to
take an automobile ride around to greet his supporters who had
gathered out at Walter Reed, and clearly Secret Service had to
protect him in that situation.
But there were all kinds of campaign events where
distancing and masking were not practiced and there were lots
of questions, legitimate questions raised about these possibly
being spreader events.
Now I understand that the Secret Service has no choice but
to salute and offer protection, whatever the circumstances. I
appreciate that and, of course, that is part of the service and
part of the sacrifice that we admire.
On the other hand, there should be some advisory role, I
would think, or some ability of the Secret Service to offer at
least advice when such events are being planned and they
inevitably are going to have to include protection. And there
needs to be, I would think, in retrospect some assessment of
the kind of dangers to which your agents were exposed and to
what extent those just come with the territory and the extent
to which there ought to be some kind of process for minimizing
these dangers.
What can you tell us about that? I think it is a, you know,
it is a legitimate concern and there were particular problems,
as we all know, with the past President and the past campaign.
But it is, you know, it is not like-- it is not unlikely that
these kinds of issues could arise in the future as well.
Mr. Murray. Yes, sir.
If I may I will do my best to be succinct, but I would like
to take you back to about February of 2020. That is when we
started to realize that this thing called Corona virus,
whatever it was, might have a negative impact on our campaign
operations.
The one thing we realized very quickly was that if we did
get to a point where our workforce could not come to their
primary places of work, we did not have the bandwidth for folks
to work virtually. So we made some quick investments in that
and solved that problem.
At the same time, I don't know if we really knew what PPE
was going to be, but we quite literally took stock of what we
had in terms of gloves, masks, cleaning materials and we
secured more thinking that might be a factor for us as well.
Simultaneously, through our Chief Medical Officer, who
ultimately was a key member of the Corona Virus Task Force and
worked closely with NIH, we set up our own robust testing
program right here, right next door, actually, in our
headquarters that is still opened today where we test people
sort of by design before and after protective travel. But I do
want to make clear it was communicated by me and by my
leadership team over and over again that the expectation was
that we would follow CDC guidelines and then some with regard
to PPE.
As a matter of fact, if anything, if we were guilty of
anything with regard to quarantining folks, we would go beyond
the primary contacts. What we would do is we started staffing
our operations, at least initially, in sort of a port and
starboard approach where we would platoon people. We would send
one group of people out. They would be on duty for a couple of
weeks, then we replaced them with a fresh group. And if any of
those were exposed, then everybody came off the line.
So those were some of the measures that we took initially
and we built on over time.
With respect to your other questions about specific
incidences, as you mentioned the Secret Service, it is
inherently a dangerous job for sure. And we are in the business
of making an assessment as to whether a particular operation
can be achieved. We really do not get involved in whether it
should or should not be achieved from an optical standpoint.
But I appreciate your question.
With regard to the matter at Walter Reed, which I think you
were referring to, I will tell you this. There was extensive
conversation about that with the medical professionals, the
White House Medical Unit, and the medical professionals at
Walter Reed.
Ultimately, the decision was that it could be achieved, and
the two individuals that were in the vehicle were wearing the
same level of PPE and protective gear that not only the medical
professionals at Walter Reed were wearing, but that the
frontline health workers are wearing around the world every day
since COVID started.
Mr. Price. All right. Thank you. My time is expired.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Rutherford.
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And, Director, great to see you here this morning and thank
you for your testimony here today.
You know, as was mentioned earlier, I was a little
concerned when I did not see the Secret Service in the skinny
budget at all, even mentioned.
So, Director, could you talk just a little bit about going
into next year, what would you like to see in that budget when
it comes out? What are the priorities for you moving forward
next year? I know the recapitalization of the academy training
center, Rowley Training Center. Can you talk about some of
those needs that you see coming that we should be focused on
here in Congress?
Mr. Murray. Yes, sir.
So very broadly, continued investment in our Cyber Fraud
Task Forces and our field operations. Likewise, continued
investment in the National Computer Forensics Institute, which
I am happy to say I feel we were certainly heard this time
around.
With regard to staffing, obviously we are highly committed
to our human capital strategic plan which gets the agency to
somewhere around 95 95 by fiscal year 2026. And I thank you
very much for your continued support with regard to that.
And obviously continued investment in our retention
methods, which are also thanks to you. Some of the programs we
have like student loan repayment, tuition assistance, child
subsidy care and the max out relief that we received for our
employees who work overtime for protective services.
On the protective side of the house I said earlier, but it
bears repeating, we are looking for consideration with regard
to our threat management efforts, our protective intelligence
efforts with specific regard to our open source investigation
capabilities. That means the ability to go out and identify
that threatening behavior or activity might be-- or language
might exist on the internet so to speak, whereas 25 years ago
you might be at a restaurant and somebody says something that
sounds like a threat against a president and you are reliant
entirely on the good citizen reporting. Now it exists out there
to be found by the Secret Service.
And lastly, you know, continued investment in our
protective efforts. As I mentioned earlier, we really need to
improve with regard to our resourcing with readiness in terms
of civil disturbance and training.
Mr. Rutherford. What about your field communications? Is
that still a challenge?
Mr. Murray. It is. That is part of the initiatives of
future planning I eluded to earlier. We are looking to continue
with our communications upgrades and our IT upgrades in the
future. Again, it is always-- I do not have to tell you, sir,
but it is always difficult administering a budget. Sometimes
you have to make difficult choices between the things you need
and the things you want.
Mr. Rutherford. Right.
Mr. Murray. But we are on a path and look forward to
continuing the conversation with this committee about those
things.
Mr. Rutherford. Yeah. No, and I think you guys are doing a
great job in moving down that road.
Let me ask you this, Director. You mentioned briefly the
earning caps. Have we sufficiently addressed that, particularly
for, you know, election years where you have multiple, you
know, particularly presidential where you have huge overtime
issues that come up. Have we adequately addressed that for you
all yet or is there still problems there?
Mr. Murray. So the answer is, yes and thank you. But it is
definitely a fix. It is not a long-term solution. I would
suggest that as we continue to grow our work force, those
demonstrable needs for excessive overtime should come down. I
do not think we will ever have a Secret Service where there
won't be overtime needs just because the operational tempo
just--
Mr. Rutherford. Sure.
Mr. Murray. --is exponentially growing. But I do think
that, you know, this relief from the pay cap is certainly,
absolutely critically necessary. But I do not think it is
sufficient just in terms of long-term appeal. This is a
difficult job as you know, sir, having been in law enforcement.
And--
Mr. Rutherford. Right.
Mr. Murray. --you know, all these efforts certainly help
with morale. But I do have concerns moving forward with regard
to long-term retention as people are having to kind of work
excessively because, you know, that cap does not remove the cap
entirely. It just creates a new and better cap.
Mr. Rutherford. Right.
Well, listen, I look forward to working with you on that
particular issue because I think that is something that we
really need to address. If you are going to continue to be able
to meet your operational tempo, particularly during these peak
years, and then maintain your adequate staffing during those
other off years, I think it is going to be critical that we
address that.
So thank you very much for your leadership over there. You
know, I hear really good things from the rank and file.
And, Madam Chair, I hear my--I see my time has run out. I
will yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Ms. Underwood.
Ms. Underwood. Well, thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you
for calling today's hearing.
Mr. Murray, my first question is about the ATC's medical
operations. Last year I heard from a constituent who was
worried about her spouse, a Secret Service agent based in the
Chicago field office because she felt that the agency's COVID
precautions and testing regime was not sufficient to keep her
family safe.
Can you briefly detail what measures you have in place to
protect your agents, and what are your testing protocols, and
where are you on vaccinations?
Mr. Murray. Yes, ma'am. Thank you for your question.
So, again, back early in 2020 during our COVID experience
we were very clear that we needed to do a lot of things with
regard to technology to be able to allow our workforce to work
virtually. We were happy to accomplish that. We were happy to
capitalize on some PPE opportunities that we had.
But at the same time, we did work with our Chief Medical
Officer as long as-- as well as other folks in the White House
Medical Unit. And more importantly, we have a long-standing
relationship with Johns Hopkins University Medical Center
folks, and we work with them to develop our own testing
protocol here in the National Capitol Region as well as
developing policies and practices for folks out in the field,
like the folks in Chicago you mentioned.
So the testing is sort of by design. It is not like
everybody comes in every day. If folks are on a continual
protective assignment, they will get tested in a certain cycle.
So let's say every 48 hours or every 72 hours.
Along the same lines, if somebody is a field agent or a
field officer, he or she would come in and get tested before
they travel, and then in the appropriate time frame after they
return from that protective travel.
Thus far here we have tested more than 20,000 people--
conducted more than 20,000 tests right here in this building.
That is probably about half of what we have done over at the
White House Medical Unit. And then we have worked with our
field offices to set up testing opportunities out in the field.
Ms. Underwood. As you may know, I run an effort to require
CBP to stand up an inner-operable electronic health record
system, which is currently in progress. And the pandemic has
only made the need for this system even more apparent.
As a nurse, I know that implementing electronic health
records can be beneficial, not only for ensuring appropriate
care for people in GHS custody, but also for improving the
health of the GHS workforce itself.
Mr. Murray, do you agree that the Secret Service could
benefit from standing up an electronic health records system?
Mr. Murray. Definitely, ma'am. I would like to learn-- I
cannot say I know a whole lot about that, but it definitely
sounds like something that would enhance our operations.
Ms. Underwood. Okay.
Mr. Murray. I look forward to talking to you about it.
Ms. Underwood. Thank you.
And with my remaining time I would like to hear about what
steps you are taking to improve the agency's operational
planning and preparation based on lessons learned over the past
year?
Like many Americans, I was shocked by the use of force by
multiple federal agencies to disperse a peaceful protest in
Lafayette Square last summer for a photo op. As you know, the
Secret Service deployed pepper spray as part of that response.
A few months later the Capitol was overrun by an armed
insurrection chanting threats against the Vice-President.
Despite the fact that this attack was plotted openly on
publicly available websites, the federal response was much less
robust.
While the disparate responses to this event is a
complicated issue that extends far beyond your agency, I am
interested in what steps you are taking internally to improve
the Secret Service's operations in the future and ensure that
your agents are trained and prepared to protect our country's
leaders and critical infrastructure from legitimate attacks.
Mr. Murray, what has the Secret Service learned from these
events and what changes have you implemented as a result?
Mr. Murray. Thank you, ma'am.
Obviously, no matter where we go or what we do on the
protective side of the house, we are always going to conduct an
after action review. We did after the experiences we had late
last May and early last June. We certainly did-- obviously on
January 6th we started our day with a different event down at
the ellipse, but we were up there with the Vice-President,
Vice-President Pence at the time at the Capitol as well, so
conducted an after action review there.
You know, I could tell you that we definitely looked to
improve on our processes at large with respect to what happened
in Lafayette Park on June 1st. The Secret Service did have a
supporting role. As you mentioned, there was an instance where
our officers were assigned to secure an intersection so that
other law enforcement could get out and perform their
operations. And when they did go over a barrier, a couple of
our officers were assaulted by folks and that is why they used
the pepper spray as you mentioned.
You are absolutely correct, ma'am. The vast majority of
people that were out there, especially during the daylight
hours, were out there expressing their First Amendment rights.
And that is a critical part of our training and that is a huge
consideration anywhere we go in this country conducting
protective operations.
But it is also true as the day has gone on and we got into
the evening, other folks came in who were not only there to
express their First Amendment rights and things did become
violent. That is--
Ms. Underwood. So, Director Murray, I thank you for your
service, but that was not my question. We are all familiar
about the events of that day. I asked what the Secret Service
has learned and what you have changed operationally.
Since my time has expired, Madam Chair, I would like to ask
the Director to submit that information for the record in
writing and hope that, you know, perhaps next time we can be
more direct.
Thank you very much.
Mr. Murray. Thank you, ma'am.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Next is Mr. Palazzo.
Mr. Palazzo. Thank you, Madam Chair, Ranking Member. I
appreciate the opportunity to be a part of this hearing.
Director Murray, thank you for your years of service. I
also want to thank you for your service in the Army Reserves. I
am also in the Army National Guard. So you have a career of
service to our nation, so thank you for that.
You know, the bad thing about going last or close to the
end is almost all the questions have already been answered. I
want to echo what Representative Hinson was talking about when
it comes to, you know, the cyber crimes and financial crimes
that are taking place.
But if we could, could we dig a little deeper and could you
identify some of the foreign actors that are actively engaged?
I mean, we know we have external threats. I mean, we serve on
the Homeland Security Committee and, you know, we know who the
bad people are out there. But can you kind of identify them for
us and, you know, how active and how entrenched are they?
Mr. Murray. So, yes, sir. I will do my best. Obviously it
is a little bit of a sensitive topic and I will try to address
it broadly. I would be happy to come back up and discuss it in
a more appropriate forum.
But I will say this. When it comes to these transnational
groups, you have people that are-- they are bright people and
they are highly proficient when it comes to cyber. And when we
are talking about something that is organically and solely a
financial crime, more often than not they are working for
themselves to fund their own efforts.
But what we have found working with our partners, both in
the intelligence community and in law enforcement here
federally, that these same cyber actors sometimes are working
on behalf of foreign governments and conducting state-sponsored
operations as well.
So that is why it is particularly concerning to, you know,
broadly speaking federal law enforcement and why we try to
focus in on those efforts and disrupt to the best of our
ability.
Mr. Palazzo. Yeah. And I know you probably cannot go into
too much detail, but we would love to have an opportunity to
chat more about that.
Mr. Murray. Appreciate it.
Mr. Palazzo. You know, and I want to thank you for setting
up a Cyber Fraud Task Force in the State of Mississippi
alongside of our Attorney General. That is extremely important.
And I know you also, and Representative Rutherford brought
this up. You were talking about, you know, recruitment and
retention. And is there anything else you would like to share
with us? I know with the private sector pay, you know, this is
across the government, all agencies, it is kind of hard to
compete now. It used to be it was the best job you could have
would be working for the Secret Service or the FBI or another
federal agency, probably not the IRS, right?
[Laughter]
Mr. Palazzo. But, you know, the other agencies.
So is there anything else that you would like to bring up
about how we can not only recruit the best and brightest, but
also retain them?
Mr. Murray. Yes, sir. Thanks very much for that question.
And, again, the fact that we are able to better retain them
is due in those small parts to the support of this committee.
But I will say this. Law enforcement is a tough job. I am
the son of a police officer. Federal law enforcement is a tough
job. And I would, with the greatest respect to my partners in
federal law enforcement, there is no tougher job than the
Secret Service. It is extremely demanding. It is a rigorous
lifestyle and it requires a lot, not just from the people who
serve in the agency, but from the people who love and support
us.
So as you go through your career and you realize that and
you realize that there might be other jobs that are similar,
maybe not the same, that aren't as demanding, sometimes people
have to make life choices and we respect that.
So we are looking to incentivize folks to stay. Likewise,
to your question, it is tough because right now, whether it is
the Secret Service or the FBI or DEA or HIS, we are all going
after the same applicant pool, right, the folks that are coming
out of the military or college, wherever they are coming from,
that want to come into federal law enforcement. They are all
looking at all these different agencies. So we are doing our
best to make ourselves the most attractive to them.
Candidly, there is a little bit of a vocational element to
being in the Secret Service. I always tell people it is the
greatest job in the world because I want to be here. If I
didn't want to be here, it might not be the greatest job in the
world. So, you know, we are looking for those people who really
kind of want to be part of something bigger than themselves
and, you know, be a part of this sort of weird thing that we do
here with this dual mission.
But you are spot on. It always has been a challenge and it
is something that we are trying to rise to.
Mr. Palazzo. Well, Director, in this current climate and,
you know, the things that we see on the news and the things
that we hear, the defund the police movement and all that crazy
nonsense that is coming out, obviously we support legitimate
reforms. But, you know, I believe we should be funding our
police more, not less, if we want them to have better training,
attract better talent, even though here in South Mississippi we
have got an awesome law enforcement community.
So with that, I think my time has expired.
Director Murray, please let your men and women know and
their families that we appreciate their service and sacrifice,
and thank you for all that you do.
Mr. Murray. I will. Thank you, sir.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Quigley.
Mr. Quigley. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chairman.
I want to follow up with Mr. Palazzo's questions. You know,
specifically if you could detail on a deeper dive a little bit
more about what you are doing to recruit in non-traditional
places. I know you talked about diversity at the opening in
that vein. If you could give us a deeper dive in how you are
trying to do that. To me it is also an additional way that you
can, you know, increase the spicket of people coming in to your
agency, but what else are you doing? And, specifically, what
are the incentives that seem to work best to keep people in
place?
Mr. Murray. Thank you, sir.
So the one thing that we are doing that did not exist when
I was an applicant many, many years ago was we are doing all we
can to not only leverage, but to exploit social media
opportunities. Obviously, most of our applicants are much
younger than I am and they are very active online. So we are
doing all we can to kind of reach out and create a level of
engagement there. We are seeing some positive feedback.
With respect to traditional recruiting, our folks are very
active not only here in headquarters, but out there in your
districts where our offices are. Folks are pounding the
pavement not only talking to colleges, but we are reaching out
to high schools trying to put the idea in folks' minds that,
hey, the Secret Service might be the place that you want to go.
And certainly during these times of COVID, we have done a lot
of that virtually.
The retention programs that exist are--it is a broad
spectrum, and I am grateful for that because I think different
programs appeal to different age groups and different employees
of different job series.
As I mentioned earlier, folks that might be closer to
retirement, they may be motivated to stay a little longer
because they know they are not hitting that pay cap and working
for nothing so to speak. Quite literally before we had that
option, you would get your pay statement every two weeks and
you would look and you would see the money you made and then it
would tell you, here is all the other money you also earned,
but you are never going to get paid. So if you are close to
retirement, it is kind of an easy choice, right?
Conversely, for folks that are coming in at a younger age,
they may have sizeable loans from school and we have the
tuition reimbursement. They may have young families and with,
you know, dual incomes, so there is the child subsidy efforts
that we have been able to implement with your support.
You know, the one thing that does concern me moving forward
is this retirement bubble that we run into every once in a
while and that is a result of sort of what used to be uneven
hiring practices where we would hire on demand and then 20
years later you would have a bunch of folks that were ready to
retire.
So we are coming up against one here in fiscal year 2022.
We are doing all we can to appeal to those folks to, you know,
reconsider and stay because, candidly, those are our most
experienced people. And I know the question came up earlier,
the max out is a great fix. It is not a long-term solution to
address those retirement bubbles, and it is probably something,
even though we have corrected the hiring practices, it will be
something the agency endures for probably the next ten or 15
years or more.
Mr. Quigley. Yeah. And, look, I think it helps us for you
to report back with what works best or what changes in the
future might help you with retention. You have just described a
couple of things that were not the case when you came in, and
that is changing year by year.
So I believe this committee and others would be receptive
to doing what is necessary to help in retention. But we
certainly appreciate this.
I guess the last point, if you could in just the last 80
seconds focus just a little more on the efforts to attract on a
diversity basis.
Mr. Murray. So, again, we invest a lot of time and energy
and we have for quite a while, but redoubled our efforts into
reaching out to, as I mentioned earlier, historically black
colleges and universities, Hispanic serving institutions,
tribal colleges and universities, and then we applied a
particular focus on women's organizations. I think it is true
that everybody in law enforcement likes the idea of hiring, you
know, more women and more females. It is not a 50/50
proposition in law enforcement at large. It is certainly not
here.
We have made great strides. When I graduated the academy 26
years ago, I think about eight percent of our class was female,
eight, 08. Last week I commissioned a class where more than
half of the agents were female. So I am happy to report that we
are making progress in that regard.
But, you know, it is not a one and done type thing. It is
something that we are invested in and we are going to continue
to do over the months and years to come.
Mr. Quigley. Thank you for your service and thank you for
being here.
I yield back.
Mr. Murray. Thank you, sir.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Aguilar.
Mr. Aguilar. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thanks, Director Murray.
I wanted to ask a little bit more about NSSE, the events
that you talked about, the National Special Security Events,
which have been defined, as you mentioned, by migration,
general assembly, those types of special events, large sporting
events.
Following January 6th, members of Congress have suggested
designating additional congressional activities is these types
of events. In your testimony you talk a little bit about
everything that you bring to the table when it comes to NSSEs.
Can you talk a little bit about how those activities cannot
be duplicated by other federal, state and local agencies? But,
also, what resources would the Service need in order-- if we
designated additional NSSEs in upcoming fiscal years?
Mr. Murray. Sure. Thank you for the question.
So as you know, sir, the NSSEs are something that were born
out of the experience we had back in '96 with the Centennial
Park bombing. President Clinton along with Congress wanted to
address the fact that there was a gap in coordination between
all levels of law enforcement and public safety. And they came
up with this NSSE model where the FBI is the lead for crisis
response. FEMA is the lead for consequence management, and the
Secret Service serves as the lead for operational security,
design, planning and execution.
But the secret sauce, the true success of the NSSE process
exists in the fact that it truly is a whole of government
approach. It is where all these agencies come together well
before an event is expected to happen and they conduct this
long-term planning. And we use a series of committees and
subcommittees, and we have had great success. We just completed
the 68th, which was President Biden's address to the joint
session just a couple of weeks back. And, you know, I do think
that there are opportunities for other events to be considered
NSSEs.
As you know, neither the Secret Service nor the FBI nor
FEMA are the ones who designate something as an NSSE.
Typically, it is a request that comes from a governor. Here in
D.C. it can come from the mayor or come through a couple of
different ways. But there are also some events, such as UNGA,
the conventions, the inauguration and so on that are pre-
designated.
We do appreciate the funding we get of about 45 million per
year. But, candidly, it is not enough and we, you know, we do
need more to be able to do, you know, four or five of these a
year as it happens. And certainly if the idea is to do even
more NSSE events in the future, you know, we would be looking
for more consideration from a budgetary standpoint.
Mr. Aguilar. You just mentioned, you know, four or five,
you know, additional. Let's use that in the fiscal year. What
would be, you know, what would be necessary, you know,
financially to meet that goal and operationally?
Mr. Murray. Sir, candidly, I would have to get with my
folks and kind of tally that up. I would love to come and talk
to you further about that at some point if you have time.
Mr. Aguilar. Understood.
Back to some of the cybercrimes that you talked about
before, the cyber-enabled financial crimes have changed. In
your testimony you talked a little bit about that during the
COVID-19 pandemic. How has the Secret Service been able to
respond to those changes specific to what the pandemic has
meant?
Mr. Murray. So, sir, so along with taking efforts to
protect our workforce and our protectees, the one thing we knew
when this pandemic hit and we saw relief packages like the
CARES Act, based on our prior experiences with things like
Hurricane Katrina, we knew that as great as these opportunities
were for citizens, it was also ripe with opportunity for people
who wanted to commit fraud.
So our initial effort, along with CISA and the FBI, was to
get the word out there to the public and private sector to kind
of be alert and make sure that they take the necessary
preventative measures within their own organizations.
At the same time, we dedicated a lot of our effort into
just knocking down and disrupting the scams that we saw pop up
early on. We weren't really concerned with building great cases
initially.
That being said, over the course of the past year we have
opened more than 750 COVID-related cases, fraud cases. We have
seized in excess of $800 million. We have probably made more
than 120 arrests specific only to COVID fraud.
It is something that we are proud to have been sort of
ahead of the ball on, but we also recognize that this is not
something that is going to go away. The size of these packages
are so notable and the opportunities that exist are going to be
persistent. We are going to be addressing COVID fraud for many
years to come. And this is why it is so important that we want
to keep investing in the modernization of our Cyber Fraud Task
Forces.
Mr. Aguilar. Thanks, Director Murray.
I yield back, Madam Chair.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. That concludes the first round.
And so we are now going to be starting with the second
round. And as Mr. Palazzo said, practically every issue has
already been covered.
So, Director Murray, hopefully this will give you an
opportunity also to elaborate more on some of the issues that
have already been addressed.
The increase in the variety and intensity of social media
poses opportunities and challenges for you in terms of
protective intelligence. What tools does the Secret Service use
to gather protective intelligence online and through social
media, and how are you adapting strategies and efforts to keep
up with technology developments?
Mr. Murray. Thank you, ma'am.
So several years back within our protective intelligence
division, which is the group that leads our threat management
efforts, based here in headquarters, but it coordinates all of
our threat investigations around the globe, within that group
we established an open source investigation unit, which is
comprised of both agents and analysts. They use certain sorts
of equipment and software in order to be able to go out and
identify any sort of threatening language or ideation that
might exist in an open source platform. This is not something
that is on the dark web.
So obviously as I mentioned earlier, this is something that
we have made some significant investment in, and we are looking
to continually invest in this thing because, you know, with
regard to technology and equipment it is something that is
always going to be advancing, probably at a rate faster than
the multi-year budget permits us to address.
Likewise, this is an area where we can really benefit from
sort of targeted hiring, getting the right people in here to do
this. It is not something that only an agent can do and there
is a lot of folks out there that are going to school right now
to do this type of thing, studying, you know, cyber security
and so forth.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. One of the missions of the National
Threat Assessment Center is to provide research and guidance to
support public safety. What actionable guidance has the Secret
Service developed through the Safe Schools Initiative to reduce
the occurrence of violence and the loss of lives in schools?
Mr. Murray. Thank you, ma'am.
So we are very proud of NTAC, of the National Threat
Assessment Center. It is something that has been up and running
for more than 20 years now. Although we actually started it to
enhance our own protective mission, it was pretty clear after
incidents like Columbine that there were opportunities for our
agency to give back to communities and share quite literally
the science and math of how we protect our own protectees.
After Virginia Tech, the White House asked us to become
involved in a more structured manner, and NTAC now not only
focuses on schools, but they conduct research. And I should
mention that NTAC is comprised of not just agents, but also
analysts and social science research specialists. And their
focus is to look historically at incidents that have taken
place and conduct research on it and make recommendations.
To date they have published about 35 different products.
The most recent one is one we are particularly proud of and it
had to do with averted school attacks that have taken place
over the past decade. They looked at 67 different averted
school attacks. That is where the folks there at the school or
fellow students noticed that there might be something going on
with the person who might commit this act, and they said
something about it.
And the takeaway there is that bystanders save lives. That
was the point of that product, which was great because prior to
that we would always encourage, whether it was law enforcement,
public safety, schools that, you know, it is important to
basically address the idea that somebody might be in trouble
and might need help and not to ignore the warning signs.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. I would like you to elaborate a
little bit more on the issue of financial and cybercrimes, and
how the pandemic and increased reliance on the internet created
opportunities for financial cybercrimes and the investigative
challenges for the Secret Service.
Mr. Murray. Yes, ma'am.
Well, one thing we saw over the past 12 months especially
as the entire world sort of went remotely was that there was an
absence of a lot of checks and balances when it came to
business processes.
So if a company had somebody there who would either effect
wire transfers at his or her desk or they would approve things
manually, these things were all being done virtually and these
transnational groups picked up on that early on and they
exploited these lack of physical controls.
And what they would do is they would either socially
engineer their way or through intrusion they would get into
these corporations and redirect those wire transfers to
themselves, to what we call a money mule account where the
recipient, the account holder is either a co-conspirator or
they perhaps might be unwitting. And then they are instructed
to take whatever that dollar amount is and then transmit it
back to the transnational group, to the cyber actors via
cryptocurrency.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Well, what is the role of the Cyber
Fraud Task Force in mitigating and investigating cybercrimes
that are related to network intrusions in the finance sector?
Mr. Murray. Yes, ma'am.
It is quite literally, it is our Cyber Fraud Task Forces
who do combat that sort of activity. That is what their primary
focus is on. And the Cyber Fraud Task Forces are comprised of
not only the Secret Service, of course, but also federal,
state, local partners who most of which are trained through our
NCFI and they are looking to identify this sort of behavior,
disrupt it, and prosecute it as well.
And, you know, we have been very successful with seizure,
but I think it is worth mentioning that the point of seizure of
ill-gotten goods is not to turn it over to the agency. It is
actually to-- it is restitution. It is to give it back to the
victims. So we are very proud, and particularly with regard to
the 800 million we have seen with credit COVID fraud, we have
been very successful in getting that money back to the victim
organizations and individuals.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. And what challenges exist with the
increasing use of cryptocurrency for financial transactions,
particularly on the dark web?
Mr. Murray. Yes, ma'am.
So it is a challenge. I think it is worth saying I have
seen some reporting in the news about cryptocurrency. It is
worth noting that cryptocurrency in and of itself is not
inherently fraudulent. It is not designed for any illicit
purpose. But the fact that it can be anonymized makes it a
pretty good utility for somebody who wants to commit fraud.
So what I mean by that is, you can actually be anonymous as
a sender and anonymous as a receiver of cryptocurrency. The
vast majority of cryptocurrencies are legitimate and they go
through a legitimate and a valid exchange, and we know who the
sender is and we know who the receiver is.
The one thing that works for the Secret Service is that we
are pretty adept at following the money. So while we might not
necessarily at first know who the sender or receiver is, we can
follow the digital footprints with regard to the cryptocurrency
itself and then sort of reverse engineer our investigative
efforts. And we have had a lot of success in that regard.
And that is where, you know, the continual investment in
not only the process, but the technology is going to help us in
the months and years to come.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you.
Mr. Fleischmann.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Director Murray, following up, I understand that the Secret
Service has redoubled its efforts to ensure that in-service and
specialized training are a fundamental part of your operations.
This subcommittee agrees with these efforts and contributed
an additional $14 million above the request to support
improvements at the James Rowley Training Center.
What is your assessment of current training operations at
your Rowley Training Center, especially as it relates to the
in-service and specialized training required to keep your
agents and officers at peak performance?
And an additional question, sir, how have you applied the
additional funding and what are your priorities for ensuring
the Rowley Training Center meets the agency's requirements in
the future, sir?
Mr. Murray. Thank you, sir.
Well, first of all, thank you for your support in that
regard. It was critical.
We have made a lot of key investments with regard to in-
service training. It was something that was lacking and still
needs continual improvement here in the Secret Service. I do
think as we increase our staffing, that will also increase
opportunity to expand opportunities for in-service training.
Obviously COVID made things a little bit challenging, but
we were, as a result of that investment we made in expanding
our bandwidth and our capability, we were able to deliver many,
many thousands of hours of virtual training to our workforce
over the past 14 months or so.
As we come out of COVID, I am very excited about the idea
of not only inviting our workforce to come back into our Rowley
Training Center here in the National Capitol Region, but also
at the training center we have a group that exists for the sole
purpose of going out to the field, whether it is here
domestically or around the world to train not only our people,
but all of our public safety and our law enforcement partners
around the world who provide support to us for both protective
and investigative measures.
We have made a lot of infrastructure improvements. Again,
thanks very much to this committee. Within the last 18 months
we have opened up our brand new state of the art K-9 facility
out there which is a huge benefit for our program. And I invite
you and the rest of the members of the committee to come out
there and not only visit the K-9 center, but also the entire
training center.
Long-term, as I mentioned earlier, I think there are some
critical opportunities that exist with regard to construction
out there at the training center. As you know, in the wake of a
fence jumping incident we had about seven years ago, there was
a panel that got together that made some recommendations as to
how Secret Service can improve its operations. It was called
the Protective Mission Panel. We have implemented pretty much
all of those things, to include the White House fence.
The one thing we have not done, the one recommendation we
have not been able to act on just yet is the construction of a
White House mockup or what we call the White House training
facility. And I know I mentioned it earlier, but in the same
way that the fence is going to be a gamechanger for us
operationally, construction of a White House training facility
would be a gamechanger for this agency and would also enhance
national security across the board.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, sir.
You mentioned several positive indicators, sir, with regard
to recruiting, retention and lower accession rates. But I want
you to dive a little deeper into another aspect that is deeply
entrenched in these metrics:
Employee morale. Over the past few years you have reported
increased levels of morale among your workforce. Would you like
to share some of the efforts undertaken that have helped drive
these particular metrics in a positive direction so far?
Mr. Murray. Yes, sir. Thank you. And thanks for your
support in that regard as well.
So certainly happy with some of the markers that we have
seen in terms of upward trends in employee morale. We do look
at things like the federal employment viewpoint survey. It is
certainly important to us. But as positive as some of those
things might be, it also illuminates the fact that-- well, two
things really. The fact that our engagement matters, and it
also shines a light on the fact that there is a lot more work
to do.
So that is one thing we have done a lot more of over the
last several years is continual engagement with our workforce.
Even with regard to COVID, we are constantly sending out
messages to our workforce. Early on we wanted to make sure we
were addressing their concerns and their needs. We, you know,
utilized surveys and conducted Town Halls on the matter and so
on and so forth.
Candidly, our employees seem to like to know about
legislative affairs that are going on. So even hearings like
this we put out there, and hopefully some of them are watching
us right now.
But, you know, I think the fact that there is engagement
with the workforce across, you know, all job series seems to be
received well and I want our workforce to know just how proud
we are of them and I am of them. And it is an extremely
difficult job. You know, some folks laugh when I say it, but I
always joke when I say there is no Coke to our Pepsi. We are a
very different kind of agency because of this dual mission. We
are very much like an expeditionary force that goes out and
never comes back, like a Navy ship that never comes back to
port. And so that makes us highly reliant on each other.
And I think, you know, like anybody else in life, it is the
importance of being heard. So I think if there is any positive
trends, it is hopefully because our workforce feels that they
are being heard because they are.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, sir.
Madam Chair, I yield back. Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Price.
Mr. Price. Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate the chance
for a second round. I will use it to ask for clarification of a
couple of earlier answers and, if time permits, to raise an
additional area.
Mr. Director, I appreciated your response to my earlier
question about campaign events in particular, circumstances
where protection might pose great risk to the protectors, to
your agents and the chance you have to offer feedback in
advance of such things.
I just want to make sure I understand your answer on the
Walter Reed automobile ride in particular because what you said
was news to me, maybe not to others.
I understood you to say that before the President, who was
clearly hospitalized for COVID, that the Secret Service was
given the opportunity to assess the possibility of protection
if he took such a ride, and then that you granted that
clearance, and then the agents who were in the car with him
were given a degree of PPE or whatever protection that was
equivalent to what the hospital workers had had.
I had not heard that. Can you elaborate on that just a bit
or at least confirm it?
Mr. Murray. Yes, sir.
So whether it is that instance or anywhere we take any of
our protectees, we are going to do an advance. If we are going
to do overseas, obviously that advance is going to be pretty
extensive. If we find out tonight that one of our protectees
wants to go to some location for dinner, we are going to do an
advance, a protective advance is what I mean.
And so we certainly did that. It is just, you know,
intensive advance planning. Granted, I do not think that our
agents had a whole lot of time to do it, but in order to
determine whether or not it was achievable, they had to have
conversations with the medical staff from the White House
Medical Unit, the medical staff from Walter Reed, and then
beyond that they had to make sure they could create a safe and
secure environment for that motorcade ride or whatever it was.
But to answer your other question, yes, sir. The two
individuals in the vehicle were fully outfitted in PPE, if that
is the right terminology.
Mr. Price. Yes. And of course here the additional element
in evaluation is whether this can be done in a way that is safe
for the protectors, for your agents. That is, I would think,
not a focus of most of these advance assessments in ordinary
times.
If I can circle back to January 6th to make sure I
understand what you are saying. You are saying that January 6th
was not determined to be a national security event; is that
true?
Mr. Murray. That is correct. It was not an NSSE on January
6th. Correct.
Mr. Price. And I do think it is a sad day in this country
when a routine counting of the electoral votes ensuring the
peaceful transfer of power has to be declared a national
security event. But that does seem to be where we are.
Can you offer some clarification as to what difference it
would have made had such a declaration been in place in terms
of your agency's role?
Mr. Murray. Sure.
So I will start by saying I think it was two days after
January 6th it was determined by the then acting Secretary of
Homeland Security that we would slide the designation date for
the inauguration 12 days earlier to go ahead and make sure we
were, you know, absolutely mission ready for the inauguration.
So to answer your question, could we have--could it have
been done to push it before January 6th? Conceivably, yes. But
the real benefit of NSSE planning is to have a long lead time
and to have the opportunity for all these agencies to sort of
work together.
We would not have had that. I do want to say, though, that
I am aware that in mid to late December a lot of the agencies
here, to include U.S. Capitol Police, Secret Service,
Metropolitan Police Department, they were involved in pre-
coordination meetings about what could happen at the National
Capitol Region on January 6th. I think there were more than
half a dozen of those meetings.
Obviously, I am aware that the former Chief, Steve Sund,
testified not too long ago up there and I am also aware that
one of the things he conveyed is that, you know, he would have
preferred to have had more, more people, more resources, more
fencing to be able to effectuate and push out his perimeter.
And I could not agree more. And had it been established to
be an NSSE, that is one of the things that you would have seen.
You would have seen more people. You would have seen more
perimeter fencing. You would have seen more resources.
But to your point, sir, it does not need to be an NSSE to
achieve that. You do not need to have the designation to have
all those things.
Mr. Price. Thank you. That is helpful.
My time is about to expire. I do want to commend you on the
agency's report on averting targeted school violence issued in
March. I will have some questions for the record about the
implications of that report.
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Ms. Hinson.
Ms. Hinson. Thank you, Madam Chair, for the second round of
questions.
And thank you, Director Murray, for sticking it out as
well.
I just had one follow up based on kind of my earlier line
of questioning. You talked a lot in just the past few minutes
about preventative measures within organizations that you work
with, disrupting the scams that are out there, and then some of
the seizures and arrests that the Secret Service has made with
fraud and financial crimes.
So I guess, you know, obviously we know you are working on
all of these things. What can Iowans and American citizens
actually do to protect themselves against being the victims of
these kinds of financial crimes that your organization is
investigating?
Mr. Murray. The first step is simple cyber hygiene. And it
sounds silly, I know, but it is just making sure that we are,
you know, always diligent with regard to our own personal
devices and our own personal access to things that matter.
From a organizational or a business standpoint, it is
basically identifying somebody, and they do not have to be a
subject matter expert, but identifying somebody to sort of be
the marshal for all things that matter in terms of resiliency
and continuity of operations for your organization. And that
certainly includes cyber.
As I mentioned earlier, I do think that we are all, as a
society, guilty of up till very recently thinking of this as
something as nice to have. But moving forward I think we need
to realize in the public and private sector, this is something
that we need to have.
If I may give a quick example of a recent public utility
that suspected that it might have been the subject of
cybercrime. This public utility contacted one of our Cyber
Fraud Task Forces. One of our agents and a local sheriff's
officer who had been trained in NCFI, went out there and when
they got there, they were advised that this public utility saw
some anomalous activity in some of their gages. And they
suspected that somebody might be controlling it remotely. And
that is entirely possible.
But here is the problem. That public utility had not
implemented any controls whatsoever. So there was no way to
tell what the baseline was, what was normal and what happened.
And if I could give you a real life example, I know in a
world of Ring doorbells things are different. But, you know,
years ago if you came home to your house and you saw the window
was broken and that is all you saw, you did not know whether
somebody was trying to break into your house or if it was just
some kids playing ball and the ball hit the house and they ran
away.
And that is effectively what that public utility had there
in front of them. So they have to invest on the front end. They
have to have, you know, some protective measures in place
because when you don't, there are no digital footprints or
fingerprints for investigators to trace.
Ms. Hinson. Absolutely.
All right. Well, thank you, Mr. Murray. I appreciate your
time.
Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. I believe there are no more questions to
Mr. Murray.
I am just doublechecking to see if--
Mr. Fleischmann, are you signaling that you have another
question?
Mr. Fleischmann. I do not, Madam Chair. I just--
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Oh.
Mr. Fleischmann. -- wanted to say thank you for another
outstanding hearing. It was substantive and productive, and I
wanted to thank the Director.
Thank you, ma'am.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you.
Mr. Murray, I just want to remind you of the request by Ms.
Underwood with regards to the use of force and your commitment
to respond in writing to the committee with regards to her
question.
And also because we are ending a little bit early and have
some time, and the fact that this subcommittee has a great deal
of respect for the Secret Service and the men and women of the
Secret Service, I just wanted to-- I don't want to put you on
the spot, but I just want to give you an opportunity, if there
is any issue or question that was not asked that you would like
this subcommittee to perhaps have more information about, I
would like to give you this opportunity to do that now.
Mr. Murray. Thank you, ma'am.
I hope it doesn't ring hollow, but I do--we really do
appreciate the continued support of this subcommittee. We are
highly reliant on you and we have a fantastic relationship with
your senior staff for which we are very, very grateful. I
appreciate the open lines of communication.
I would like to, when the time is right and COVID permits,
I would like to invite everybody to come out to the Rowley
Training Center and down to the National Computer Forensics
Institute to take a look at the good work that not only our
people are doing, but with regard to NCFI the good work all the
law enforcement officers in your communities are doing as well.
But I thank you very much and I appreciate all you have
done for us, and I appreciate the fact that you recognize the
hard work of our employees.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you. And we will. We will be
taking that visit.
Mr. Murray. Thank you, ma'am.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. So thank you, Mr. Murray, very much for
being here.
The Subcommittee on Homeland Security stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:30 a.m., the subcommittee was
adjourned.]HUNT REPORTING COMPANYRPTS HOFERHAP133150HOMELAND
SECURITYAPPROPRIATIONS FOR 2022Thursday, May 13, 2021U.S.
IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND
OPERATIONAL PRIORITIESHOMELAND SECURITY APPROPRIATIONS FOR
2022Thursday, May 13, 2021U.S. IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS
ENFORCEMENT RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND OPERATIONAL
PRIORITIESWITNESSTAE D. JOHNSON, ACTING DIRECTOR, U.S.
IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT
Ms. Roybal-Allard. The Subcommittee on Homeland Security
will come to order.
During today's virtual hearing, members are responsible for
muting and un-muting themselves. When you are recognized to
speak, If I notice that you have not un-muted yourself, I will
ask you if you would like staff to un-mute you. If you indicate
approval by nodding, staff will un-mute your microphone.
To avoid inadvertent background noise, the chair, or staff
designated by the chair, may mute participant microphones when
they are not recognized to speak.
If there is a technology issue during a member's speaking
time, we will move to the next member until the issue is
resolved and you will retain the balance of your time.
We will be following the 5-minute rule. With one minute in
your time, the clock will turn yellow. When your time has
expired, the clock will turn red and it will be time to
recognize the next member
We will follow the speaking order set forth in the House
rules, beginning with the chair and ranking member, followed by
members present at the time that the hearing is called to order
in order of seniority, and we will alternate by party. Next we
will go to the members who were not present when the hearing
was called to order, until every member present has had a first
round.
Members can submit information in writing at any of our
hearings or markups using the email address provided in advance
to your staff.
Now let's begin.
Today, I welcome Tae Johnson, Acting Director of U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He is here to discuss
ICE's management of its resources and its operational
priorities. Thank you for being here this morning.
Acting Director Johnson, as a career civil servant, you
have been asked to step into this interim role as ICE Director
and we appreciate your service in this capacity. We have spoken
about some of the recent challenges you and the Secretary face,
and I want to reaffirm my commitment to help you both address
them.
We have seen many important retractions of the prior
Administration's policies that abrogated the rights of asylum
seekers and others. Those policies drove a wedge between us and
many communities, particularly large migrant populations.
There are significant disagreements about immigration
policy in this country and among members of this subcommittee.
My own view is that we should not simply accept approaches that
divide us, but instead work together to find appropriate
solutions to balance immigration enforcement with due process,
and balance removals with humanitarian considerations.
We have a lot of work left to do, but if we are truly to
address the challenges of immigration it is critical that we
fix our broken immigration system. That is why it is critical
for Congress to pass the President's immigration reform bill,
H.R. 1177, and other important legislation like the American
Dream and Promise Act.
One issue that I am particularly alarmed by is the
increasingly high number of detainees in ICE custody. This
increased number not only puts at risk the lives of detainees,
including those who pose no threat to our communities, but it
endangers the lives of ICE and detention facility personnel,
and the communities in which they live. We have a public health
imperative to find a way to address this issue.
I am also concerned about ICE's relationships with
communities around the country. ICE must find a better way to
balance fulfilling its important mission and respecting the
important mission of local law enforcement.
It is unfortunate that the prior Administration's
aggressive interior enforcement policies placed demands on many
local law enforcement agencies that has compromised the trust
they worked so hard to nurture in their communities.
As you know, that trust is strained in many places by
concerns about abusive law enforcement practices. We should not
be adding to that erosion of trust with immigration enforcement
pressures from ICE. Victims and witnesses to crimes must feel
safe in coming forward.
It is my hope ICE can find a way to work collaboratively
with our local law enforcement agencies, and I look forward to
working with you and this Administration to build that trust
with communities and colleagues concerned about this issue. A
good place to start is by increasing transparency and
collaboration with non-profit community organizations which
provide shelter, along with legal assistance, trauma
counseling, and other services to migrants.
Lastly, I would like to recognize the important work and
accomplishments of the Homeland Security Investigations
workforce. I especially commend them for their work in
combating the criminal activity related to vaccines, personal
protective equipment, and attempts to steal CARES Act funding
meant for families and small businesses.
It is now my pleasure to turn to the distinguished
gentleman from Tennessee, Ranking Member Fleischmann, for his
opening remarks.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Acting Director Johnson, welcome, sir. I would first like
to thank you for your decades of service protecting this
country. Your commitment and leadership over the years with INS
and now ICE are greatly appreciated. I would also like to thank
you for stepping up to serve as the Acting Director before and
during the presidential transition. This is a difficult job
under the best of circumstances, but I know the agency and the
men and women who serve with you are in good hands and, again,
sir, I thank you.
It is unfortunate that we don't have the fiscal year 2022
budget at this time, at the time of this hearing. You may or
may not know, but ICE funding, and especially detention bed
funding, is usually one of the last details that gets worked
out in our conference negotiations. And I would like to see
what marker the President is putting down to show his
commitment to a safe and orderly immigration system.
ICE is a crucial component in our ability to enforce
immigration, customs, and trade laws in our country. To try to
limit or minimize the Nation's laws enacted to protect our
country by withholding funds is simply irresponsible, and to
demand that the agency responsible for enforcing those national
security laws be dismantled is unconscionable. We need a
strong, effective, transparent, and accountable ICE.
I have consistently advocated for a funding level for ICE
that enables ICE to fulfill its law enforcement mission,
including funding detention facilities. I am dismayed that the
President's order to no longer apprehend persons illegally in
this country is linked to a scarcity of resources. I believe
everyone on this subcommittee now has a responsibility to pass
a bill that has adequate funds for ICE to perform its mission
to enforce immigration laws on the books, not just three
categories as arbitrarily determined by the President.
I know that the officers and teams in Homeland Security
Investigations, or HSI, do amazing work tackling some of the
most heartbreaking cases and taking down some very bad actors.
HSI funding is an example where we have agreements on both
sides of the aisle. However, if we don't recognize that these
very criminal organizations that we are investigating and
pursuing are being fueled and funded by the waves of illegal
migration we refuse to stop, I don't think we will ever be able
to effectively shut down these transnational criminal
enterprises. We need to act and I remain hopeful that we can
work together to find a resolution to keep our nation safe.
Thank you again, Mr. Johnson, for being with us this
morning. I very much look forward to your testimony.
Madam Chairwoman, I yield back. Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Acting Director Johnson, we will submit
the full text of your official statement for the hearing
record. Please begin your opening statement, which I would ask
you keep to 5 minutes.
Mr. Johnson. Chairwoman Roybal-Allard, Ranking Member
Fleischmann, and distinguished members of the Subcommittee of
Homeland Security, it is an honor to appear before you today
representing the 20,000 outstanding professionals of ICE.
Because the fiscal year 2022 President's budget has not yet
been submitted to Congress, I am unable to address any specific
details at this time. That said, I will discuss our operational
challenges, impacts of working in a COVID-19 environment, and
our efforts to remain nimble and forward- leaning in response
to changing operational needs.
As you are well aware, we are continuing to experience a
wave of families and unaccompanied children arriving along the
Southwest border. At the border, our goal is to ensure border
security while supporting an immigration system that is
orderly, efficient, fair, and humane.
Currently, the majority of those being apprehended along
the Southwest border are single adults who are being expelled
under Title 42. This has proven to be critical to ICE's efforts
to ensure adequate space for social distancing and reduce the
spread of COVID-19 in our detention facilities. ICE is
concerned that the loss of Title 42 could create additional
pressure on our immigration system.
One other concern we face is Mexico's limited capacity.
When Mexico's capacity is reached, we process the families and
place them in proceedings in the United States. We have
partnered with community-based organizations to test families
and quarantine them under COVID-19 protocols. In some
locations, the processing of families have strained our
resources. This cannot be sustained unless we receive
sufficient funding to keep these families safe after they cross
the border.
On February 18, I issued guidance that requires ICE staff
to focus on three presumed priorities: national security,
border security, and public safety. Although this guidance sets
forth certain priorities, anyone in the U.S. illegally is still
subject to arrest and removal.
In the first two calendar months following the
implementation of this guidance, arrests that meet the presumed
priority criteria are up. For example, in March, there were 645
arrests that meet these criteria and, in April, there were
1552. This is higher than every preceding month going back to
April 2020. Similarly, arrests for non- citizens who have
committed certain serious crimes are up. In March, ICE arrested
280 non-citizens whose most serious offense is assault; in
April, ICE arrested 264. This is higher than all preceding
months this fiscal year. The same is true for weapon offenses
and DUIs.
Consistent with this guidance, ICE will continue to focus
on the most pressing national security, border security, and
public safety threats. Through prioritization, we hope to
achieve even greater success in this regard.
Following the issuance of the interim guidance, ICE was
able to quickly develop and deploy supporting technology and
systems. ICE is working with CBP on the Unified Immigration
Portal, a technical solution that will connect relevant data
from across the immigration life cycle to enable more complete
and understanding of one's immigration journey.
Additionally, to better identify long-term needs and
solutions, ICE has begun the development of a data
modernization plan and roadmap that will allow us to properly
assess the current and future data needs across all of ICE.
This plan will allow ICE to identify forward-leaning solutions
and identify the resources needed. I hope to work with this
committee over the next few months as this plan is developed.
Over the last two decades, transnational organized crime
has transformed in size, scope, and impact, posing a
significant threat to national and international security.
ICE's strategy seeks to build, balance, and integrate
sophisticated analytical tools and techniques to combat
transnational crime and related threats to our national
security, and urge our foreign partners to do the same.
ICE continues to prioritize the investigation and
disruption of TCOs that illicitly introduce fentanyl, heroin,
and other dangerous opioids into the United States. Continued
congressional support for ICE's criminal investigative mission
is vitally important.
In closing, I want to thank you again for inviting me to
testify before you today. I am honored and extremely humbled to
represent the dedicated employees of ICE as they continue to
keep our borders secure, enforce our laws, and stay true to our
values principles.
[The information follows:]********** COMMITTEE INSERT
**********
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you, Director.
Director Johnson, since you issued the Interim Guidance on
Civil Immigration Enforcement and Removal Priorities, arrest
rates have gone down. And we know that cases involving
individuals considered threats to national security or public
safety often take more time and more resources.
I heard you discuss in your opening statement, but I would
ask if you could please further characterize what changes you
have seen in the types of arrests being made since the
implementation of the Interim Guidance. For example, have
arrests of individuals with convictions for criminal sexual
offenses or other serious convictions changed?
Mr. Johnson. Sure. Just as you mentioned in your question,
while the overall arrests have certainly gone down a bit, the
arrests of folks that meet our presumed priorities have
actually gone up. One category or a couple categories of folks
where we have actually seen arrests increase are those
convicted of domestic violence, sexual offenses, and DUIs, as
another good example.
So, I mean, I think you--you know, while the overall
apprehensions are down, I think when you have officers focusing
on what they believe are the worst of the worst, then they are
actually much more able to make a more meaningful impact on
public safety and I think that is what you are seeing.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. Well, you know, as you work with
the Secretary to develop the final guidance, it really is
imperative to address the important context of mitigating
factors in a way that clearly distinguishes between people with
a criminal history who continue to pose a threat and those who
don't. For example, a person who committed a low- level drug
offense 20 years ago and has not engaged in any serious
criminal activity since, and for whom there is no other
aggravating circumstances, is unlikely to be a threat to public
safety today.
It is my understanding that ICE has not conducted an
agency-wide, individualized assessment of each detainee in its
custody to determine whether continued detention is appropriate
under the interim guidance priorities. Currently, reviews of
detainees are only carried out based on a specific request from
or on behalf of the detainee, but it appears that those reviews
do not weigh each detainee's circumstances against the interim
guidance. Will ICE commit to doing this more thorough review,
especially in light of the public health imperative, to address
the unacceptably high number of COVID-positive cases in
detention? And, if so, will that review be conducted by someone
outside of the current field office workforce to ensure a truly
independent review?
Mr. Johnson. Thanks for that question. We continue to
review the cases of those individuals that are detained. I
think, you know, one of the most important pieces of that sort
of analysis is just making sure you only put the right people
in a detention bed at the onset. And I think that sort of had
been the primary focus to start that if you are only putting
the priority cases and those that pose the most significant
public safety threats, then you know those are the individuals
that are appropriate for a detention bed.
We do continue to review the detained population and we
certainly have plans to do a full review of those that are in
our custody, and continue to review cases of those that are
arrested and detained to make sure that they meet our
priorities. So I will commit to that.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. Will that review be done from an
independent, will it be an independent review, or will that
review be done within ICE itself? Because I think that is an
important thing that you need to consider.
Mr. Johnson. And we have. The current process is the
initial review is done at the local field office level, there
is a secondary review that is done by someone outside of the
field office, as you sort of described, and we are looking at
some other sort of frameworks that might work as we look at
other options to review these cases, but that work is still
underway.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. And I may have some
recommendations for you.
And I see that my time is up, so now I am going to go to
Mr. Fleischmann.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you again, Madam Chair.
Director Johnson, sir, we saw almost 900,000 persons cross
the Southwest border illegally during 2019 and we declared it a
crisis. It was not possible for CBP and ICE to detain the sheer
numbers of people appended at the border. I have got several
questions.
To begin, sir, for those migrants that entered in 2019, how
many or what percentage were given a notice to appear when they
were released from CBP or ICE custody, sir?
Mr. Johnson. I believe, sir, that the answer to that is
everyone that was arrested and apprehended by Border Patrol was
issued a notice to appear, but I would want to confirm, but
that is my understanding.
Mr. Fleischmann. Yes, sir. And of those given a notice to
appear, what percentage never once checked in with the court or
their ICE office?
Mr. Johnson. Sir, I don't have that information in front of
me. What I will say is typically, once those individuals report
to court, that is when ICE is typically made aware. And
obviously for those that we release on alternatives to
detention, we have a much-- sort of much better way and
effective way to track those folks through the immigration life
cycle, but I would have to-- I would have to see if we can't
pull that information about those that were apprehended in 2019
and get back to you.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you.
After almost 2 years, if you know, sir, what is the current
compliance rate for those migrants who arrived in 2019?
Mr. Johnson. We certainly don't have that information. What
I can tell you is based on the number of individuals that we
enrolled in alternatives to detention. In fiscal year 2020, we
had about 11,000 individuals abscond from the program, and so
far in fiscal year 2021 we have had about 3,000-- or 2700
people, this is through March, abscond from the ATD program.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, sir.
For those who are not compliant with the terms of their
release or who have orders of removal, what is ICE doing to
find those individuals and remove them from the U.S.? And, as a
follow-up, is there room under President Biden's priorities to
ensure that those people who are not in compliance are
expelled, sir?
Mr. Johnson. There certainly is room. As I mentioned in my
opening remarks, you know, everyone that is here in the country
illegally is subject to arrest and removal, so there is
certainly some room there. In terms of what ICE is doing to
sort of identify those that aren't compliant or that failed to
comply with the court order, I mean, that is-- you know, it
really comes down to a resource issue. As you know, we have
6,000 ERO officers that have to cover, you know, 5,000 state,
local, and county jails, and there are a lot of individuals on
the non-detained docket. So they are only able to do but so
much given the staffing levels, but they do make efforts to
identify those that violate their terms of release.
Mr. Fleischmann. Yes, sir.
One final question in this round. Are you able to quantify
how many individuals are currently being admitted at each point
of entry without receiving a notice to appear? If so, how are
these individuals vetted and what conditions of release are
being set for these individuals, sir?
Mr. Johnson. Sir, I would have to defer that question to
Border Patrol, they are the ones responsible for issuing the
NTA. I do not have a whole lot of visibility on the actual
numbers that are being released without issuance of an NTA.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, sir. I appreciate your
answering those questions.
Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Cuellar?
Mr. Cuellar. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And, Director Johnson, I appreciate your almost 30 years of
experience and career, and I thank you for your service for
everything you have done.
I want to ask a couple questions, one dealing with staffing
and then one dealing with the prosecutorial discretions.
So let me ask you about staffing. I'm talking about the
Homeland Security Investigations. We know what they do. I
think, bipartisan, we agree that we need to do that. But one of
the things that I am seeing on the border is that when you look
at those HSI special agents, they spend about 88 percent, about
eight percent, maybe nine percent of their time conducting
long, complex investigations relating to narcotics and only
about five percent of their time doing the long-term, complex
investigations relating to human smuggling, which is what we
are seeing at the border.
I mean, you know, some people don't see the smuggling or
the trafficking. They only see what happens when they cross
border, but on the other side is the smuggling, plus some of
that that happens on our U.S. side.
I want to see if the committee agrees that we need to have
more Homeland Security Investigation agents, but we need to
have more IRS folks also. And by IRS, I am talking about, of
course, the Investigation Research Specialists that right now,
you know, the ratio is just not high enough for your agents.
So tell me about that and tell me if you can also add more
people to the border, because sometimes we tend to send them to
nice places, other cities, but they need to be at the border,
and we need to fill the staffing. For example, in the Laredo
area, one third of the-- we still have about one third vacancy
in the Laredo area and you can look at the border area of other
areas.
So tell us about that, and then tell us also about
immigration attorneys, so the judges can do their job, the
immigration judges. I know that Chairman Quigley is on, we are
working with him to get more court spaces because right now we
have more judges than court spaces, so the judges are just
basically hanging around for an open space. And I know Chairman
Quigley is helping us with that, but we also need those ICE
attorneys.
Mr. Johnson. Thank you, Congressman.
I think you are absolutely right, you know, our HSI
investigators have a fairly broad sort of portfolio as it
relates to the types of crimes that they investigate and just
given, you know, their limited resources, they are typically
only able to devote some percentage of their staff to the
various different portfolios. So I certainly recognize the
concern with only five percent of the staff being devoted to
human smuggling. I can't say for sure that that is 100 percent
accurate, I have not seen that stat, but we will confirm that.
But just to your point, I mean, I think it really does just
start with additional resources, at least from the smuggling
context, you know. It is just not important to have the
resources here domestically, but we need to really have
sufficient resources abroad, which is where a lot of these
investigations start with our sort of partnership and work that
we have with the foreign partners overseas.
So, you know, in terms of the Intel Research Specialists,
which is also known as criminal analysts, you are absolutely
right. We have a ratio of about one to ten. You know, there are
7200 special agents and only about 750 criminal analysts. And
we really do need to get that number up pretty significantly
because our data seems to suggest that, you know, that any time
you have a criminal analyst partnered with a special agent
throughout the course of that investigation that you have a 30-
percent higher success rate in terms of a positive outcome in
that investigation.
So that is something that we continue to ask for the
committee's support on and we think that will go a long way
towards tackling this human trafficking and human smuggling
issue that we have here in our country.
As it relates to immigration attorneys, we only have 1300
immigration attorneys today, that is compared to about 650 or
so immigration judges, if I remember correctly, and, you know,
that is just totally, woefully inadequate in terms of our
attorneys being able to cover it out on all the courtrooms
across the country.
Mr. Cuellar. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Chairwoman.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Palazzo.
Mr. Palazzo. Thank you, Madam Chair, Ranking Member
Fleischmann, and thank you, Mr. Johnson, for your remarks.
As ICE's senior law enforcement official, you have an
extraordinarily difficult job. Please know that there are many
of us who support your mission and believe in the integrity of
you and those under your supervision.
I also would like to extend my thanks and gratitude to the
men and women of your agency who work every day and night to
protect our citizens and to enforce our laws, because this is a
nation of laws.
In your opening statement, you mentioned that what is
happening at our border is a humanitarian crisis, and I cannot
agree with you more. Since January, we have seen an
unprecedented number of individuals, families, and abandoned
children come to our border. This invasion of migrants is
overwhelming our border facilities and, because of the global
pandemic, this furthered a health risk for our Border Patrol
and ICE agents.
Today, I hope this committee can have an open and honest
discussion on ways to address and fix this ongoing crisis.
As I mentioned, since the beginning of the Biden
administration, our Southern border has seen an invasion of
migrants trying to come into our country illegally. In March,
Border Patrol told this committee that a large percentage of
migrants crossing the border evaded law enforcement and entered
the country. Border Patrol remains overwhelmed by the vast
number of migrants they are detaining. We have heard their
facilities quickly filled up, further making it a problem for
agents to process illegal migrants.
All that said, in April I read a report that ICE
experienced a record low of deportations. So can you please
explain why we are seeing lower deportation rates when the last
few months we saw an increase in border crossings? And how do
we push the Southern border further south, stopping dangerous
individuals before they get to U.S. ports of entry?
Mr. Johnson. Thank you, Congressman.
I guess my first response would be, like you have
mentioned, there has been a significant surge of individuals
along the Southwest border, but, you know, the overwhelming
majority of those individuals have been single adults that we
have been fortunately able to expel via Title 42. So those
individuals have not made it into our detention network and,
therefore, just weren't even, you know, in a position to
remove.
You know, the numbers of removals, as you mentioned, in
April was much lower than-- lower, I wouldn't say much lower,
than any-- you know, in the past, and there are a lot of
factors that come into play with that. I mean, you know, ICE
doesn't control the speed at which some of these cases make it
through the process in terms of getting their cases adjudicated
by judges, so that could have played a factor. And, as we
mentioned, the arrests are down and sort of generally, although
the priority arrests are up. So we think that may have also
contributed to the lower number of removals.
Mr. Palazzo. And my second part of the question was, can
you-- you mentioned before, like how can we move, like, away
from our Southern border and move that border further south?
Mr. Johnson. Yes, that is a great question. Again, that
just starts with just deploying more HSI staff abroad, so that
they can, you know, work with our foreign partners to bring
down these transnational criminal organizations right there
before they reach our southern border. So that is a huge sort
of priority for us and any additional resources we can get on
that front to deploy additional staff overseas and enhance our
Transnational Criminal Investigations unit would go a long way
at attacking these smugglers and human traffickers.
Mr. Palazzo. It seems that many elected officials in the
United States believe they are above the law by creating
sanctuary cities, counties, and states. Currently, there are 11
states and 180 cities and counties that are listed as sanctuary
cities. These sanctuary cities pride themselves on making it
difficult for DHS agencies to do their jobs and create
jurisdictions of amnesty for illegal aliens. No Mississippi
cities currently act as sanctuary cities. In fact, in 2017 the
Mississippi state legislature passed a law making sanctuary
cities illegal in the state. The law prohibits towns, counties,
and universities from purposefully defying federal immigration
laws.
A former Mississippi Governor said it best: ``Taxpayers
expect their state and its political subdivisions to abide by
federal immigration laws.''
Can you tell me briefly, how do sanctuary cities affect
your agents' ability to do their jobs, and do sanctuary cities
create extra costs for your agency to enforce immigration?
Mr. Johnson. Thanks, Congressman.
I mean, to start, I would say that our relationships with
the state and local community is absolutely vital in us being
able to carry out our important mission. You know, without
their support, it is very difficult for us to be efficient and
effective. So when local jurisdictions do not cooperate,
whether that is in terms of not honoring our detainers or not
letting us in at their facilities, then it puts ICE in a
situation where we actually have to go out into the communities
to find individuals that in this case would meet our priority.
So it is certainly not the most efficient process and it
does put our officers in harm's way unnecessarily, in my view.
Mr. Palazzo. I see my time has expired. Thank you.
I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Price.
Mr. Price. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Mr. Johnson, thank you for appearing before us today. Thank
you for your long service. We realize there are certain
limitations on what you can say about next year's budget; on
the other hand, you have long experience with the Department,
which I hope will enable you to reflect on two interrelated
challenges that I want to introduce.
One is the targeting of enforcement actions, how the
Department exercises its prosecutorial discretion, and the
interrelated problem of the relations with local law
enforcement.
This subcommittee has a history, it goes back about 14
years, of pushing for a more precise focus on dangerous
individuals when it comes to ICE enforcement. We directed
funding in that way and we assumed that in many, maybe most
cases, deportation would occur as individuals emerged from the
penal system. That led to the Secure Communities Program. As
you know, it turned out to be far less targeted, I would say,
on dangerous individuals than we had hoped. A good deal of
discussion and agitation during the Obama administration and
the Priority Enforcement Program replaced Secure Communities.
But then Secure Communities was brought back with a vengeance
by the Trump administration with a much less effective
targeting strategy on people who posed a threat.
The Trump administration also sought to weaponize the
287(g) program. It sought to commandeer local law enforcement.
They greatly increased 30 to 150 participating jurisdictions
during the Trump administration. The Atlanta ICE director
confirmed at one point that North Carolina raids were targeted
at jurisdictions where sheriffs had withdrawn from the 287(g)
program. Some provocative billboards were purchased by ICE
across the country in areas where 287(g) was an issue. I mean,
you know that history as well.
So I want to register the hope and the belief that in the
new Administration we are going to see some serious changes. We
are going to see a renewed focus on targeted enforcement and we
are going to see the reform, if not the elimination, of 287(g).
I would appreciate your comments.
Mr. Johnson. Thank you, Congressman.
First, just in terms of targeted enforcement actions, I
think you are absolutely spot on. As I mentioned earlier when,
you know, although our overall arrests are down, I think the
data shows that the individuals with the highest level of
criminality is up is somewhat reflective on, you know, the
results that you get when people are somewhat hyper-focused on
certain types of criminal elements, and we expect that trend to
continue. And while our overall arrest numbers might not ever
be as high as they were, I do expect that the number of, you
know, violent offenders to increase because folks are spending
their time working on those types of cases, which oftentimes
are a little bit more difficult, as we all know.
So as it relates to just the partnerships with 287(g) and
other local officials, I mean, as I mentioned, I think there
are some very-- there is some importance to keeping those
relationships together. I think, you know, we cannot perform
our jobs without the assistance of state and locals. And while
we recognize that some, you know, local government agencies
have elected to end their programs, there are other local
governments that find the 287(g) program useful.
So, you know, from our perspective, we are going to try to
find some common ground and ways to encourage greater
cooperation from state and locals and whatever that looks like.
I mean, it doesn't have to be signing up for a 287(g) program,
but we just want to keep those lines of communication open and
find some areas of agreement because we think there are some--
there is lots of middle ground out there and we just need to
figure out what it is, so that we can be effective at
performing our mission.
Mr. Price. I am sure you would acknowledge that if local
law enforcement is seen, though, in the first instance as the
long arm of ICE, that does have implications often for their
ability to do their job in the local community.
Mr. Johnson. Absolutely, sir, and I totally understand why
people take the position that it is just not worth it. I mean,
it stymies people from reporting crimes. Oftentimes, people who
are subject to domestic violence won't pick up the phone
because they are afraid of the ICE or immigration implications.
So these are all valid and fair points, and I could certainly
understand why those who choose not to participate make that
decision.
Mr. Price. Thank you, sir.
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Ms. Hinson.
Ms. Hinson. Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate you
holding this hearing today. I did have the ability to speak
with Acting Director Johnson earlier this week.
So, thank you again for taking the time to meet with me
earlier this week. My time today I am going to devote to
follow-up questions from that conversation, as well as a few
concerning issues that have been brought to my attention,
specifically about ICE's activity or lack thereof in certain
cases as well. These issues and a general lack of information
are highly concerning to me and we are going to follow up with
the Secretary when he is in in a few weeks, but these issues
must be addressed by ICE leadership and the Administration. In
my mind, it is part of our role to hold everybody accountable
and make sure taxpayer dollars are spent effectively.
So, Director Johnson, thank you again for your service and
our frank conversation earlier this week. I also think it is
important to note, when members of this committee reach out to
ask for answers, we are doing that not to create more work for
you, but because we are ultimately accountable to the American
taxpayer and require those answers to be able to make truly
informed decisions about how to spend those taxpayer dollars,
their money.
So thank you for the responses I have already received and
I trust that you and your team are going to follow up on the
other questions that we discussed in our call.
We did talk about in our call the disconnect between ICE
and Customs and Border Patrol, specifically when it comes to
tracking illegal immigrants once they have been released into
the United States. So today can you confirm for me the
ability-- the inability, rather, for ICE to track illegal
immigrants' location and then their activity within the
homeland on that person level following their release by CBP?
Mr. Johnson. Sure. Thanks, Congresswoman.
As I mentioned in our call, there are certainly some gaps
in our ability to track everyone that is released in the
interior. For those individuals that are released on an
alternative to detention, whether it is an ankle monitor or a
smart link or telephonic reporting, we have, you know, much
better success at keeping track of those, but for individuals
that are just released with notification to report to ICE or to
show up in court, then our ability to track those folks closely
is much more limited. And--
Ms. Hinson. So this gap you talk about, why is it so much
more challenging to track individuals now than it was in 2019?
Mr. Johnson. No, I don't think it was much more limited to
track in 2019. The systems have been-- the same systems are in
place and in 2019, when we were seeing a surge of family units
that were being released, I mean, they were being released with
a notice to appear and not-- you know, we couldn't enroll
everyone on ATD because the numbers were high, just as they are
now. So we were certainly running into those same issues in
2019 as we are today, that has not changed.
Ms. Hinson. Can you state for the record that you are not
currently able to tell Iowans how many illegal immigrants are
present in Iowa right now or how many CBP has released into the
country with plans to be in Iowa?
Mr. Johnson. That is correct. And, again, I would want to
just-- that is my understanding, I would like to start with. I
would like to go back to CBP and just clarify that they are
unable to pull data by state, but that is my understanding that
their system of record will not sort of product a report based
on the states that the individuals that they are releasing are
proposing to reside.
Ms. Hinson. Right. And you say you want to go back to them
obviously to confirm this, but do you believe that ICE should
be able to provide this information? You know, obviously, we
have got a gap here in communication if you can't and they
can't. But do you believe Americans should know if illegal
immigrants are in their neighborhood? Specifically, you talk
about some of these risk categories, I think people deserve to
know who is coming in.
Mr. Johnson. I agree and, you know, it should be possible
for that information to be transferred over to ICE's system of
record in a way that would allow us to track folks down to the
state and, quite frankly, the cities that these individuals are
living in, we just don't have that capability or capacity
currently.
Ms. Hinson. Okay. So why is that? I mean, is it a lack of
resources that you are not able to track individuals down to
that in-person level at this point?
Mr. Johnson. It is our--it is the two systems, the one
system that CBP uses and the one that ICE uses, they just don't
talk to each other in a meaningful way. So I do think it is,
you know, getting some technology that will make the two
systems talk would be extremely, you know, helpful, or maybe we
will have to just scrap the two systems that are being used and
start afresh with something that provides the sophistication
that we need to track folks.
Ms. Hinson. Well, Director Johnson, I appreciate those
answers and I will probably have a few more questions in round
two, but thank you.
And, Madam Chair, I yield back. Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Aguilar.
Mr. Aguilar. Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate the
opportunity to dialogue here with the Acting Director. And
thanks for our conversation earlier in the week, Acting
Director.
I wanted to bring up an issue that had some local impacts
as well. And let me start by saying, in fiscal year 2021, this
committee included report language that directs ICE to publish
on a publicly-accessible website reports on arrests, detention,
and removal of U.S. citizens that were citizens when they were
detained or found to be citizens while in ICE custody. Can you
tell me the status of the report that is being prepared and
what can the committee expect to see-- when can the committee
expect to see this information online?
Mr. Johnson. So, Mr. Congressman, I do not know the
background on the actual U.S. citizen report. I do remember
clearing something related to U.S. citizens in ICE custody over
the last week and it is my understanding that that is going to
be sort of signed off on and submitted to the committee soon. I
just don't know if that is the same report that is going to be
posted-- that we are required to post on the web. So can I take
that as a get-back and follow up with your staff?
Mr. Aguilar. Absolutely. And I would just, you know,
encourage you with an eye toward following the guidance of the
report language to include this in a publicly-available format
as well. I am happy to view the information, obviously, in the
committee role, but I think that this deserves to be publicly
available as well that ICE is-- the number of individuals and
the manner in which ICE detains U.S. citizens, as some of my
constituents have experienced.
Acting Director, I wanted to talk specifically about the
Adelanto facility in Southern California. There have been
ongoing concerns with the facility and sometime around October
of last year ICE began operating a new annex to increase their
bed capacity near Adelanto, right next door. Can you tell me
what the capacity of that facility is? And, if you can't, is
that something that you can get back to us on?
Mr. Johnson. Yes. I mean, the capacity at Adelanto, if I
remember correctly, is somewhere around 2,000 or thereabout, if
I remember correctly, but I will confirm, and the annex is
definitely much smaller. I think it is somewhere around 600
beds total, maybe 800 at the annex, but I will get you those
exact figures and, you know, following this meeting.
I will say that our use of the annex right now has been
limited largely to just the new intake and testing and
quarantine of positive cases and we have not seen, you know,
any sort of significant population there. Once those folks
clear their quarantine, they are transferred over to Adelanto.
Mr. Aguilar. So can you tell me then how many beds we pay
for that aren't being utilized?
Mr. Johnson. At both facilities, Adelanto and--
Mr. Aguilar. Sure. And I bring this up in the context of
there was a state bill that sought to limit for- profit
prisons, and I know ICE entered into contracts with these
facilities and with others around the country just, you know,
prior to this bill taking effect. And so I just wanted to kind
of get for the record, you know, what contracts do we have. If
you said 2,000 at one facility, six to 800 at the annex, you
know, what is the population there, and are we under contract
and are we paying for bed space that we are not utilizing.
Mr. Johnson. Copy that. We will certainly run down that
information. I believe of the three or four facilities that we
entered into sort of contracts with right there in that sort of
midst of the new California legislation, I think that one
facility near Adelanto is the only one that we actually
activated, but I will confirm that to you, Congressman Aguilar,
and let you know.
Mr. Aguilar. But you agree that we are paying for bed space
that we aren't utilizing?
Mr. Johnson. For sure. Especially right now during this
pandemic, I mean, that is the case across the country in a
number of our facilities that we have these guaranteed
minimums. And it is just because there has been so much
uncertainty surrounding whether Title 42 is going to end or,
you know, a host of litigation that is at play that could
significantly turn things around and we would have needed all
of these beds, but that is absolutely accurate that there are
some beds being paid for.
Mr. Aguilar. Yeah, I think that is just something
critically that we need to look at as we keep an eye on the
fiscal year 2022 budget. It is pretty clear that there is a lot
of bed space that we are utilizing in many cases-- or that we
are under-utilizing and we are paying companies for that, and I
think that that is something we have to remedy and fix.
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Rutherford.
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Director Johnson, great to see you, and please thank all
your men and women for the job that they do. As a former law
enforcement officer, I am particularly appreciative of the work
that you and your office accomplish.
If you would, Director, I want to talk a little bit about
287(g) because I am hearing some rumors that this program may
actually be in danger of being cut back or eliminated, and I
really want this committee to hear how important this program
is. I know as a sheriff this is one of the few programs that
was a win-win-win. It is a win for the community because it
makes-- it keeps our communities safer by getting rid of
criminals, it keeps our officers safer by ICE officers come to
the jail and pick these guys up for deportation and they don't
have to find them on the street, and it is safer for them
because they are found in those locations. And I would like
you, if you would, Director, because I know as these numbers
continue to go up on the interior of the country, a program
like 287(g)-- and let me make this clear, I am only talking
about the jail- based program, because the task force program
that happens out on the street where you are actually going and
looking for individuals, I never had that, I never did that,
because I felt it drove people underground and I did not want
to do that, but my jail had a very robust 287(g) program.
And these are individuals who are in the interior of our
country, committing crimes, getting arrested, and that is a
prerequisite for 287(g), they have to go to jail under the JEM
program, they go to jail and then they work on being deported.
Can you talk about how important that program is to the
safety of your officers and our communities?
Mr. Johnson. Absolutely. Thanks, Mr. Congressman.
You know, as you mentioned, this is a perfect of good
cooperation between federal and state law enforcement. As I
mentioned earlier, these relationships that we have are vital
to ICE being able to sort of successfully perform its mission.
The 287(g) program has the two types, the Task Force Model,
which Jacksonville did not necessarily have, and then you have
the Jail Enforcement Model, which you did have, which is
basically sharing that, you know, information as you run in
print with ICE and letting us know if there is an ICE- wanted
and ICE warrant.
So, as I mentioned, you know, there are a lot of
jurisdictions that find the program useful, you know, and
others who have decided for whatever reason that it is not as
useful, it runs contrary to some of the other, you know, law
enforcement obligations, which I understand. I have heard
concerns from folks about them not wanting to report crime.
But I do think that, you know, any time we can have our
officers not have to go out into the communities and arrest
people that are in local custody, whether it is a 287(g)
program or it is whether the facility is honoring a detainer,
it makes our officers safe.
Mr. Rutherford. So, Director, I mean, look, you ran the ERO
program for a long time, so can you talk about how there has
been growth in the 287(g) program that has made it better for
your officers, safer for your officers?
Mr. Johnson. So I don't have the exact numbers. I mean, I
do know that there is at least over 100 current agreements.
Some of the agreements are fairly useful and then, you know,
there are obviously some agreements that there is just not a
whole lot of activity.
So, look, any time our guys and gals don't have to go out
and arrest someone in the communities and put themselves at
risk, it is a good thing for folks. But, you know, I certainly
recognize the sort of-- you know, the issues associated with
some that think that it just results in certain folks being
apprehended and potentially targeted, which is certainly
something I don't think any of us want to see.
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you very much.
And I see my time has run out, Madam Chair. But I certainly
hope, Director, this is a program that survives any cuts from
the Biden administration.
Thank you. I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Quigley.
Mr. Quigley. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you, Director, for being here. Sir, I was one of the
founding members of the Transgender Equality Caucus, so I think
justifiably concerned about their care under ICE detention. As
of February 2019, ICE confirmed it was jailing more than 100
transgender individuals in 20 different immigration jails
across the U.S. Unfortunately, immigration detention is
notoriously dangerous and harmful for transgender immigrants
who are likely to be seeking asylum because of trans-phobic
violence they have already faced or they fear and, because of
such histories, they are likely to suffer from depression,
post-traumatic stress disorder, and other mental health
conditions.
Additionally, in 2017, a congressional inquiry revealed
that LGBTQ people in ICE custody are 97 times more likely to be
sexually victimized than non-LGBT people in detention.
Sir, do you know how many people are currently in ICE
custody who identify as transgender and which facilities they
are detained in?
Mr. Johnson. Sir, I do not have that information in front
of me, but it is certainly something I can run down.
Mr. Quigley. Okay. Now, our advocates report that many
transgender individuals in ICE, they don't reveal their
identity because they fear they will be subject to segregation
and other harms. Can you tell us a little bit about the
training and protocols in place to ensure that individuals
coming into custody are provided a safe and protected
opportunity to reveal their gender and their orientation to
ICE?
Mr. Johnson. Absolutely. You know, upon intake, individuals
are asked a series of questions and one of the questions is,
you know, how they identify. So there are a number of
opportunities along the way for individuals to sort of reveal
their LGBTQ status to an officer at any point in the process.
There is also the detention reporting and information line
where, if they don't feel comfortable reporting it to the
officer, they can report it to our hotline, or they can report
it during their medical screening when they are in front of
medical professionals and not officers.
We have made some efforts on sort of, you know, improving
our training and identifying specific facilities that would
focus on housing these individuals in a less restrictive
environment, but there is always more work we can do. I mean,
we are looking at all aspects of our vulnerable population to
include transgender and this is going to continue to be a
priority for us as we move forward in assessing our detention
framework.
Mr. Quigley. And obviously there have been horrors told
about transgender individuals being abused in these facilities.
So it just seems obvious that training needs to be pretty
dramatically expanded and altered to make sure that the culture
understands that these abuses are not going to be tolerated and
that, if anything, extra protection needs to be afforded those
who identify to all of yours.
Are there plans to expand what you are talking about even
more?
Mr. Johnson. Yes, definitely some work is underway to
figure out, as I mentioned, how to deal with various segments
of our vulnerable population to include transgender, you know,
identifying other alternatives where that is possible. You
know, as you may be aware, I mean, some individuals that are
transgender have pretty serious criminal convictions and it
is-- you know, that is one area where we are just trying to
evaluate some of the mitigating factors that come with some of
these cases like, you know, their special vulnerabilities
compared to the public safety threat that they actually pose.
But we are going to continue to sort of dig into that issue
and see where we can make improvements.
Mr. Quigley. Yes, if you could get back to us on that, as
well as my initial question about the number of transgender
individuals and where they are located, and any plans and how
those plans coming moving forward for additional and improved
training and care, I appreciate it.
Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Ms. Underwood.
Ms. Underwood. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for
holding today's hearing.
Mr. Johnson, as you know, vaccinating your detainees
against COVID-19 is important not only for their own health,
but also for the health in the communities where the detention
facilities are located. I have a county jail in my district
that contracts with ICE and, despite some initial confusion, I
am pleased to report that everybody detained there was offered
COVID-19 vaccines on March 10th. However, over the last few
months, there have been broader communication breakdowns around
ICE detainee vaccinations that need to be addressed.
You stated in your testimony that COVID-19 vaccines for
people in ICE's custody were included in the Federal
Government's allocation for each state, and that the local and
state public health departments are responsible for
distributing them to the detainees. However, I understand that
DHS is currently reevaluating its strategy for vaccinating
people in custody.
Can you please clarify for the committee what the current
plan is for getting ICE's detainees vaccinated?
Mr. Johnson. Thank you, Congresswoman.
As things currently stand today, the allotment for vaccines
for detainees across the entire country is part of the
individual state's allotment--
Ms. Underwood. Right, exactly.
Mr. Johnson. --that is the current sort of plan. And, as
you are probably aware, what priority level the inmates and ICE
detainees are vary significantly by state. I mean, we have some
states in the Ninth Circuit, for instance, California, Arizona,
where people have already started to get their vaccines
actually a few months ago, whereas in other states they are
much lower on a priority list. So because of that sort of
variance, we have been looking at working with CDC and HHS to
just see if we can get our own batch of vaccines, so we can
just deploy them across the country to the ICE detainee
population.
The problem with that is, if you have ten ICE detainees,
like in your situation where, you know, the number of ICE
detainees in your facility compared to the number of local
inmates, is-- you know, it could be much, much lower. So for
ten ICE-- if we bring vaccines for ten ICE detainees and there
are 500 local inmates that don't get vaccinated, then that
could create some problems.
So that is one of the issues that we are going to have to
work through if we deliver just the vaccine to the ICE
population that is detained in these local facilities with U.S.
citizen inmates.
Ms. Underwood. So if ICE is dependent on state and local
jurisdictions for vaccine allocations, what outreach have you
done to convey that need to local partners?
Mr. Johnson. Oh, the locals are aware. I mean, that was
communicated in the original plan on how to deal with not just
the ICE detainee population, but the U.S. Marshals Service
population and many of the, you know, populations across the
country, that it was going to be consistent with the individual
states to vaccinate their inmate populations.
Ms. Underwood. So what plans then do you have to ensure
that all detainees at all facilities have access to any
translation services that they may need to learn about the
vaccination in a language that they understand, right? We are
trying to make sure that everybody can get vaccinated and we
don't want there to be barriers in place.
Mr. Johnson. So we do have a fairly robust and
comprehensive interpreter and translation services line. I also
think we have already created some material that explains not
only the importance of vaccinations, but some of the other
educational materials surrounding COVID generally. So that is
certainly a priority for us. But if there are-- you know, all
of our facilities have access to our interpreters hotline and
if there are any issues with communication and communicating
the importance of the vaccine, then we will certainly, you
know, make sure we focus on that. But it is a fair point and we
will make sure we get something up to folks to remind them.
Ms. Underwood. Great. And you stated in your testimony that
ICE Health Service Corps will administer vaccines at facilities
that they staff; however, the Health Service Corps staff is
only 20 of the over 200 facilities that house ICE detainees. So
who administers the vaccines at the other 90 percent? So that
is different than the allocation.
Mr. Johnson. The person who administers it is the health--
you know, it is the health authority that oversees that
particular clinic. So I don' know if you are at or near
McHenry, but--
Ms. Underwood. Yes, I represent the McHenry ICE--or the
McHenry County Jail.
Mr. Johnson. Yes, so it is the health service administrator
and that medical authority that would be responsible for not
only just administering the test to the ICE inmates-- I mean,
the ICE detainees, but also the McHenry County inmates as well.
Ms. Underwood. Okay. Well, vaccination is so important. It
is not just a moral obligation, but it is important to protect
the public health of all Americans. I am looking forward to
coming back in round two. Thank you very much.
I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you. And that completes round one,
and we do have time for a second round.
Director Johnson, I want to go back to an issue that was
raised by Congressman Aguilar. Beginning in fiscal year 2019,
and then continuing over the course of the fiscal year 2020,
ICE entered into contracts to increase its guaranteed minimum
detention bed capacity by over 10,000 beds, without providing
notification to Congress about how this would impact future
appropriation requirements.
While ICE has the responsibility to humanely enforce the
laws of our country, we have a responsibility to oversee the
agency's budget. Not disclosing this information obstructed our
ability to do so, resulting in likely hundreds of millions of
dollars going to pay for detention beds that have not been used
during the pandemic, and while Title 42 public health order has
dramatically reduced the need for detention beds for recent
border crossers.
My question is why didn't ICE engage with Congress and how
the plan to expand guaranteed minimum detention capacity would
tie this committee's hands when making funding questions.
Mr. Johnson. Thanks, Chairwoman. I mean, I am fairly
certain that ICE was in communication with the committee during
2019 when we were sort of bring on all the 20,000 additional
detention beds, and we were providing ramp-up plans, and
explaining to folks our plan to relieve the overcrowding that
we were faced with along the Southwest border.
So there was certainly some visibility into all the beds,
and efforts, and work that was underway to try to get those
individuals out of the overcrowded border patrol stations. Now,
maybe there was no specific discussion on how those contracts
were going to be structured, and that some of them were going
to have to include some guaranteed minimums.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. I just want to make the point that you
are right on that. The discussions that you are talking about
were not about contracting, and the impression that was given
that these were temporary. And now, we are in this situation
where it is impacting our budget. So in light of the reduction
in detention bed requirements related to Title 42, another part
of the question that I had is why didn't ICE, at the very
least, delay expanding its guaranteed minimum capacity until
after the public health order could be lifted?
Mr. Johnson. So I think in large part, we brought on all
those beds well before March 2020. And as you may know,
Chairwoman, we have been at risk of losing Title 42 it seems
like at every month or every few weeks. So there was just so
much uncertainty surrounding how long we would be able to keep
expelling people, as well as there were other things that
reduced the population prior to the new administration coming
in, like MPP and some of the other stuff that was also the
subject of significant litigation.
So I think the only answer is that there was just so much
uncertainty surrounding our detainee population, whereas you
know, just overnight, we could start seeing 3,000 and 5,000
people a day, and those beds could fill up, that there was just
a lot of reticence to ending all of those contracts and
agreements, and then finding ourselves back in a situation like
we were in 2019, where border patrol had 15,000 people in
custody, and no place for them to go.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. I think what you are describing is a
situation which highlights why it was important to actually
work with the subcommittee, and to plan this out in a way that
we wouldn't be in this situation now, where it is impacting our
budget.
One more question on that, what financial analysis was
conducted to determine that ICE could absorb the cost
associated with these substantial growth and its guaranteed
minimum capacity?
Mr. Johnson. So there was certainly some analysis by our
budget folks. I mean, if I remember correctly, I mean, I think
even for fiscal year 2021, even though-- I mean, we have gotten
rid of some of the facilities with GMs. There is still a good
number that exists. But I think for 2021, we were able to
absorb the additional cost associated with some of those
guaranteed minimum contracts, just based on our current burn
rate, and the fact that we are not using a lot of other beds
outside of those GM facilities.
But I totally get your point. I mean, I will do a much
better job in the future of making sure folks are aware of the
various structures of any contracts that are being brought on
that might impact funding in out years.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. Does ICE have internal controls in
place to ensure that it doesn't commit taxpayers to
expenditures for which Congress does not provide funding?
Mr. Johnson. We do. There are some various controls in
place that ensure that we don't go above what was allotted by
Congress.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. So Somehow there appears, then, to
be a breakdown, because we are in this situation right now. And
my time is up, but I do want to emphasize what Congressman
Aguilar asked for, and that is the amount of funding that ICE
has spent on empty beds in 2020 and so far this year. If you
could provide that with us, I would appreciate it.
Mr. Fleischmann?
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Director Johnson, the country is still operating under a
Title 42 public health declaration because of the COVID
pandemic, which allows ICE and CBP to repatriate and remove
migrants who have crossed the border illegally, immediately
after their apprehension, thus keeping the numbers of migrants
who are released into the U.S. after crossing illegally down.
But we get the sense that there are talks of revoking the Title
42 declaration, which means the ability to swiftly repatriate
and return migrants also goes away.
I have several questions. What are the plans to lift the
Title 42 declaration, sir?
Mr. Johnson. So there is certainly a concern that we may
use our Title 42 authority. I think it is all stemming from a
number of lawsuits that are out there. I am not aware that it
would be lifted sort of voluntarily, because again, with the
large number of single adults that are being expelled, we think
that in this COVID environment, that is extremely helpful. So I
don't think it is a situation where it is going to just be
lifted electively. We will be mandated through some sort of
court order to lift it.
Mr. Fleischmann. What would that mean for ICE operations,
sir, and the population ICE is responsible for tracking through
the court process?
Mr. Johnson. Well, the biggest impact is just going to be
the single adults that are coming across the southern border
that are largely being expelled via Title 42. The last report I
received was somewhere around 3,000 single adults per day. The
impact of 3,000 people a day coming into ICE custody in the
midst of a pandemic could significantly impact our operations.
On the family unit front, we are only expelling about 25
percent of the family units right now. So that will be a little
bit of an impact, but nothing as significant as the impact as
it would be for single adults.
Mr. Fleischmann. For planning purposes, sir, how many
people are you estimating will flood the border and into ICE's
detention or responsibility, sir?
Mr. Johnson. Very little visibility on what the impact
might be in terms of additional people coming. What I can say,
sir, is that we are expelling somewhere around 3,000 to 3,500
single adults a day. So those would certainly be people that
would be coming into our immigration system if T- 42 were to go
away.
Mr. Fleischmann. Yes, sir. What plans does ICE have to meet
the increased numbers, and can you meet the demand for services
and detention within your current budget, sir?
Mr. Johnson. In fiscal year 2021, perhaps. I mean, I would
want to go back and confirm, just because our numbers have been
so low. We may be able to absorb an increase for the next four,
five months of this fiscal year. But you know, at 3,000 a day,
it could very well exceed our-- first, our funding, as well as
just our ability and capacity within our detention network. But
I don't have anything other than that, sir.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Mr. Director. And Madam Chair,
I am going to yield back. I think Mr. Palazzo is going to take
the chair as ranking member. I have got a couple of questions
to ask in Labor H. So Mr. Director, I think you, and Madam
Chair, I will be back momentarily.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. Mr. Cuellar?
Mr. Cuellar. Madam Chair. Director, follow up on Title 42,
I hope Title 42 doesn't go away. My understanding is that you
get about 3,000 single adults per day, about 90 to 95 percent
of those single adults are expelled back under this 1944 law.
If you look at the Doreo area and you get Cubans, Haitians, and
Venezuelans, mainly. Then you go to the Laredo area, and you
get mainly Mexicans that are coming in, single adults. And then
you go to the valley, that is where you get 15 percent are
kids, 36, 37 percent are family units. But in the Loredo area,
if you would release all those adults into our community, I
will tell you my community would not be happy. And I know you
have got to follow whatever the administration says, but just I
can tell you my community would not want to have where most of
the people coming in the Loredo area are single adults. And to
be released in our area, my community would not be happy with
that.
But that is--I will ask you to comment on Title 42. But the
other thing is, talk about prosecutorial discretion. In the
valley, they have released 20,400 people on what I call the
honor system. I know some of the folks in the administration
have called this a notice to appear, but my understanding is a
notice to appear is I862, I-82. The people that are being
released are under an I385, which is an admission to release
document.
So under the 385 document, the remark there is that they
are supposed to go to a local ICE office after final
destination and report to you. My understanding is for you to
do that, you have to do that manually. So you have to check
manually 20,400 cases, and I think you need some sort of
computer, where you would be able to connect with CBP, because
I don't think you all are able to talk under those
circumstances or check those 20,400 people that have been
released on the honor system.
And by the way, it is not only family units. I have single
adults that have been released. Tell us a little bit about the
points that I have just mentioned.
Mr. Johnson. Thanks, Congressman. To your point, I mean,
Title 42 is absolutely critical. Without it, we would have so
many negative outcomes in our detention facilities, and I
suspect that most of the intake would have been shut down based
on significant numbers of quarantines and extremely high
positivity rates at certain facilities.
So the only way we have been able to survive and have so
few COVID-related deaths in custody over the last 15 months has
been because of Title 42.
In terms of the 20,400 folks that are being released, you
are absolutely correct. There is no automated method by which
we can track those individuals. There is a requirement for them
to show up at their closest ICE office and report. Once they
report to an ICE office, they are put into our system of
record. And at that point, we can track those folks at that
time. But otherwise, we would just have to get a list from
border patrol of the 20,000 cases and check them pretty
regularly.
Mr. Cuellar. So Mr. Director, so when they are released,
they are not put in the system itself, and it is not a notice
to appear before an immigration court. So in order for you to
put them in the system, Mr. Director, you have to wait for them
to show up, if they show up, so you can put them in the system,
correct
Mr. Johnson. That is when they get put into the ICE system
of record. They are certainly in the border patrol system,
because they process-- they make the encounter and they process
the individual. But they typically don't get into the ICE
system until they actually report. That is with the exception
of those individuals what are being enrolled into ATD.
Now, if you are enrolled in ATD, then obviously we have
greater ability to track those folks, because we are taking
their information, putting it in our system at the time that we
are putting the GPS monitor or putting them in SmartLink.
Mr. Cuellar. Thank you, Mr. Director. Real quickly, because
my time is up, have there been any talks about creating
additional immigration court dockets to deal with this surge? I
know it is under Department of Justice, but any talks on that?
Just a yes or no, sorry.
Mr. Johnson. Yes. There are talks that are underway to
create a much more accelerated process so that these folks
could get adjudicated much more quickly than they do currently.
Mr. Cuellar. Thank you, Mr. Director. Thank you, Madam
Chair.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. Mr. Palazzo.
Mr. Palazzo. Thank you, Madam Chair. This committee has
already begun working on crafting the fiscal year 2022 budget
legislation. And I know the acting director, you are limited as
to what you can share before the president releases his budget
in detail. But generally, what resources does ICE need, and
with the flood of migrants coming into our country, I hope
there is a better way to monitor these individuals before they
find some way to disappear.
So what resources does ICE need, and how can this committee
help you and your agents do their jobs most effectively?
Mr. Johnson. Thanks, Congressman. I mean, I would start
with just the help we need on the data modernization effort. I
mean, that is an area where we continue to struggle with our
data analytics and reporting. It has certainly, I am sure, been
a frustration for some of the committee members. So just
funding along those efforts.
Additional attorneys is certainly--as I mentioned before,
we have 1,300 attorneys. There is over 600 judges. We need
attorneys to represent and adjudicate these cases in courtrooms
across the country.
The other thing is the ERO case officers. We have nearly
three million people on the non-detained docket, and if there
is a real expectation if these cases are actually monitored,
and we can sort of track them, and know when folks are showing
up for court, then we need sufficient ERO case officers to
track them.
And then lastly, on the HSI side, we need more special
agents. We need our criminal analysts at a more reflective,
appropriate ratio so that they can provide the case support
that these criminal investigations need. And we need to beef up
our international footprint so that we can dismantle and tackle
these TCOs right there before they make it to our border.
Mr. Palazzo. With the contact media narrative, and just
conversations, you hear people wanting to abolish ICE. There is
this defund police movement, which just makes no sense in the
world. Can you tell me, is this affecting your team's morale in
any way or fashion? And how is recruitment, and how is
retention? Because it has to be extremely tough when we are
trying to ask you to do your jobs, enforce our Nation's laws,
and at the same time, it feels like we are handcuffing you from
being able to do those jobs, just like the border patrol.
Instead of enforcing our laws on the border, I mean, they are
picking up trash, changing diapers. They basically become
babysitters, and that is not what they signed on for.
And I know your agents, you all do great work. You are
tasked with a monumental mission. As part of our overarching
homeland security mission, can you just talk to the morale, the
recruitment, and retention? And what can we do, as a committee,
to-- I mean, obviously, words hurt, and when we say things, it
could have an impact on your agency and other federal agencies
as well.
So if you don't mind just sharing your thoughts on that.
Mr. Johnson. Sure. Again, it is certainly challenging when,
you know, and I am sure some of the men and women are impacted
when you hear statements like that. But look we realize that it
was a-- we are going to get criticized for carrying out our
job, no matter what job it is. I mean, ICE is the only agency
where 50 percent of the people are going to be mad at us 100
percent of the time. And our men and women are professionals.
They will carry out the mission, and perform it with great
professionalism and pride.
In terms of recruitment and retention, I mean, I think we
have a fairly specialized workforce, where people sign up for
this job because they like the job, and they typically don't--
at least in the officer corps, the special agents and the
deportation officers, obviously there is always going to be
issues with attorneys, and support folks who can certainly find
a better, less hectic place to work other than ICE.
We struggle, to some respects, in those categories, but our
law enforcement corps are here to stay, and they typically
don't go until they retire.
Mr. Palazzo. Well, Director Johnson, I appreciate your
remarks. And thank you for your 30 plus years of service, and
let the men and women under your supervision know how much
America appreciates their work and commitment. Thank you.
Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Price.
Mr. Price. Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Johnson, let me
pursue a little further these intertwined issues of targeting
enforcement on truly dangerous people, and the kind of
relations you maintain with local law enforcement. Looking at
figures-- and you cited this more generally, looking at the
people in detention, and how many had serious records over the
past administration, I am quoting here from the track reports
at Syracuse University.
``The number of people in ICE detention rose from 41,163 in
2016 to 49,396 in 2019. But at the same time, the number of
those individuals who had serious level one criminal records
declined from 7,475 in 2016 to 6,048 in 2019. The percentage of
those detained with no criminal conviction at all rose from 57
to 64 percent. In other words, ICE raids became both more
frequent and less discriminating.''
And I can tell you that both that increased frequency and
that lesser discrimination, more random quality, was felt in
immigrant communities throughout the country, including a lot
that I saw in communities that I represent. Just a lot more
anxiety and apprehension.
So I wonder, do you have any kind of comparable--you said
earlier in your earlier testimony that the percentage of those
enforcement actions involving serious criminals had increased,
and I don't know exactly the time frame you were referring to.
But do you have figures you could supply that would document
that?
Mr. Johnson. I do. And what we have been--the period that I
am referring to is after the release of our February 18
guidance, where it made clear what the sort of priorities were,
and where we wanted the officers out in the field to focus
their efforts. So that is the period that we were able to
compare the last two months or so, compare to the preceding
months to see what the data looked like.
Mr. Price. All right. If you could give us those precise
numbers, that is, of course, the kind of direction we were
looking for and hoping for with this new administration.
Now, in the matter of local law enforcement, I was
interested in the exchange with Mr. Rutherford earlier, who of
course comes from a law enforcement background. As I understood
it, he described a system based-- a jail-based system, based on
the penal system, and of course, as I said earlier, this is
what some of us had in mind when we were trying to reform this
earlier. Secure communities turned out to be, I would say, less
focused on serious criminals, more on people who were
apprehended, sometimes for traffic violations, or whatever. It
wasn't officially discriminating.
And then, of course, these other models of the 287(g)
program, the so-called taskforce model are less discriminating
yet. So the question, I think, you and we are going to need to
face is is this salvageable at all, or is this 287-- and then
you add to that the weaponization of 287(g), just the
absolutely reprehensible weaponization of this program during
the last four years, I just wonder if it is salvageable?
Mr. Johnson. No, that is a good question. Again, I think
there is some that find usefulness in it, and others that don't
want to touch it at all, because of some of the polarization,
or just the impact that it has on local community.
I mean, I think the question, at least as I see it, as long
as we can all agree on, or come to some agreement on what types
of cases that everyone feels comfortable targeting, whether it
is in this 287(g) sort of framework, or whether it is just in
honoring detainers, but just identifying what everyone is sort
of in agreement with in terms of those folks should be on the
table to be removed, because we don't them released into our
communities.
And I think if we start there, then I think there would be
some opportunities to find some middle ground and actually
potentially salvage it or come up with something, a new program
that sort of addresses the issue that we are all trying to
solve.
Mr. Price. Yes, sir. That is possible--entirely possible,
completely outside of a 287(g) framework, I would think. Thank
you. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Ms. Hinson?
Ms. Hinson. Thank you, Madam Chair, for the second round.
And thank you, Acting Director Johnson, as well. You mentioned
that communications break down between CBP and ICE in terms of
your systems. And Congressman Cuellar was hitting on that as
well in his line of questioning a little bit earlier.
Our office stands ready to work with you to come up with
solutions on that. Because ultimately, this is a breakdown on
communication that is keeping you from fulfilling your mission.
It is keeping CBP from fulfilling their mission. Ultimately, a
barrier to keeping our community safe as well. So we are ready
to work on that. I think a clear priority list there.
I want to go to something you said about the number of
arrests, the lower number of arrests. Basically, we know that
is about a 50 percent reduction in arrests at this point, due
to the priority changes laid out in the guidance memo from
February. And Madam Chair, I would like to ask unanimous
consent to enter the guidance memo from February 18th, 2021
into the record.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. So granted.
[The information follows:]********** COMMITTEE INSERT
**********
Ms. Hinson. Thank you. So, Director Johnson, were you aware
that it would result in that 50 percent reduction based on
these criteria laid out here? Do you believe the changes in
this memo are impacting your ability to carry out your mission
of enforcing all of our immigration laws to the fullest extent
possible?
Mr. Johnson. I suspected that there would be some reduction
and the low level folks that we had taken into custody in terms
of the prior administration. So absolutely, I did think that
that was a possibility.
Ms. Hinson. I mean, a fifty percent reduction is a
significant reduction. Is it accurate right now that ICE is
averaging one interior arrest for every two and a half months
per officer? So that is on pace of about four to five arrests
per year, per officer. Does that seem accurate to you?
Mr. Johnson. I don't know. I have not looked at--
Ms. Hinson. Okay. Well, it is definitely a low number, and
in my mind, it keeps you from fulfilling your mission. And I
think that is an important flag when you do that math. If
arrests are down significantly and we are talking about
eliminating Title 42, 3,000 adults coming in a day, 21,000 a
week, over a million a year. This is a significant challenge,
obviously, coming your way, and we want to make sure we are
catching the worst of the worst, obviously. But this is your
mission at its core.
So I think we need to get back to prioritizing your
mission. And obviously this committee stands to do that. I also
wanted to flag, it is my understanding that a long time senior
employee at the agency rang a warning bell about this and this
process in an email to you and other senior officials as well.
So based on your many years of service, and you are talking
about approaching 30 years of service, you have got to have a
professional well-honed opinion about this. Do you have
concerns about the impact that this might have long term on the
ability to carry out ICE's mission?
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Ms. Hinson, I think we have lost the
connection with the director.
Ms. Hinson. Okay. Well, I will follow up with him on our
questions, for the record. But appreciate the second round,
Madam Chair, and I would yield back until we get that sorted
out.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. Let me check on what the
possibility is of getting him back.
The report I have is that they are trying to reconnect the
director. And we have a little bit of time, so Ms. Hinson, I
will give you the time back so you can ask that final question
or make that final point, if we get connected. Okay?
Ms. Hinson. Yeah. Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Director, can you hear us? I see him
back on the screen, but I don't know if he can hear us or not.
You may be on mute, Director.
We will just recess just for a couple of minutes while they
fix his audio. Apparently it is not working.
Mr. Johnson. Can you hear me now?
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Yes, we can. Ms. Hinson?
Ms. Hinson. Yes. And thank you, Madam Chair, for that
flexibility, and thank you, Acting Director. I know
technological challenges can be a problem for all of us.
So I just wanted to go back. I am not sure where you heard
my last question cut off, but I wanted to flag that we
understood a long term senior employee actually flagged it for
you in an email and to other senior officials about this
guidance being a concern.
So I just wanted to know from your professional opinion,
you have got about 30 years of experience in this field, did
you have concerns about the impact that this would have on the
agency's ability to carry out its ultimate mission?
Mr. Johnson. So what I would sort of respond, I guess, is
that certainly no concerns from my perspective, if the goal if
just keeping our communities safe, and making sure that
individuals convicted of serious crimes, or those that pose the
biggest public safety threats, or any public safety threat,
quite frankly, as well as a national security threat are still
sort of prime for immigration enforcement. So certainly no
concerns on that front from my perspective.
Ms. Hinson. I would real quick point to the category number
three, which is public safety category, that says, `` A non-
citizen is presumed to be a public safety enforcement and
removal priority if he or she poses a threat to public safety,
and he or she has been convicted of an aggravated felony.''
I think that is concerning to me when I read that, because
I look at how much time that might take, and they are a danger
to our community, and they are not meeting these three
criteria, when it is your agency's mission to get these people
into custody.
So I think this narrows it beyond the scope of what
actually is designed to keep our public safe. So that would be
my main concern with this guidance at this point. And I think,
again, our Iowans deserve to know who is in their communities,
and it is your job to make sure that our communities are safe
and we are protected from these goals.
So Madam Chair, I understand my time is out and I yield
back. Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Aguilar?
Mr. Aguilar. Thank you, Madam Chair. Acting Director, I
wanted to talk a little bit more about the Adelanto facility.
And in November of 2020, there were inspections of the
facility, specifically the ICE processing centers east and west
Adelanto. Because of the pandemic, these inspections were
conducted remotely, I understand. Staff sent photos and videos
at the facility to the inspectors and conducted interviews by
phone.
In one instance, it was noted that there was mold in the
shower. However, the pictures provided to the inspectors did
not show mold. Can you walk me through the logistics of how ICE
complied with these inspections, and how can we be confident
that you are getting a true picture of the facilities, and that
inspectors have an honest view of what is going on?
Mr. Johnson. Again, this is all unprecedented territory. I
mean, we have never been having to operate in the midst of a
global pandemic. There was a lot of changes that we had to sort
of implement as it relates to our facilities, and whether it is
suspending visitation, really limiting the number of
individuals that were actually showing up at the facility,
because everyone that goes there is a potential threat at
spreading the virus.
So while it was certainly not ideal to go to a sort of
virtual format for doing these inspections, and quite frankly
not something that many of the inspectional components had sort
of even developed a plan for, but we felt like we still needed
to have some sort of oversight at these facilities during the
pandemic. So I think that is sort of just where folks landed on
trying to provide some sort of oversight of facilities during
this unusual time. Is it preferred and ideal? Absolutely not.
Is it possible that you don't get a true and accurate
assessment as you would when you are actually on site?
Certainly. But it is the best we have given the circumstances.
Mr. Aguilar. Do you plan more inspections of this nature in
the coming months? Or how can we remedy this, and what type of
guidance can you give to the facilities to ensure that it is a
more complete review?
Mr. Johnson. So good question. I do think that as things
stand currently, ODO is doing two of these inspections each
year. So I mean, it really just depends on how long we are in
the midst of this pandemic, sort of in terms of how long,
whether or not we are going to do this-- have to do this at
lease one more time before we are beyond this thing.
But I certainly get your point that you have some concerns
at how these are being done, and I will take that back, and get
with a team, and see if there is anything we can do on our end
to try to make sure that we get a good feel for conditions as
they exist at the facilities, even if we are doing this
remotely.
Mr. Aguilar. Thank you. I appreciate it. Can I ask briefly
about the Office of Detention Ombudsman, the Chairwoman's
leadership and the committee's guidance created this office.
Can you tell me how it is going, what the timelines and
measurables are, and things that we need to know in order to
make sure that that office is staffed up and ready to help?
Mr. Johnson. Sure. I can tell you what little bit I know.
That is an office that reports directly to the secretary. So it
is not an office that is under ICE's purview. I know that they
have been doing quite a bit of hiring to beef up their staff,
and they have been working closely with a lot of the other
inspectional entities, like CRCL and others that perform these
audits, that just understand sort of what their role is going
to be, and how they can sort of compliment the process and
program.
So outside of that, I would just have to defer to the
department, since it reports to the secretary.
Mr. Aguilar. Thank you. I appreciate it. I yield back,
Madam Chair.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Ms. Underwood?
Ms. Underwood. Thank you, Madam Chair. Okay. So Mr.
Director, I wanted to continue on with my vaccine questions.
What percentage of ICE detainees are fully vaccinated?
Mr. Johnson. If I recall correctly, and don't quote me on
this, I will certainly get you the precise numbers, but if I
remember correctly, it is like 20 percent have had at least one
shot. But let me confirm that that is the case--
Ms. Underwood. Okay. You had testified that 1,229 detainees
were fully vaccinated as of May 5th. We are just not sure what
percentage of the total detainee population that is. And we,
based on the numbers that we have access to, believe that that
is around 7 percent. But we really do ask that you follow up
promptly with that numbers.
I am concerned, because at 7 percent, that would lag far
behind both the nation as a whole, and at 20 percent, sir,
because over one-third of American adults are fully vaccinated,
and even the Federal Bureau of Prisons as one- third of their
incarcerated people fully vaccinated.
So can you speak about your plans, or the administration's
plans to get more shots in arms as quickly as possible.
Mr. Johnson. So I do know, like I said, that our chief
medical officer at the department is in conversations with CDC
to see if we can't just get our vaccines ourselves. In fact, I
think there was just some email traffic maybe a day or so ago--
Ms. Underwood. Perfect.
Mr. Johnson. --about potentially getting 20,000 vaccines.
So we will get you an update on that and circle back.
Ms. Underwood. Thank you. Now, Mr. Johnson, you testified
that the administration's use of Title 42 is `` critical to
your ability to implement social distancing in detention,'' and
that your efforts-- and it is essential or critical to your
efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and that they would
be-- it would be undermined if the expulsions under Title 42
ended.
In light of this concern, what are you doing to prepare for
the eventual lifting of Title 42 restrictions?
Mr. Johnson. We are preparing as best we can. I mean, we
are talking to our transportation vendors to make sure we have
the resources, capability, and capacity to move much larger
numbers. We are making sure we have the sufficient PPE so that
if we do need to move people by bus or by plane, that folks
have the proper PPE. We are also looking at whether or not
there are some opportunities for us to move people to one
location, just so that they can be tested and quarantined
before sending them to a longer term facility.
So there is a lot of ways, or a lot of things that we are
looking at, just to figure out how best to deal with a huge
number every single day, because it will be overwhelming and
could put us in a tough spot really quickly.
Ms. Underwood. Thank you. While the pandemic is an
extraordinary circumstance, we can't continue expelling people
forever. So it is imperative that we have a plan for keeping
people safe and healthy.
Mr. Johnson, you testified that ``it is a requirement that
ICE test 100 percent of those who come into ICE custody for
COVID-19.'' Specifically, you explained that all detainees are
tested within 12 hours of admission to a facility, and then
again before release from quarantine if they had been exposed
to the virus. Are you currently fulfilling that requirement and
testing 100 percent of detainees within 12 hours of admission?
Or are there cases where people are not tested within that
timeframe?
Mr. Johnson. I am not aware of any instances where people
are not being tested at this point in the process. I know that
six months ago, or nine months ago when we were early on, that
there were still some capacity issues. But I think we have
gotten past those hurdles at this point.
Ms. Underwood. And how frequently are detainees tested
after initial intake and quarantine?
Mr. Johnson. It varies by facility. I know at our ICE-owned
facilities, we try to test-- do saturation testing at least
quarterly, if I remember correctly. But let me take that as a
get back.
As far as the state and local jails, I am sure it is all
over the place, and there is very little inconsistency about
how frequently they do saturation testing.
Ms. Underwood. Okay. Well, detention centers aren't
islands. The staffing contractors who come in and out every day
can and do bring the virus with them. We know from the New York
Times that they have linked numerous outbreaks within ICE
detention centers to then having community spread in the
surrounding area. So it is really important that guards are
tested frequently, in addition to the detainees. And we will
follow up with you about the guard testing.
I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. That completes the second round. Before
we adjourn, Director Johnson, I just want to bring your
attention to the Unified Immigration Portal, which we funded,
to enable agencies like ICE to get information about a
migrant's release directly by CBP. Perhaps that could be
helpful in giving you some of the information that you need
based on the questions that were asked.
If there are no more questions, Acting Director, thank you
so much for your time and for helping us think through these
challenges. One second, please.
I have just been informed that Ms. Hinson would like to add
something. Ms. Hinson.
Ms. Hinson. And I will be quick. Thank you, Madam Chair. I
just wanted to follow up, Director Johnson, on this memo
specifically. Did you or your staff write this? And if not, who
wrote it?
Mr. Johnson. Are you referring to the February 18 memo?
Ms. Hinson. Correct.
Mr. Johnson. Yes. Me and my staff wrote it.
Ms. Hinson. Did you and your experts at ICE go through it
and look to make sure that it was either justified or
conflicted with what your role is? I mean, did you find any
conflicting-- you said you weren't worried, but was there any
part of it in that guidance that you felt was conflicted with
your mission?
Mr. Johnson. So look, that memo was drafted following the
January 21, at that time acting secretary, memo. So this was
the guidance that was required to sort of come out as a result
of that January 21 memo.
Now, this is just interim, and we are working on our final
guide. And so there is certainly some issues or some areas in
this particular February 18 memo that I would change, and that
we will change once we issue the final draft.
But based on the timeline that we needed to get out our
guidance, that is sort of where we landed, and it is interim,
and I am sure it will be improved.
Ms. Hinson. What is your timeframe for getting that final
guidance? That is my last question, Madam Chair.
Mr. Johnson. I mean, the discussions continue every day. We
were hoping to get something out here within the next week or
two, but it could be a month. It could be six weeks. I mean,
that is my best guess right now.
Ms. Hinson. All right. Thank you, Director. And I
appreciate the extra time, Madam Chair.
Ms. Underwood. Madam Chair, you are muted.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Ms. Underwood.
Ms. Underwood. Thank you so much, Madam Chair, for the
additional time.
Mr. Johnson, do you have the authority to require testing
for guards and other staff at all detention facilities?
Mr. Johnson. To require testing?
Ms. Underwood. Yeah, COVID testing.
Mr. Johnson. I can't require testing of detainees. So I
don't know that I can require testing of the contract guard
staff. So that is a question I will just need to run by our
legal folks to know for sure, but for some reason, I don't
think so.
Ms. Underwood. Okay. Well, I am really concerned about that
limitation, sir. If you would please provide the committee with
a written explanation of the legal or contractual limitations
that might prevent you from requiring COVID-19 tests for staff
and contractors at the ICE detention facilities.
Mr. Johnson. Will do.
Ms. Underwood. Okay. Thank you. Testing is critical for
protecting your workforce, and the people in your custody, and
the communities where your facilities are located. I certainly
look forward to working with you to fill this need. Thank you
so much, Madam Chair, for the extra time, and I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. Director, once again, thank you
very much for your time. I will be submitting additional
questions for the record, which I hope we will get a quick
response on.
The Subcommittee on Homeland Security now stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:04 p.m., the subcommittee was
adjourned.]RPTR ZAMORAEDTR HOFSTADDEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND
SECURITYAPPROPRIATIONS FOR 2022Wednesday, May 19, 2021U.S.
CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION RESOURCE MANAGEMENTAND
OPERATIONAL PRIORITIESDEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
APPROPRIATIONS FOR 2022Wednesday, May 19, 2021U.S. CUSTOMS AND
BORDER PROTECTION RESOURCE MANAGEMENTAND OPERATIONAL
PRIORITIESWITNESSTROY MILLER, SENIOR OFFICIAL PERFORMING THE
DUTIES OF THE COMMISSIONER, U.S. CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION
Ms. Roybal-Allard. The Subcommittee on Homeland Security
will come to order.
During today's virtual hearing, members are responsible for
muting and unmuting themselves. When you are recognized to
speak, if I notice that you have not unmuted yourself, I will
ask you if you would like the staff to unmute you. If you
indicate approval by nodding, staff will unmute your
microphone.
To avoid inadvertent background noise, the chair or staff
designated by the chair may mute participant microphones when
they are not recognized to speak.
If there is a technology issue during a member's speaking
time, we will move to the next member until the issue is
resolved, and you will retain the balance of your time.
We will be following the 5-minute rule. With 1 minute
remaining in your time, the clock on your screen will turn
yellow. When your time has expired, the clock will turn red,
and it will be time to recognize the next member.
We will follow the speaking order set forth in the House
rules, beginning with the chair and ranking member, followed by
members present at the time the hearing is called to order in
order of seniority, and we will alternate by party. Next, we
will go to members who are not present when the hearing was
called to order, until every member present has had the first
round.
Members can submit information in writing at any of our
hearings or markups using the email address provided in advance
to your staff.
And let's begin.
I would like to welcome Mr. Troy Miller, the senior
official performing the duties of the Commissioner, who is here
to discuss his agency's operations, particularly its activities
along the southwest border. This is Mr. Miller's first time to
testify in front of the subcommittee.
So welcome, Mr. Miller.
I recently visited the border with Secretary Mayorkas, and
I want to commend the CBP personnel who have been working so
hard over the last few months to manage an incredibly difficult
challenge. Thank you for your efforts to impose order on what
might otherwise have spiraled into an unmanageable situation.
While challenges undoubtedly remain, I look forward to an
update from you on the situation on the southern border and how
you are working to ensure that migrants receive adequate
shelter, culturally informed nutrition, trauma care, and due
process while in CBP custody. These efforts are vital as we
work towards a more humane, efficient immigration system.
I continue to have concerns about the lack of child welfare
professionals and caregivers in CBP facilities. The
subcommittee has repeatedly asked CBP to quickly deploy such
professionals into border facilities to provide child-centric
care for kids who have already experienced significant trauma.
The COVID-19 pandemic has also taken a toll on the morale
of the CBP workforce, which has continued under most difficult
circumstances to fulfill its mission of ensuring border
security and the flow of international commerce. I understand
that you have established peer support, medical resources, and
caregiver support for the CBP workforce. Please let us know how
we can help you with these initiatives.
To help address the shortfall in CBP fee collections
resulting from the pandemic-related reduction in international
travel, we appropriated $840 million in supplemental funding in
our fiscal year 2021 bill. It now seems unlikely the funding we
appropriated will be sufficient to carry the agency through the
end of the fiscal year. This morning, we will want your candid
assessment about CBP's current fiscal posture.
Also, while I know you are still limited in what you can
say about the budget request for the coming year, we will want
to have a good discussion about what it will take to address
all of these challenges, both now and in fiscal year 2022.
In conclusion, on behalf of the subcommittee, I convey our
heartfelt condolences to the families and colleagues of those
who have lost their lives in the line of duty. Tragically,
since January 2020, CBP has seen 32 line-of-duty deaths, 30 of
which were directly tied to COVID-19. I reaffirm our continued
support for the health and well-being of your workforce and our
appreciation for their service.
I now turn to the distinguished gentleman from Tennessee,
Ranking Member Fleischmann, for his opening remarks.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
Mr. Miller, I too want to welcome you to the subcommittee,
sir. Thank you for being with us today as we discuss the
operations of Customs and Border Protection. Your decades of
service to protecting this country and your commitment and
leadership with Customs and CBP are greatly appreciated.
I would especially like to thank you for stepping into this
role of Acting Commissioner during this transition. I know this
position has taken you away from your home and family, but we
all appreciate the stable and steady leadership you provide for
the mission and the men and women at CBP, especially during
this challenging year.
I pass along my sincere and heartfelt condolences, as did
our chair, to the families, friends, and colleagues of the 34
CBP employees who lost their lives to COVID.
The issues we are seeing at all of our borders and ports of
entry are complex and made all the more challenging due to the
pandemic and world's unsettled economies. We are seeing record
numbers of migrants presented at our southern border, numbers
we would not have imagined even in the busiest months of 2019,
that threaten the safety of our Nation.
We have heard about CBP identifying serious known criminals
and even individuals matching to the terrorist watchlist within
the many large groups apprehended at the border.
Let me be clear: I am not saying that every migrant
apprehended is a hardened criminal. I know that is not the
case. However, the sheer volume of people makes it harder for
CBP officers and agents to properly identify and screen
everyone for threats and--that pose threats to our communities.
Further, the seizure of drugs, weapons, and counterfeit
goods have not slowed during the pandemic, indicating that the
cartels and transnational criminal organizations are still
targeting our borders and our communities to fuel their
profits.
I was really hoping we would have the fiscal 2022 budget at
the time of this hearing, but it appears, Mr. Miller, timing is
on your side and you will have avoided any questions about the
upcoming budget year.
But I will tell you, and you know, that the investments we
make with CBP are so important to the mission. The funds we
provide for people, training, technology, operations, and, yes,
even the wall have shown to play a significant role in
protecting our country. I have concerns that what I do know
about the CBP budget I don't like.
I am concerned that the fiscal 2022 budget does not contain
any new funds for the border wall construction, even though
work still exists. And when you consider the work left
unfinished by the removal of DOD funds, DHS might need even
more investment to complete those miles.
Even more disturbing is the proposal to rescind funds at
the end of the year. I don't know how the administration can
make that math add up, when decisions on how to resume border
wall construction or the cost to cancel contracts have not yet
been made. I think it is foolish to back into a number when we
haven't even reviewed the contracts and current needs.
Further, I fear that, without adequate investment and
without a strong message that we are actively enforcing all of
our Nation's immigration laws, the numbers at the border will
only grow and, consequently, will strain the resources across
CBP's mission. I hope the parts of the budget I have not seen
yet will shed some light on how we are going to resolve these
challenges.
Thank you again, Mr. Miller, for being with us this
morning. I very much look forward to your testimony, sir.
And, Madam Chairwoman, I yield back. Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Miller, we will submit the full text
of your official statement for the hearing record. But I do
want to note that we did not receive your testimony until late
yesterday even though it was due to the committee 48 hours
prior to the start of this hearing. This type of delay is
unacceptable and hinders Congress's ability to conduct its
oversight. And I certainly hope that this is not going to be a
pattern as we continue to request important information for the
subcommittee.
Please begin your oral summary, which I ask that you keep
to 5 minutes. Thank you.
Mr. Miller. Chairwoman Roybal-Allard, Ranking Member
Fleischmann, and members of the subcommittee, I am honored to
testify before you today on behalf of U.S. Customs and Border
Protection.
CBP proudly serves the American people, and we take very
seriously our responsibility to protect the United States from
terrorism and criminal activity while enabling thoughtful
travel and trade.
These responsibilities have been challenged by COVID-19.
The pandemic has forced all of us to do things differently, and
CBP is no exception. We have changed how we process, care for,
and monitor those in our custody.
CBP, along with our Federal, State, local, and
nongovernmental partners, have implemented a robust,
multilayered approach to ensure migrants are tested before
continuing their immigration journey into the United States.
Suspected COVID-19 cases are referred to local health systems
for appropriate testing, diagnosis, and treatment. DHS is
working to expand non-congregate sheltering for migrants who
test positive or have potentially been exposed.
Tragically, COVID-19 has claimed the lives of 34 CBP
employees and 30 in the line of duty--34 lives among the more
than 586,000 American lives the virus has claimed to date in
this country. Services will be held today for an employee who
lost his life in the line of duty. Since the pandemic started,
over 8,700 CBP employees have tested positive.
Even under the cloud of COVID-19, we are better prepared
today to meet the demand placed on us during large-scale
migrant surges, such as we are currently experiencing on the
southwest border.
In March, CBP encountered 172,000 migrants attempting to
cross the southwest land border. That number increased 3
percent in April to 178,000, with over 62 percent immediately
expelled pursuant to title 42.
Although fewer than 11 percent of encounters in March were
unaccompanied children, or UCs, by the end of March, that
population accounted for almost half of all the people in our
custody. In response, we mobilized four soft-sided facilities
in Arizona and Texas with a combined capacity of 2,500.
To expedite UC transfers from CBP custody to Department of
Health and Human Services custody, DHS stood up the Movement
Coordination Cell with representatives from CBP, the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, HHS Office of Refugee
Resettlement, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
This interagency approach has been remarkably successful in
decreasing the average number of children in CBP custody. On
May 11, there were just 455 children in our custody. The
average time in custody has also dropped from 115 hours in
March to just 28 hours in May.
CBP faces other challenges at our Nation's ports of entry
as well. In coordination with the Governments of Mexico and
Canada, only essential trade and travel is allowed to cross our
borders. These restrictions are reviewed monthly to protect
public health without unnecessarily prolonging the
restrictions. International air travel into the United States
decreased by 95 percent in March 2020 and currently stands 70
percent below pre-pandemic levels.
Presidential proclamations remain in place limiting entry
from China, Iran, the Schengen Area, the United Kingdom, the
Republic of Ireland, Brazil, South Africa, and India.
International travel to Mexico and the Caribbean have shown
signs of rebounding, and CBP stands ready to secure and
facilitate air travel as it returns to pre-pandemic levels.
This sharp decline in volume directly impacts CBP's budget.
International air passengers pay about 94 percent of CBP user
fees, which, in turn, fund about 40 percent of CBP's Office of
Field Operations salaries.
Day after day, the men and women of CBP persistently
safeguard America's economic and public health, ensuring
travelers and goods move safely and efficiently across U.S.
borders, that migrants and visitors are properly documented,
and that trade laws, regulations, and related international
agreements are enforced. We are absolutely committed to
balancing border security, national security, properly caring
for those in our custody, and keeping the American people and
our workforce safe.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. I look
forward to your questions.
[The information follows:]******** COMMITTEE INSERT
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Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Miller, it is my understanding that
CBP has recently implemented a form of prosecutorial
discretion, to include the issuance of notices to report to
ICE, also known as RTI or an I-385, to certain migrant families
in the RGV sector of Texas due to severe overcrowding in CBP
facilities.
This began at a time when CBP had thousands of
unaccompanied children in its custody and was also having to
manage the impact of COVID-19. As CBP has worked with HHS to
reduce the number of children in CBP custody, the number of
such notices issued has gone down significantly.
Notices to report to ICE have unfortunately been referred
to as "catch and release," which I have always found to be
extremely disrespectful to migrants, most of whom are fleeing
desperate conditions. I believe that no one should be using a
fishing term to refer to human beings.
Mr. Miller, can you elaborate on the rationale for issuing
such notices, including the impact of changes in ICE
operations, and describe how you have worked to introduce more
efficiency and accountability into the process?
Mr. Miller. Chairwoman, thank you for the question.
As you indicate, notice to report was initiated in the Rio
Grande Valley, and only in the Rio Grande Valley, on March 19,
2021. Let me be clear: This is not a decision we made lightly,
but it was necessary, as you pointed out, given the capacity in
our facilities and the need to decompress our facilities to
keep not only the folks in our custody safe but to keep our
agents and officers safe.
The surge of family units began in RGV on January 23 when
Tamaulipas stopped taking back Northern Triangle families with
tender-age children under the age of 7. The situation on the
ground, on March 19, we had encountered 2,439 migrants in
between the ports of entry in RGV alone. We had over 2,600
unaccompanied children, of which 1,943 unaccompanied children
were held over 72 hours in our soft-sided facility. Pre-COVID,
the capacity of our soft-sided facility was 1,000.
What we did before initiating our notice to report is we
moved 470 agents to the southwest border. We set up virtual
processing. We increased overtime for our Border Patrol agents.
We moved some of the migrants for processing laterally from RGV
to other sectors. The DHS Volunteer Force was activated. HHS
and ICE personnel were deployed to our facility in Donna.
The notice-to-report process cuts the paperwork in half,
but let me clear up some misconceptions about the notice to
report. Agents perform the same national security and border
security checks as they would with notice to appear. They will
collect biometrics and facial recognition--or facial--for the
I-385 when they complete the I-213. The migrants are also given
a G-56, which tells them that they must report to an ICE
location within 60 days. This is essentially the same process
that we perform during the NTA--same checks collecting the same
biographic and biometric information.
Let me correct a common misrepresentation. Currently, DOJ
time and date to determine--in the NTA, the time and date is
marked as "to be determined." So we are not issuing a court
date on an NTA today because of DOJ not having a non-detained
docket.
We are filling out five less forms, cutting the time in
half. And the reason this continues in RGV, as you mentioned,
to a limited extent, is we continue to see about 1,700 migrants
a day, with a greater percentage of family units in RGV, 41
percent versus 25 percent nationally, and a greater number of
UCs, unaccompanied children, 14 percent versus 8 percent
nationally.
What we are doing to fix this: We are working with the DHS
CIO, Chief Information Officer, ICE, CIS, EOIR to streamline
and automate the A-File process.
Thank you for your question.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. [Inaudible.]
Mr. Miller. Chairwoman?
Mr. Cuellar. We can't hear you, Madam Chair.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Oh. So CBP does conduct a security
assessment on individuals before they are considered for
release with a notice to report to ICE?
Mr. Miller. They are.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. They are.
And what responsibilities does a recipient of a notice to
report to ICE have? And what are the consequences for failing
to appear or report?
Mr. Miller. Similar to the notice to appear, they are
directed to report to an ICE office within 60 days. Within that
60 days, when they report to the ICE office, they will have to
complete the NTA paperwork and obtain a court date.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay.
And are there additional process forms that could address
concerns such as ICE not being informed of when migrants with
such notices are in certain locations?
Mr. Miller. So we are fixing those process notifications
now through--thank you for your continued assistance for the
Unified Immigration Portal. That system brings all the data
together for CBP, ICE, HHS. And, under the direction of the CIO
from DHS, we continue to expand that program.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. Well, thank you, Mr. Miller.
I just would like to point out that the issuance of a
notice to report to ICE is not a misuse of prosecutorial
discretion, as some have mischaracterized it. It is a tool for
managing the immigration adjudication process when overcrowding
in CBP holding facilities has become a threat to health and
safety and ICE and HHS are unable to quickly assume custody of
migrants.
I now turn to our ranking member, Mr. Fleischmann, for his
questions.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Mr. Miller, we have been waiting for the administration to
release the results of border wall construction contract
review. I am very concerned about reports that the
administration is seeking to nullify the DHS appropriations
that were the result of bipartisan, bicameral negotiations and
rescind funds that were lawfully appropriated.
Simply destroying the work that has already been done or
that is under contract is foolish and contrary to what previous
CBP Commissioners have requested prior to the Trump
administration.
I have a few questions, sir. I will start with three and
then go from there.
What is the status of the border wall contract review, and
when do you anticipate that Congress will be briefed on those
results? Can you tell us what criteria is being used to
evaluate the existing contracts and pending work? And are
frontline officers and agents being consulted, sir?
Mr. Miller. Sir, thank you for the question.
As you know, we have signed the exemption for RGV, the
safety and welfare exemption for RGV, as well as San Diego, for
the erosion issue that we had out in San Diego. The border wall
plan currently sits with DHS and the administration, and we
await the decisions, and we will implement once they are given
to us.
Mr. Fleischmann. Okay.
A lot has changed over the past few years. Is there any
effort underway to comprehensively evaluate the different
layers of security--wall or barrier, technology, and law
enforcement personnel--that are needed to maintain operational
security effectively and efficiently at the land borders?
Mr. Miller. Sir, yes, that is something that we are looking
at very closely. As my predecessors used to call it, the three-
legged stool--the infrastructure, the technology, the
personnel--we need all three for border security.
Certainly, the Border Patrol continues to look at their
version of a workload staffing model, which we hope to roll out
by the end of this year. We are looking at our technology needs
and our infrastructure needs as well. So 100 percent, sir.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you.
Will this administration submit another Border Security
Improvement Plan to the committee for review, sir?
Mr. Miller. I will have to get back to you on that, sir.
Mr. Fleischmann. Okay. We would appreciate that.
Mr. Miller, I asked these questions to your colleague Mr.
Johnson last week, but I would like to get your impression.
Countries are still operating under a title 42 public
health declaration because of the COVID pandemic. Under the
title 42 authority, ICE and CBP have been repatriating and
removing migrants who have crossed the border illegally near-
immediately after their apprehension, thus keeping the numbers
of migrants who are released into the U.S. after crossing
illegally down.
But we get the sense that there are talks of revoking the
title 42 declaration, which means the ability to swiftly
repatriate and return migrants also goes away.
For planning purposes, how many people are you estimating
will flood the border into CBP's stations for processing? And
what plans does CBP have to meet the increased numbers? And can
you meet these processing demands within your current budget?
Mr. Miller. Sir, thank you for the question.
We continue--obviously, we are still under a global
pandemic, and the CDC order will be lifted, you know, when the
health professionals decide that it needs to be. But, as we
look at the eventual and, we hope, soon lifting of title 42, to
be honest with you, for the sake of our economy and the world,
you know, we continue to assess our operations.
Number one, the soft-sided facilities. We have stood up
four soft-sided facilities. We are in the process of standing
up a fifth soft-sided facility.
We have moved additional resources downrange, Border Patrol
agents.
We have stood up what is called our Movement Coordination
Cell, which has helped us move out--in coordination with HHS
and ICE, which has helped us move children into the appropriate
settings. We are also going to create a Movement Coordination
Cell for single adults and family units that will be housed
right here at the Ronald Reagan Building.
We continue to look at all of our processes and procedures
to automate them, like the automated A-File, working with the
DHS CIO.
And we continue to look at our projections going forward,
but, right now, the majority of the encounters we see with
migrants continue to be single adults, about 65 percent. And we
believe we have the appropriate laws and policies in place to
remove the single adults.
Mr. Fleischmann. Mr. Miller, thank you for your responses,
sir.
Madam Chair, my time has expired, and I will yield back.
Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Cuellar?
Mr. Cuellar. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And, Mr. Miller, thank you for being here with you. And I
appreciate all the good folks that work for you up and down the
border, northern border, coastal, and every part of the U.S.
I want to talk about nonessential travel. As you know, it
is something that I have been trying to do, been trying to open
up since last year. Under the former Commissioner, Mark Morgan,
we almost had something worked out where we could have a phase-
in, depending on the health of the communities. And CBP and the
local communities would decide how to open the borders in a
safe way.
We are in a much better situation than we were last year,
as you know. Vaccinations and cases in, you know, my hometown
of Laredo and the Valley are extremely low and all that.
You know, my problem are contradictions that we have. And I
am not blaming you. But, you know, we let undocumented aliens
into the U.S. and there is no health issue. We talk about
bringing in legal Mexican visa holders that, before the
pandemic, were spending over $19 billion for our restaurants,
hotels, small businesses, not only the border, but, I mean,
California, Texas, you know, Colorado, and all over that, but
there is a health issue on that. They say it is a health issue,
according to the Secretary.
When you let a rich Mexican fly in, they can fly in, and it
is not a health issue. You let a poor Mexican that wants to
come over and spend $15, $20 or see a family member on the U.S.
side, it is a health issue. So there are a lot of
contradictions.
In my area along the border, there are some businesses that
depend on 40, 50, maybe even more, percent on Mexican shoppers.
When I talked to the Secretary, he said it is a health issue,
as I just mentioned, which I respectfully disagree with him,
the way he put it, especially on the contradictions I just
mentioned to you.
So I talked to CDC. CDC basically--well, the Secretary
said, "Talk to CDC. It is a health issue." I talked to CDC.
They pushed it back to Homeland, and they said it is a Homeland
Security issue.
I have had very good talks with your Health Under
Secretary, and he does a great job. And I am just trying to
figure out, you know, when are we going to open this up? I
mean, if there are so many contradictions--and I have
businesses that have closed down not only because of the
pandemic, but, on top of that, you lose 40, 50, 60 percent of
your business. What do we need to do to get this open, in spite
of all those contradictions I just laid out to you?
And, you know, my businesses are so frustrated. My
communities are so frustrated. I mean, I assume we are going to
open up one of these days, but I am just trying to see if we
can expedite this in a safe way. And I, you know, want to
follow up with you after this call, if you don't mind--after
this hearing, should I say.
Mr. Miller. Congressman, you know, thank you so much. And,
you know, first of all, thank you for recognizing the heroic
work that the men and women of CBP continue to do under
unprecedented times, under the most difficult situations.
You know, first and foremost, as you know from the
background of my career, I grew up in small communities on the
northern border, and I understand the economic impact that this
is having on the small communities and the communities on the
southwest border.
So, really, I am committed to working with you over the
next 30 days or so to see what we can do in a more regional
approach. And I look forward to working with you into the
future so we can do that as well. And we will continue to
consult with DHS, like you said, CWMD and CDC and CBP, to
ensure that we have a clear path forward.
And I thank you for the question.
Mr. Cuellar. All right. And I would like to follow up on
that, because I keep getting different signals on that.
Just real quickly, I would ask you--because I am going to
ask for another round of questioning if we have time--but I
would ask you to look at the technology and some of the
requests for proposals are set out to be 14 years of
performance, and I am a little worried about that.
We can follow up. I know my time is up. I have about 20
seconds left. But I am just concerned that, if we go with some
of the RFPs, we are going to see the same thing we saw with
Boeing in 2008, and we are still in the same place with
technology.
So, anyway, I would like the follow up on that issue, on
some of the RFPs that you put out for towers and instruments
and communications along the border.
My time is up, but I would like to follow up on that, Mr.
Miller, and thank you for your time.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Palazzo?
Mr. Palazzo. Thank you, Madam Chair, Ranking Member
Fleischmann.
Commissioner Miller, thank you for being here today. I
appreciate everything you are doing. As you mentioned, you
know, you all are operating under some unprecedented times and
hardships. Big thanks goes out to all the CBP agents and their
families underneath you that show up every day with their
number-one goal of keeping Americans safe. And that should be
the number-one goal of this committee. That should be the
number-one goal of all Members in Congress. So I thank you for
what you do.
You know, I had an opportunity to go to the border in 2019
as a part of the conferee on the Appropriations Committee. And,
you know, we had a great host, Henry Cuellar. We went to
Laredo. And Ranking Member Fleischmann was with us, and
Chairman Granger at the time. And, you know, while we were at a
point of entry, they seized 7 to 8 kilos of cocaine.
And I know some of my colleagues are focused on, you know,
this humanitarian crisis at the border, and, you know, we are
focused on it as well. But I am wondering about the crisis and
the dangers of, as our CBP agents and others are misdirected,
taken off their core missions, to focus on, you know, other
jobs, other things to help address the humanitarian crisis, we
have huge gaping holes on our southern border, where we don't
know what is coming over. We don't know the true amount of
drugs.
I mean, obviously from what you seized in 2020, the COVID
epidemic obviously did not keep the cartels from working
overtime--44,000 pounds of cocaine, 5,700 pounds of heroin,
177,000 pounds of methamphetamine, and 4,700 pounds of
fentanyl. Now, if I am correct in the back-of-my-napkin
figures, 4,700 pounds is enough to kill every American two
times over. And that is what you seized. And so what scares me
is what we haven't seized.
And so can you kind of address, you know, the type of
people that you are apprehending, whether they are on the
terrorist watchlist, whether they are sex offenders,
murderers--and, again, those are the ones that we are catching,
not the got-aways--and, also, your concerns with the hard
narcotics that are coming across?
And what technologies can we give you? I mean, obviously,
Congress isn't committed to giving you all the barrier that you
need. And we know it is effective. I mean, just look; we
wrapped our Capitol around it with two rows of barrier.
And, you know, so, between the boots, the barrier, and
technology, what can be most effective to execute your job in
keeping Americans safe?
Mr. Miller. Sir, thank you. And thank you for
acknowledging, as well, the incredible work the men and women
are doing, because, ultimately, that is what they are hired to
do, that is what they want to do, and that is what they are
doing--border security, national security, keeping the American
people safe.
So just a little bit on the numbers, as we sit here today.
Our fentanyl seizures are up 308 percent in fiscal year 2021;
heroin, 14 percent; cocaine, 100 percent; and methamphetamines,
up 20 percent. So the men and women continue to do a phenomenal
job of keeping these dangerous narcotics off the streets.
So a couple things on the technology. We have a pretty good
plan going into 2024 to increase the vehicles being screened on
the southwest border from less than 1 percent to around 40
percent in fiscal year 2024. Thank you to Congress for those
funds.
We also have a plan to increase our screening technology
for the commercial traffic on the southwest border up to 90
percent by fiscal year 2024. And we are in the process of
procuring that equipment as well.
If you look at the fentanyl pandemic and where it started,
it started at the mail facilities. And thanks to this
committee, we received funds and have deployed some additional
technology at our mail facilities in JFK, where my daytime job
is, where I left on January 20. And that technology and the re-
imaging of the mail facilities and the ECCs is going to be
hugely beneficial.
On the Border Patrol side, we continue to look at
technology such as AST, which have artificial intelligence
embedded within it. And, you know, that should help to ensure
that we are directing agents to the places they need to be to
encounter the subjects we need to encounter.
Mr. Palazzo. All right. Well, thank you, Commissioner
Miller.
I see my time has expired, and I look forward to having a
second round of questions. Madam Chair, I yield back.
Mr. Miller. Thank you, sir.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Price?
Mr. Price. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And welcome, Commissioner. We appreciate your testimony and
your service and that of your colleagues as well.
I have some questions about the attempts to alter the so-
called "Remain in Mexico" policy, which I am sure other members
will also be addressing.
I want to start, though, with an aspect, a wrinkle in that
policy that I encountered at the border. Like lots of Members,
I have visited the border and have a lasting impression from
those visits. And this one has to do with Matamoros and the
practice of so-called metering.
As you know, under the Trump administration, the CBP
engaged in the practice of metering or regulating asylum-
seekers at our Nation's ports of entry, severely limiting the
number of people who were able to even seek asylum.
I remember going in the summer of 2019 to Matamoros. There
were migrant, mainly, it appeared, families waiting outside the
bridge, not even able to go on the bridge, in 102-degree heat,
very insecure conditions, very deprived conditions. Some had
waited months, 3 or 4 months, for their names to be called from
a, kind of, vague, indeterminate list for the few slots that
were available to even make application for asylum.
And, of course, they knew that if their name did come up
and they could make application, then they would need to spend
time in overcrowded CBP holding facilities or, indeed, be sent
back in to Mexico.
Now, there was no CBP waiting list or official process that
allowed migrants to wait in line. It was run by someone
different at every Mexican border town. No transparency in how
names appeared on the list, in what order. No transparency in
terms of how the names came up, whether there might be people
jumping the line. The list was taped to the window of a
building in Matamoros and had 2,000 names on it. And the
migrants told me that, at the time, no name had been called for
some time--not one name.
Now, this process created a huge backlog of asylum-seekers,
who were denied even the chance to make application at our
port. They, of course, sometimes concluded they had no choice
but to attempt to cross the borders between our ports.
So what can you tell me about that metering policy and
whether you have officially ended the practice, or what is
going on with this particular class of asylum-seekers? Given
the history of metering and other troubling Trump policies,
what have you done in this administration to improve the
process for handling these applicants, this large backlog of
applicants?
Mr. Miller. Sir, thank you for your question.
As you know, as our Nation's ports of entry, in particular
on the southwest border, we have a difficult task of juggling
legitimate trade and travel while doing things like
intercepting fentanyl that is coming into our communities,
whether it is a hard narcotic or bad people, bad things. And,
really, you know, that is our major job, facilitating
legitimate trade and travel.
And, on top of that, when you layer in the situation we are
currently seeing with the global pandemic, our facilities, as
you know, were not built to hold migrants or anybody for long
amounts of time.
So I think, to answer your question, we have started,
through the MPP process, or wind-down, and bringing those folks
back into the country for their hearings, we have started a
process where we are getting advance information in scheduling
and doing the vetting in advance and scheduling times for them
to arrive at our ports of entry and, thus, enabling us to
process them in a very timely manner.
So I think, as we move forward, when we talk about
technology and innovation and some of those things, I think
those are the processes that we need to look at so we are
getting advance information and we are able to do the vetting
in advance and we are able to ensure that we are processing
appropriately when they arrive at our Nation's ports of entry
so, at the same time, we can do our job of facilitating
legitimate trade and travel.
Mr. Price. So are these encampments still there? Or how has
the situation changed for the asylum-seeker who previously was
waiting in this, kind of, indeterminate situation?
Mr. Miller. So for the folks that are remaining in Mexico,
we are scheduling appointments. Matamoros, we have wound down
that camp through the MPP process. But we still do, in places
like San Ysidro, have large groups of folks south of our
border.
Mr. Price. But they do know when they can have an
appointment? Or is that not right? Are they still waiting for
days and waiting for some kind of list to be cleared? That is
my question.
Mr. Miller. I will have to get back to you on that
question, but not at this time.
Mr. Price. All right.
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mrs. Hinson?
Mrs. Hinson. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And good morning, everyone.
I want to go back to kind of a line of questioning that we
first started learning about at our hearing last week. We
exposed some concerning issues on the communication challenges
between CBP and ICE.
So, Acting Commissioner Miller, I am going to focus on that
today. I appreciate your service to our country. I think it is
imperative that we acknowledge our gratitude for the men and
women who are keeping our borders safe. And, again, I want to
make sure we are prioritizing their morale. We are hearing
about a lot of very challenging situations at the border they
are obviously on the front lines of.
Back in April, I had the chance to visit the southern
border, myself, and see the current crisis. And your agents
welcomed me there; they welcomed our delegation. We heard about
all the time and energy they are devoting to their jobs to keep
the country safe. And I am grateful to them. They are putting
their lives in harm's way. Obviously, they catch those not only
crossing into our country illegally, but they are also policing
the human smugglers, the drug traffickers, the cartels. I think
it has to be frustrating for them to then see those people
sometimes released into the interior soon after.
Several reports have come to my attention regarding notices
to appear. Obviously, those are the official notices issued to
illegal immigrants telling them that they are expected to
report to a court proceeding or an immigration office. And I
would like to follow up a little bit on the chairwoman's line
of questioning. I appreciated her remarks about some of the
discrepancies with the notices to appear.
So my first question today is: Is the CBP currently
providing one of these notices to appear to all individuals,
families, unaccompanied minors who are released from CBP into
the interior? And, if not, can you give me a specific ratio?
Mr. Miller. So we are, yes, issuing--depending on the
processing pathway. Obviously, unaccompanied children are
processed a different way under title 8 and turned over to HHS.
And single adults, if they are returned, again, will be
processed under title 8.
If we are talking about the family units, whether it is a
notice to appear or notice to report, yes, we are issuing one
or the other for all family units.
Mrs. Hinson. Is there specific written guidance for how you
issue those NTAs, who gets one, who does not?
Mr. Miller. There is.
Mrs. Hinson. Okay.
Mr. Miller. We have policies and procedures across the
southwest border--across the CBP.
Mrs. Hinson. If you could make sure our office gets those,
that would be much appreciated.
And then is it possible at this point for CBP and ICE, or
either agency independently, to track an individual who does
not receive an NTA?
Mr. Miller. We--I don't understand the question. We are
giving them an NTA or an NTR. The folks that would not get one
were not processed and we would not have encountered.
Mrs. Hinson. So, if they are released without an NTA, there
is no way to track them. Once you give them an NTA, is there a
way to track them through either CBP when you release them or
ICE at this point? Do you know?
Mr. Miller. So we don't release them without an NTA or an
NTR. However, if we do release them with an NTA or NTR, we do
collect the 213 information, we do collect the I-385
information, and we do collect the destination information if
they give it to us. And, yes, we can pull that out, as well
as--
Mrs. Hinson. So you can collect the information, but can
you actually track them? Can you find out if--you know, what is
the process for actually ensuring that, after they get that NTA
or NTR, they actually get to the place they said they were
going to be? Do you have the ability to do that?
Mr. Miller. We can pull the information from the forms or
the information that we have in our systems, and we can tell if
they have reported within the 60 days as they are supposed to.
Mrs. Hinson. Okay.
So the biggest concern I have is the breakdown in
communication between CBP and ICE. Because, as we learned last
week--and they did tell us that there is no way to track them
once the NTA or NTR is given and they are out of our your
custody until they either check in or, as we know, many times
don't.
So I would like to know what efforts you are taking as an
organization to coordinate with ICE on tracking those people,
making sure that your processes are more coordinated. Because,
right now, frankly, it seems like one arm doesn't know what the
other arm is doing.
Mr. Miller. Thank you for that question. And I will say
that our relationship with ICE today is 100 percent better, and
it continues to get better. We talk every single day. We stood
up a Movement Coordination Cell right here in the Ronald Reagan
Building where I sit. ICE is present in the Movement
Coordination Cell. And as we continue to look at single adults
and family units, they are going to put additional people in
that Movement Coordination Cell, which will allow us to ensure
that we are seeing the same thing at the same time.
Mrs. Hinson. Okay.
Well, I look forward to a second round of questioning.
Madam Chair, thank you very much, and I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Ms. Underwood?
Ms. Underwood. Thank you, Madam Chair, for holding today's
hearing.
Mr. Miller, we know that vaccination remains a critical
part of ending the COVID-19 pandemic and saving lives, so I am
interested to hear about the vaccine rollout for both your
workforce and the people in your custody.
Let's start with your workforce. Mr. Miller, what
percentage of CBP employees are fully vaccinated as of today or
your most recent available data?
Mr. Miller. So, Chairwoman--or excuse me, ma'am, thank you
for your question.
Ms. Underwood. Sure.
Mr. Miller. I do not know the percentage of individuals in
our workforce that have the vaccination. Obviously, there are
privacy laws, and they can get the vaccination on their own or
they can get the vaccination through the VA.
I can tell you, though, we had a slow rollout of the
vaccination to the workforce, but under the guise of our Chief
Medical Officer and the Department, we have made significant
progress. And, obviously, now the vaccines are available to all
of those who want it.
Ms. Underwood. Well, I did read in your testimony that 33
percent of your eligible workforce were vaccinated at VA sites
and the rest do have access to community sites. Do you know how
many have actually taken advantage of that access and been
vaccinated with your VA partnership?
Mr. Miller. So those numbers are correct with the VA
partnership. I do not know outside the VA partnership.
Ms. Underwood. Okay.
So I understand that CBP previously faced some vaccine
supply challenges that slowed down workforce vaccination
efforts. Now that vaccine production has caught up with demand,
are you finding it easier to get more shots in arms? Or have
vaccine confidence, you know, issues created challenges on the
demand side?
Mr. Miller. So, you know, certainly, on the demand side,
you know, I think everybody that wants a vaccine can get the
vaccine. And we are continuing to message to the workforce the
benefits of the vaccine and, you know, encouraging them to get
the vaccine, while not mandating it.
Ms. Underwood. Yeah, this is a top concern for me, and it
needs to be a proactive priority for the Department as well.
Vaccine hesitancy in America is at an all-time high, and the
stakes are literally life or death.
I was devastated when I heard about Freddie Vasquez, the
Border Patrol agent and father of four who lost his life to
COVID earlier this month. His wife, a nurse, reports that he
took every precaution to protect his family over the past year,
but ultimately he had delayed getting vaccinated.
What steps are you taking to proactively combat vaccine
hesitancy and disinformation and to make sure your employees
have accurate information about the safety, efficacy, and
critical importance of the COVID-19 vaccine?
Mr. Miller. So I myself, all the leadership in CBP, we
continue to message it, we continue to muster it. We continue
to message it at the local levels, the national levels, the
sector levels, the station levels, the port levels. But,
ultimately, it is a personal choice.
So we are going to continue to message it in any way we
can, and I am willing to work with you if you think you have
some good ideas for us to how to continue to message the
benefits of the vaccination for the workforce, because I, too,
believe it is vitally important. And, frankly, stories like
that break my heart.
Ms. Underwood. Great. Thank you, sir.
Vaccinating CBP employees is essential to not only
protecting their own health but also ensuring that they don't
expose migrants to the virus or bring it home from their
workplace to their families and communities.
Now that we have enough vaccines to go around, there is no
excuse for vaccination rates across the country to be so low as
they are, and especially for our own Federal workforce. I know,
as you have said, you don't want to lose more agents like
Freddie Vasquez any more than I do, so I do look forward to
partnering with you and keeping informed about your plans to
proactively address this crisis.
Thank you.
Mr. Miller. Thank you.
Ms. Underwood. Next, can you tell me about your plans for
vaccinating migrants in CBP custody? I understand that DHS is
reevaluating its vaccination strategy and that ICE will soon
get a direct allocation. What changes can we expect to see at
CBP?
Mr. Miller. So, ma'am, I can tell you, as you pointed out,
our first goal really was getting our own folks vaccinated, and
it continues to be our number-one priority.
Then our second goal was really to fix the overcrowding in
our facilities, working with HHS, ICE, FEMA, and the like to
ensure that we are getting children the proper care that they
needed. And, right now, as we sit, the children's time in
custody is about 20 hours, 21 hours, but it is under a day.
And I have, as you know, continual conversations with the
Chief Medical Officer at the Department. He has indicated that
he is working with ICE, but we have not had those conversations
with CBP as of yet.
Ms. Underwood. Okay. Well, as you know, vaccinating
migrants not only keeps them safe, but it also protects the
communities that they may travel to after they leave your
custody. The question that we face must be how, not if, we get
vaccines to migrants. And so I really ask that you begin to
make those plans and keep our committee updated on any resource
needs that you have as you, you know, do the vaccine rollout.
Now, Mr. Miller, as you know, the chairwoman and I pushed
to include funding in the fiscal 2020 appropriations for an
interoperable electronic health record system, or EHR, for
Customs and Border Protection. And, as a nurse, I have seen
firsthand how important good record-keeping is to good patient
care.
Obviously, continuity of care can be an even greater
challenge for migrants who may be transferred from one Federal
agency to another. And I witnessed this myself when I visited
the border in 2019 and saw records being kept on paper, if they
were kept at all.
Which is why I am so glad that the funds we provided are
already being put to use. I understand that you have nearly
completed phase one of the EHR rollout. And so, very quickly,
before my time is expired, we know phase one has begun along
the southwest border. Have your officers begun using the new
system to ensure that migrants are getting appropriate care,
and has the rollout gone smoothly?
Mr. Miller. Yes, we have. And, as you stated, this summer,
we will complete rollout of phase one across the southwest
border; and, quickly, phase two will be connecting to our other
system, both the OFO and the Office of Border Patrol; and,
thirdly, we will start working with the other government
agencies.
Ms. Underwood. Excellent.
My time has expired. Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Rutherford?
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Commissioner Miller, thank you very much for your service.
And please pass on to your men and women our condolences for
those 34 officers who lost their lives this last year. I want
to join with the chairwoman in offering those condolences, and
also Freddie Vasquez's family, as well, who is sadly having a
funeral today. We greatly, greatly appreciate and honor their
service to this country.
But, as you know, we do have a lot of crises that we are
facing in this country right now, not just on the southern
border. I mean, we are looking at an economic crisis. You know,
lumber is skyrocketing, prices. Food costs are going up. We
have an energy crisis. We have gas lines I haven't seen since
the 1970s. And we have a national security issue with, you
know, Israel and Hamas. And, you know, they have been
emboldened, I think, by the perceived weakness of this
administration.
And now, you know, they finally admit that we have a crisis
at the border that, quite frankly, Mr. Miller--or to Mr.
Miller, you are going to have to deal with. And so I want to
make sure that this committee is doing all we can to help you
be successful. And I think some of what we need to do is talk
plainly about some of these programs.
The notice to appear is not a notice to appear; it is a
notice to disappear--to disappear into the interior of this
country. And I will let you share the numbers that actually
show up when they are supposed to. And that is in addition to
all of the other alternatives to detention that are utilized.
So if you could talk a little bit about the NTA.
And I would like an answer to this as well, Commissioner,
because I am very concerned, and I think it is important that
this committee know, the 287(g) program--and I am not talking
about the program on the street, the task force effort. I am
talking about the JEM, the jail piece of 287(g), where we take
criminals who have already been arrested and help ICE get them
out of the country.
And I am hearing that the 287(g) program may be eliminated
by the Biden-Harris administration. I hope that is not true,
because I can tell you, having been a sheriff and run a 287(g)
program, my community was much safer because I was able to get
all of those criminal aliens out of the country.
And so if you could talk a little bit about that as well, I
would be curious to know where you see us going on 287(g) and
the notice to disappear into the interior of the country
program.RPTR SINKFIELDEDTR HUMKE[11:01 a.m.]
Mr. Miller. Well, sir, thank you for your question. And
really, I would defer both of those questions to ICE.
Mr. Rutherford. Have you heard that discussion about doing
away with 287(g)?
Mr. Miller. I have not.
Mr. Rutherford. Okay. Well, let me ask you this because
this is an area I know that we can help you. As the points of
entry--and you talked about the increase of folks coming
between those points of entry crossing the borders, tunnels are
a major, major factor. And sometimes I don't think we give them
enough emphasis.
And I really--and not faulting you, but I really do believe
that the tunneling program has been insufficient at best. And
what can we do to help you get a better tunneling detection
program started?
Mr. Miller. Well, sir, thank you for that question. You
know, I think we have made progress in the Tunnel Detection
Program. In the last couple of years we stood up regional teams
in San Diego, California, Nogales, Arizona, El Paso, Texas, and
McAllen, along with the tunnel task force that his runs.
We have made additional--thanks to this committee's help--
we have made additional investments in persistent and mobile
detection technologies. I just received a brief yesterday about
the interagency collaboration that is going on--and I see that
the time has expired--that is going on to address this problem
area.
And we will continue to work with you and your staff to
ensure that we are getting the right technology to improve the
program.
Mr. Rutherford. Okay. And we may be able to talk about that
a little more on a follow-up second round.
Madam Chair, I see my time has expired. I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Quigley.
Mr. Quigley. Thank you, Madam Chairman. Welcome, sir. Good
to talk to you the other day. As I mentioned, and I would like
to go in a little more detail. On August 28, 2020, 20 dogs
enters the U.S. on a flight from Jordan to Chicago's O'Hare
International Airport. Due to improper vaccination
certificates, 18 of these dogs were denied entry and were held
by Alliance Ground International LLC, a customs and border
patrol bonded warehouse where they awaited CDC and APHIS-
approved review.
These animals were later found in small cages covered in
feces and urine and had been without food or water for several
days. Several of the dogs died. A clear and brazen violation of
the Animal Welfare Act.
During the pandemic, live animal imports as pets increased
significantly. And there is concern this incident will repeat
itself if CBD lacks adequate facilities and procedures to care
for live animals at all the ports of entry.
At this time, there is only one such facility known as ARK
that is equipped to safely handle live animals during potential
required quarantine. It is located in New York City, which
obviously doesn't help everywhere else in the country.
Why is there only one CBP-bonded warehouse facility in the
U.S. that is well-equipped to care for live animals that are
held for legally required quarantines? And can you commit to
adding more facilities that will meet the standard for care for
live animals at ports of entry? What resources do you need to
do this?
Mr. Miller. Sir, thank you for the question. And, you know,
number one, we did work with our interagency partners in
Chicago to address that issue, sent out what is called a trade
pipeline to ensure something like that doesn't happen again.
I really--there is multiple agencies involved whether it is
the Center for Disease Control or was it USD-APHIS. As you
mentioned, we do have a bonded warehouse in New York to cover
such issues so. You know I committed to working with you and
the interagency to figure out what we can do to continue to
look at this issue and ensure that we have the proper care and
even facilities at our other locations.
Mr. Quigley. It is not that there aren't private sector
facilities that can't do this. We need to locate them, certify
them, and pay them for their services. You know, can we commit
to doing this, especially at the major ports of entry in the
United States to start?
Mr. Miller. Again, you know, I have to talk to APHIS and
CDC. And, you know, we will look at that and certainly get back
to you.
Mr. Quigley. All right. And there are currently no CBP
practices in place to require everybody in the warehouse to
maintain the standard of care for live animals that exceeds the
basic requirements of the Animal Welfare Act. And as we saw in
this incident in Chicago, it was a major fail. Will you commit
to updating the practices to ensure the safety and welfare of
live animals in custody and the bonded warehouses that contract
with you?
Mr. Miller. Yeah. Again, yes, we will work on that with our
partners.
Mr. Quigley. All right. We appreciate that. Rather than go
into a series that will take much longer, Madam Chairwoman, I
will yield back at this time. Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Aguilar.
Mr. Aguilar. Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate it. Sorry
for my tardiness. Multiple committee hearings, as all of you
know. Thank you so much. And I wanted to ask a little bit,
acting commissioner, about your conversation you had with the
ranking member.
Looking forward to a world after Title 42, you mentioned
coordination with ORR with respect to unaccompanied children.
Does the CBP plan to coordinate with local NGOs and
organization that support asylum seekers as part of the post
Title 42 strategy as well.
Mr. Miller. Yes, sir, we do, and we are coordinating. We
actually have NGO coordinators across the Southwest border both
in the Office of Border Patrol and the Office of Field
Operations who are having almost daily conversations with the
NGO. I myself have met with a good portion of the NGOs across
the Southwest border.
Mr. Aguilar. How many of those coordinators do you have?
And with respect to their conversations, are you talking--is
there a conversation about post Title 42 in that, or is it just
we are all going to work together and keep the lines of
communication open? I am asking specifically about post Title
42.
Mr. Miller. So there is a coordinator at each sector and at
each field office. And you know we are talking, specifically,
about the coordination that is going on between the NGOs and
CBP, which is happening today. Are we talking, specifically,
about post 42, the post 42 environment? I would have to get
back to you on that.
Mr. Aguilar. I would appreciate if you would. I also wanted
to continue on the line of questioning that Representative
Underwood asked about vaccinations and spend a little time
focusing on how CBP's posture may change as they interact with
more vaccinated individuals.
Does CBP have a process to interact with individuals who
state that they have received the vaccine when they present
themselves at the border? And does CBP have a plan to validate
if an individual has received a vaccine?
Mr. Miller. So as of now, you know, we do have what is
called our Job Hazard Analysis. That is something that we send
out to our ports and our Border Patrol stations that dictate
how we interact with the traveling public and the migrants and
those folks we interact on a daily basis.
We continually update the Job Hazard Analysis based on the
conditions that we face. As of as of now, we are treating
everybody we encounter as if they may have COVID. But as things
change, we will continue to update that guidance.
Mr. Aguilar. What type of strategies are your medical
professionals talking about with respect to vaccinated
individuals; an individual who presents themselves and states
that they have been vaccinated? What guidance have they been
giving you with respect to that? I understand that there is
manuals, and I understand that things, policies get updated. I
am asking specifically about this issue.
Mr. Miller. Well, specifically, today, we are treating
everybody as if they would still have COVID. We are still
wearing our PPE. That is the most recent Job Hazard Analysis we
put out there.
CDC is the folks that dictate, you know, the vaccinated
folks' vaccination or testing regimen and how they are entering
the country. That is how we are treating them today as if they
would had COVID.
Mr. Aguilar. As you think through what that planning might
look like, what resources or supplies would you need in order
to ensure the safety of CBP personnel, migrants, asylum
seekers, and the American public should the border reopen?
Mr. Miller. So, sir, we continue to ensure that we have the
appropriate stockpile of PPE, to ensure that we have the
appropriate supplies for the migrants, for our officers and our
agents. We continue to update the guidance. As the pandemic
changes, you know, I think we have came an awful long ways
during the pandemic in learning what and how we can do it, what
supplies we need, ensuring that we have the appropriate
stockpile. I would give the agency credit. We are one of the
few agencies that had the appropriate stockpile going into the
pandemic to deal with what we are dealing with today.
Mr. Aguilar. And I want to give the agency credit for doing
that. I just think that there is more that we can do when it
comes to providing that discussion and the policies and looking
past the next curve. I think we need to do a little bit more of
a deep dive and look forward to the continued conversations. I
yield back, Madam Chair.
Mr. Miller. Thank you, sir.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. I believe that concludes the first
round. So we are going to go into a second round of
questioning.
Mr. Miller, last week, you released data showing more than
178,000 total encounters at the border in April. Can you talk
more about the demographics that make up that number, the
transport scene with regards to migrants coming from countries
other than Mexico or the Northern Triangle countries, and talk
about some of the push and pull factors for migrants in
different demographics and for different originating countries.
Mr. Miller. Thank you, ma'am, for that question.
So, really, right now, across the Southwest border, we are
seeing about 65 percent, 65 percent single adults, somewhere in
the neighborhood of 10 percent of unaccompanied children, and
about 25 percent family units across the Southwest border. As I
indicated in our first question, the family unit percentage is
a little bit higher in the Rio Grande Valley.
When we look at the demographics, we continue to see Mexico
and the Northern Triangle be in the highest floor. Ecuador,
Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti; Nicaragua round out to top 10
of the folks we are seeing. What we have seen on the Western
plank is we have seen an increase of the Brazilians, which
provide a unique challenge because of the Portuguese language,
ensuring that we have the folks to communicate with them the
right way. We continue to see a high amount of Cubans, I think,
I mentioned, and Venezuelans as well.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. And some of the push and pull factors
that you are seeing for these different demographics?
Mr. Miller. So I think the push and pull factors are pretty
much the same because the demographics--as you have seen the
increase, you know, focus on Brazil a little bit. Brazil has
had a real tough time with the pandemic. The economic
insecurity, you know, the Northern Triangle, as you know, we
have had, we have had droughts, we have had hurricanes, you
know, unemployment, the crime, the corruption. So, you know, I
think some of the factors that we have seen over time remain
the same.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. And I want to ask a question, this
has to do with encounters in March which totalled over 173,000,
of which around 60,000 or 35 percent were so-called
recidivists, meaning individuals who attempted to reenter the
country after having been previously removed. Do you think that
a relatively high recidivism rate is linked to the current
reliance on Title 42's expulsion authority?
Mr. Miller. I do. I think that Title 42 lends itself to a
higher recidivism rate. However, that being said, we are able
to process these folks and send them back relatively quickly,
keeping them out of our facilities and keeping the facilities
decompressed.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. I recently traveled with the
Secretary to visit the temporary CBP facility in Donna, Texas.
And while I noted a much-improved environment as compared to
the surge in 2019, more procedures are still needed for how CBP
cares for those in this custody, particularly, care for
children and families.
I understand that you are working closely with the DHS
chief medical officer to address short, medium, and long-term
issues to improve the care of children. What recommendations is
the CMO making at this time?
Mr. Miller. Thank you, ma'am. Just as a little background
for everybody here, in 2016, we had no medical staff at our
facilities. At the beginning of the current situation, we had
around 700 medical staff. Now, today, as we sit here, we have
850 across the Southwest border. We have hired additional
caregivers. That is one of the short-term recommendations that
the CMO made that we are acting on, additional caregivers.
We have four behavioral health advisors that can be
contacted by the caregivers on the ground. Some of the other
recommendations that have been made of ensuring that the
children are orientated, more orientation videos ensuring that
they have frequent contact or ability to contact the relatives
via phone.
So we are implementing those. Keeping the kids active.
Things like coloring books, getting outside, ensuring that we
are getting them outside two or three times a day.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Miller, I am running short of time,
but I did have a follow-up that I think is important and that
is what the status is of establishing a child welfare
professional program, and, you know, and increasing the number
of nonmedical child caregivers, because that has been a top
priority of mine and of this subcommittee. Can you give us a
status report on that?
Mr. Miller. Yeah, so, ma'am, we are in the process of
hiring additional caregivers. We have 260 in the pipeline that
are hired now, and we are getting those full-time jobs across
the Southwest border.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. And what is the status of their
training--
Mr. Miller. The--
Ms. Roybal-Allard. --of CBP personnel who come into contact
with migrants who have you know trauma, what is their ongoing
CBP officers with regard to working with these children that
have trauma?
Mr. Miller. So thank you for that question. And we are
working with the CMO, and we will be training our Border Patrol
agents along with the caregivers in trauma-informed training
care.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you.
Mr. Fleischmann.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Miller,
continuing with my line of questioning about Title 42 servers,
do you think people are waiting in Mexico in anticipation of
the Title 42 declaration being lifted soon?
Mr. Miller. I don't know that they are waiting in Mexico
for the Title 42 to be lifted. I do know that we are preparing
in the Customs and Border Protection for the eventuality of
Title 42 to be lifted. And we discussed many of those things
that we are doing to prepare for it.
Mr. Fleischmann. I see in your written testimony, sir, that
about 62 percent of total encounters resulted in a Title 42
expulsion for the month of April. For the 38 percent of persons
encountered--for the other 38 percent of the persons
encountered, what was the ultimate result of their encounters
with CBP, and what was it about this population that made them
not eligible for Title 42 expulsion, sir?
Mr. Miller. So Title 42 is mainly, the easiest way to say
it is for Spanish-speaking nations. So some of the folks you
are talking about would have been from other locations. Many of
them would have been those family units with tender-aged
children that we talked about. So those would be the two
biggest groups.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you. Should or when Title 42 gets
lifted, what percentage of that 62 percent will still be able
to be quickly repatriated?
Mr. Miller. So I think as we discussed before a large
percentage who are seeing right now, about 65 percent of the
folks we are seeing are single adults. And we will continue to
work with ICE on Title 8 processing on those individuals.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you for that. Following up on that,
are you getting the support you need from ICE and HHS to
quickly remove migrants from the Border Patrol stations and
land ports of entry, sir?
Mr. Miller. So we have made significant progress with
unaccompanied children, as we have mentioned, through the
movement coordinations. The cell that set up here at the Ronald
Reagan Building at CBP headquarters. We are literally sitting
side by side, looking at the information every single day to
make sure we are moving the children out within that mandated
72 hours and really trying to do it within a day.
We are taking the same approach with the single adults in
the family units. And we are going to stand up a cell, an
interagency cell with ICE and CBP to continue to look at the
surges across the Southwest border, sector by sector, field
office by field office, so we can respond timely to those
situations.
Mr. Fleischmann. Yes, sir. And, finally, will COVID still
be an operational challenge at the border even when public
health declaration is lifted? If so, how will you need to adapt
to keep your people safe?
Mr. Miller. Well, thank you for that question, sir,
because, the health and welfare of the workforce continues to
be the number one priority here.
So we are going to need to work very closely with the
healthcare professionals with CDC, with everybody to ensure to
the previous line of questioning from Congressman Aguilar on
exactly what we are going to do to plan out for the eventuality
of the Title 42 andTitle 19 go away.
So those are ongoing discussions with the medical
professionals. The professionals will be happy to update you as
they come to conclusion
Mr. Fleischmann. Mr. Miller, thank you for answering my
questions and for your service in stepping up at this time.
Madam Chair, I have some more time left, but in light of
the fact that some of the members want to ask additional
questions, I am going to yield back at this time.
So thank you so much, and I appreciate your testimony.
Mr. Miller. Thank you, sir.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Cuellar.
Mr. Cuellar. Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Miller, again, we
have already reached out to your office to sit down with you
and CDC and your health, DHS health officer to talk about the
border restrictions.
As I mentioned, just to add one last point, I go home every
day--I mean, every week, so I live at the border. I don't go
visit. So I see things very differently from some of my
colleagues, both the Democrats and the Republicans.
And every time I fly over here in the morning, I ask the
Border Patrol folks there, you know, how many families are
there, how many people are there flying? There are families
that fly every time I fly to D.C. on the plane, and again it is
not a health issue I have those folks, but the legal visa
holders from Mexico, that is a health issue. So I do want to
follow up on that because I see that every time I go and go
home to the border.
I want to ask about the construction of the border wall. As
you know, I am dead set against the wall, and I am glad that
they rescind the money. One of the things is you all made a
determination that my area, the Laredo sector needed a border
wall. We don't want a border wall. What we want is everything
but the border wall.
So there was a $1.3 billion that was appropriated to the
Laredo sector to build a wall. We don't want the wall. We want
the roads. We want to eradicate the Carrizos. We want the
technology. We want a new checkpoint for Border Patrol outside
of Laredo.
If that checkpoint was the port of entry, it would be the
fourth largest port of entry in the country because the number
of trucks that we have there. The World Trade Bridge is now at
17,000 trucks a day. And, you know, most trucks will come
through ports of entry and not in between.
My question, and I know I had asked the chairwoman about
this at the very beginning is will that $1.3 billion that got
appropriated to the Laredo sector stay there for technology,
roads, and all that? Or is this now a pot of money that
Homeland is going to take out and put in other places of the
area?
The security questions are still there. I mean, you all
thought that there was a need for a wall, which I disagree, but
I still want the technology there. Will you all put the-- are
you all looking at putting that money back in the Laredo
sector, or are you going to take that somewhere else and say
there is no need, there is no security issue in my sector?
Mr. Miller. Well, sir, as I mentioned before, the final
determination on the wall and the funding, you know, is with
DHS and the administration as we speak. I certainly
acknowledge, as we discussed previously, sir, the need for
technology, infrastructure, and people to secure the Southwest
border. And we are going to continue to look at what that
calculus needs to be and ensure that we are getting the
technology downrange to help the men and women of CBP and keep
our community safe.
Mr. Cuellar. Well, I would like to follow up on that
because I am going to push for that money to stay there. One of
the other things I see is the Del Rio sector has Brazilians--I
mean has people from Cuba, Haitians, Venezuelans. The Valley
gets some of the family units, as you mentioned the percentages
of family and unaccompanied kids.
So Laredo gets over 90 percent of the apprehensions or
Mexicans. And we have stash houses. We got, you know, times
that they put up 180 people in a trailer. Sip gangs (ph). As
you know, sip gangs (ph) usually steal drugs from one another.
I have videos where they are stealing a commodity, if I can use
that term, which are people. They are stealing undocumented
aliens from one gang to another gang. And if anybody wants to
see that video, I would be happy to share with you.
So we got that type of issue. And that is why I am saying
if you are determined to put a wall, then I will ask you to
also determine that we still have that security interest and
keep that $1.3 billion in the Laredo area without a wall. So I
would ask you to please take a look at that.
Mr. Miller. You know, thank you, sir. And you know, I would
just like to hit on one of the points that you raised. You
know, and we can talk about with further questioning or
offline, but Operation Sentinel is what we are doing to take
down these transnational criminal organizations that really are
profiting off the vulnerable. So I would be happy to further
discuss those operations and what we are doing to attack these
PCOs.
Mr. Cuellar. Yes, and we will follow up with the moneys
because most of the moneys for smuggling people in comes from
the U.S. and not from other places. So I think you and I have
to have a conversation. I would love to follow up on that. We
have got to follow that money.
With that, thank you so much, Mr. Miller.
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Mr. Miller. Thank you, sir.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Palazzo.
Mr. Palazzo. Thank you, Madam Chair. Commissioner Miller,
back in, I guess, 2012, 2013, when I was on the Homeland
Security Authorization Committee, we would use a term or a
metrics about operational control over the border. And back
then I think we were around 43 percent operational control.
That means at any given time, we know we have control over the
border. And I know that may be outdated. Could you just comment
on, you know, what in-houses do you all use now to kind of
derive an operational control number for the border?
Mr. Miller. Sir, that is something I will have to get back
to you on. The exact in-houses, I don't want to misspeak on
that, sir.
Mr. Palazzo. Okay. Please do. Also, I know I have been a
huge advocate, as some of my colleagues have been, since I have
been in Congress to utilize the National Guard to help support
your frontline people down there in the CBP and ICE and others.
Can you tell us about the partnership with the National Guard,
maybe share some successes, and some of the stories of what
they actually do to support you and your men and women?
Mr. Miller. Well, sir, thank you. I mean, there is no more
important partnership on the Southwest border right now than
the partnership with the National Guard. As you probably know
that the RFA has got approved for next year as well.
So a couple of things, the National Guard continues to
provide us flight hours for the Border Patrol agents on the
ground when our marine office is not able to provide those
hours. They are out there every single day really looking,
sitting on those surveillance cameras and through that
surveillance equipment to tip off the Border Patrol agents when
we have groups illegally entering between the ports of entry.
And really I can't say enough about the continued service
that they have, really, saving migrants' lives. I mean, I
literally see a case every single week where [inaudible]
Identified somebody that is in distress or has saved somebody
that is in distress. So, yeah, the work they are doing every
single day to not only help us with the security but the safety
and welfare of those that we encounter is incredible.
Mr. Palazzo. Well, thank you. I am glad to hear that. As a
National Guardsman myself, I am glad they are being utilized,
and I think it is a huge multiplying effort that helps you
focus on your jobs, and they can pick up missions. They also
get valuable training for them as well--
Mr. Miller. They sure do.
Mr. Palazzo. --they probably wouldn't be getting otherwise.
And real quick, I know we talk a lot about the southern
border. It is truly again a humanitarian crisis. It is an
invasion. There is all kind of adjectives we can use to
describe it. And we all have our own reasons why we think it is
continuing to be a crisis.
Can we pivot to the maritime border for a second? I know
you mentioned in your testimony 95,000 miles of slide. So I
will show you that we do, but I am more specific towards the
Gulf of Mexico. So like it is a huge blind spot for us because
our focus is like whether it is trying to interdict drugs on
the high seas, we are in the Caribbean, and any area in South
or Central America. What were some of the things that you could
use or share with us, any issues that you have with the
maritime border?
Mr. Miller. So, again, as you pointed out, 95,000 miles is
a lot of miles to patrol. But really the maritime border is
much like the Southwest border. It really comes down to
partnerships, right? We really need to be able to work with,
and we do work with the United States Coast Guard very closely.
You know, we also continue to work with the multiple
interagency groups.
We have a center down there in New Orleans where we are
working with ICE, we are working with Coast Guard, the State
and locals, air, and marine. You know it is about information
sharing. And, you know, it is continuing to look at technology
so we can see inside places like the Gulf. I think when you
look at the shoreline down in Florida, it is a little bit more
advanced, working with chiatta South or GTF east and the
partnerships at down range with our partners, whether it be
Panama, Guatemala, Honduras--Guatemala, Costa Rica, and some of
those places. So it is very challenging, but it is all about
partnerships and increasing our technology.
Mr. Palazzo. Absolutely. Partnerships and relationships are
extremely important.
Commissioner Miller, thank you so much, my time is up.
Madam Chair, I yield back.
Mr. Miller. Thank you, sir.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Price.
Mr. Price. Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Commissioner, I
appreciate your offer at the last round of questioning to get
back with them, more detailed account, for the record, of the
metering policy that I described and where that stands at this
point.
I think it is important to know how individuals and
families in those circumstances are now being dealt with and
what remains, really, in terms of how we should be dealing with
this and how we can deal with this in a responsible way so that
people, people are able to make their application, and then
pending the review are able to wait in intolerable
circumstances.
With that, let me turn to the Mexico policy itself, the
Mexico policy itself. As you know, migrants make this
treacherous journey, dangerous to the U.S. to seek legal
refuge. They having applied the--often have had to wait in
overcrowded CBP facilities much longer than the prescribed
time. And then under the Trump administration, the policy was
in many, if not most of these cases, to return these migrants
to Mexico, to dangerous border towns, encampment situations
under a program with no or little oversight.
They faced extreme difficulties in Mexico, often just
insecure--food insecure, dangerous situations. They have, of
course, trouble getting legal counsel. They often had their
cases closed in absentia because they were simply unable to
return for their court hearings or even learn when those
hearings were occurring in any kind of reliable way.
So, thankfully, the Biden administration has now announced
that it is ending this policy. Tens of thousands of people,
including vulnerable populations who were forcibly returned to
Mexico are now being processed or in the stage of beginning to
be processed.
So that is what I want to ask you to describe. What
challenge is the agency encountering in trying to do this
course correction or remedy this program. What additional
resources or legislative changes do you need to regain our
footing in the handling and processing of these individuals.
And what kind of success have you had in processing the so-
called MPP migrants since the February change in policy?
Mr. Miller. Sir, thank you for that question. And, really,
I would like to highlight, you know, really the incredible work
by the Office of Field Operations and their innovation, and the
Office of Information Technology working with the partners in
Mexico.
The international organizations, we are able to collect
advanced information through our CBP One app, and really vet
those individuals in advance of arrival and schedule arrival
times from Brownsville, Eagle Pass, El Paso, Hidalgo, Laredo,
and San Diego to ensure that we are processing expeditiously
but to ensure that we are also continuing to uphold border
security and national security at the same time. So today we
have processed over 10,000 of those individuals through our
ports of entry.
As far as challenges, you know, I know we are looking at
some of the additional population what we call the Yellow
population that was removed in absentia. So those folks we are
working with EOIR and OPLA ICE OPLA to have those cases open
back up, at which time we will begin doing that same process
through the international organizations gathering information,
vetting them, and scheduling the time in a humane and orderly
process.
Mr. Price. Well, thank you for that update here too. If you
want to provide further information for the record, that would
let us gauge the scale of this effort, the problem that is
remaining, that would be helpful.
We commend you for turning this around, and we know it is
not easy, and these situations are inherently difficult. And so
any further information you want to provide, we will be
receptive.
Mr. Miller. Thank you sir.
[The information follows:]******** COMMITTEE INSERT
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Mr. Price. Thank you very much.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mrs. Hinson.
Mrs. Hinson. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, again,
Commissioner Miller, for going through round two and for
staying to answer our questions today.
I just wanted to focus the second round on something that I
think people back in Iowa have told me they are concerned, I am
certainly concerned about human trafficking across the Southern
border, particularly, when minor children are involved.
We have got several groups in Iowa uninterrupted and my
district being one of them that are working to end human
trafficking. So I just wanted to ask you some questions,
specifically, about that. How does CBP verify the ages of
individuals when they are apprehended at the border or when
they are brought into custody, because, obviously, there can be
some discrepancies there? So how is that process working?
Mr. Miller. Well, you know, it is a difficult process to be
perfectly honest with you.
So as we encounter individuals, you know, whether they have
documents, or what have you, who they are with, if we
previously encountered them, questions, questions to them,
questions to their family members.
You know, obviously, the Border Patrol agents, Office of
Field Operations officers are well-trained in this type of
activity. We have a couple of different things we can if
needed, we can fingerprint children, if needed. We work with
ICE on the rapid DNA to determine their family members. So
there is a number of things we can do to collectively to try to
determine age, if those relationships are--relationships are
legitimate. And we continue to look at knew innovative ways to
do that.
Mrs. Hinson. So if someone doesn't have an ID, let's say,
they don't have survival documentation of their age, what does
that step look like? Because, obviously, the biggest concern is
that you have young girls posing as adult women and vice versa,
adult women posing as young girls, or, you know, young men and
young boys too. So what does that process look like if the
information is not something that can be verified?
Mr. Miller. Well, you know, first, and, again, you know,
there are agents that deal with this every single day, so it
is, you know, through questioning, it is through talking to
family members, the folks that they are arriving with. But at
the end of the day, if we are unable to determine age, we are
going to err on the side of being an juvenile and putting them
through that process.
Mrs. Hinson. And can you just walk me briefly what does the
process look like for someone, you know, just the verification
who they are, that they are who they say they are, so to speak?
Mr. Miller. So, again, well, the agents will encounter
them. They will take them, obviously, to the station or the
sector for processing. They will ask them their age. They will
see if they have any identifiable information. They will talk
to the folks that they are traveling with, if there are any
family unit members, the folks that they were encountered with.
You know, obviously, again, if the agents are talking to
hundreds and hundreds of people so through that experience,
they are able to determine or determine likely age. But at the
end of the day, we are going to err on the side of that being a
juvenile and coordinate with ICE and HHS, OR&R for the
appropriate procedure.
Mrs. Hinson. I think the biggest concern is we don't want
kids getting on planes going to someplace when we don't go who
they are going to, we don't know if they are who they initially
say they are. I think the one thing I want, and the last thing
I want is the government to be enabling human trafficking to
happen.
So if you can follow up with them from the interview
processes that your agency used to verify those identities and
especially when it comes to the children, I would certainly
appreciate that on follow-up.
Also, I just wanted to follow up on something Congressman
Cuellar was talking about was using technology to help at the
border. Can you talk a little bit about may be the use of like
drones and technology, high-impact cameras, how those could be
helpful to you in keeping agents safe and still fulfilling the
goal of keeping our borders safe as well?
Mr. Miller. Yeah, no, and thank you for that question. We
have what is called the event team that works with really
investments, venture back start-up companies, small businesses,
so we can look at things like counter UAS, not only UAS, but
counter UAS. And we have used those contracts to establish
procurement of drones to help us.
We continue to look at, you know, towers that have
artificial intelligence embedded with them. So, you know, there
is a number of different things we continue to look at along
the Southwest border to continue. We continue to update our
technology.
Mrs. Hinson. Yeah, I have had a chance to see the
autonomous surveillance towers, I think, is what you are
referring to, the person in there. It is remarkable what we can
do with that technology.
And so I would encourage your conversation and continued
conversations with us about the use of that technology, because
I think that is something that is absolutely crucial. I am
moving forward to keep us safe.
So, commissioner, thank you so much for answering our
questions today. I appreciate you coming before the committee.
Mr. Miller. Thank you, ma'am.
Mrs. Hinson. Thank you, Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Ms. Underwood.
Ms. Underwood. Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Miller, I have
some more questions. I want to pick up where we left off with
the Electric Health Records System. As you look ahead to
completing phase 2 of the her implementation and integrating
that electronic health record with CBP's other systems, do you
anticipate any challenges or need for additional resources in
order to meet the timeline which is next year?
Mr. Miller. I believe on the integration with our on
systems, you know, I believe that we should be fine on the
timeline. You know, I think we may have to come back at a
future time is when we talk about integration with other
government systems. But I think we are in pretty good shape for
our own integration.
Ms. Underwood. Thank you. Well, please, keep my office
updated as you continue rolling out this essential system.
Now, Mr. Miller, we both know that a Border Patrol facility
is no place for a child. But, obviously, when you encounter an
unaccompanied child at the border, you can't just leave them to
wander the streets or the desert unsupervised. So having kids
temporarily in your custody is an unfortunate reality while you
prepare to transfer them to a specialized HHS facility and
ultimately to their families. I believe that the number of
children in CBP custody has decreased from over 5,000 to under
500 in the past 2 months, and that the average time that a
child spends in custody has decreased from over 5 days to under
24 hours. It is incredible progress, and I know that there is
more that we can do to provide for both the physical and the
psychosocial health of these children.
I was glad to hear that you recently invited the chief
medical officer to visit your facilities. Can you tell us more
about what he found in his assessment?
Mr. Miller. You know, first and foremost, and then again, I
will take every opportunity to say thank you to men and women.
Because the first thing that he did tell me was the incredible
work that is going on down range and the incredible compassion
that the Border Patrol agents mostly in this case they continue
to have.
And, you know, I think many of us, you know, myself having
a 6-year-old are fathers, mothers, and again, it is a real
tough situation for them. So some of the other things that I
think we mentioned is having that connectivity to the
behavioral health advisors, which we up for so are continuing
to look at that. And, you know, continuing to look at those
caregivers. We mentioned that. So we are upping the caregivers
at the facilities. The training of our officers and agents is
essential.
So we are going to ensure that we get the proper training.
The orientation he pointed out was really important, because
often when the children travel these long distances they don't
quite understand where they are or how they got there, to be
perfectly honest.
So updating our orientation videos is ensuring they are
getting those on a timely basis. Keeping the children active,
right? We have to keep the children active. So, you know,
ensuring that they are getting outside, which frankly was
difficult when we had over 3,000 in those in Nashville and--
Ms. Underwood. Right.
Mr. Miller. --Donna. So getting the children outside at
least two times a day. Looking at those additional activities
that we can have the children doing, whether it is coloring,
all sorts of things, coloring books, you know a number of
different things depending on the age of the children.
Ms. Underwood. So if you had to have a timeline associated
with fulfilling those recommendations, what would that expected
timeline be, and what additional resources do you need from our
committee to implement the full list of recommendations as
quickly as possible?
Mr. Miller. I don't have an exact timeline. I can say that
we are moving out on most, if not all, of those issues as we
speak here today, but I would be happy to fill you in on a
timeline. Once--I really haven't got the formal recommendation
yet, but I have asked for it and worked with a team to start
implementing some.
So once I get the formal recommendations and I have a
formal plan, you know, I will circle back with you and let you
know what we are doing.
Ms. Underwood. So does that mean, like, a month, 2 months?
Mr. Miller. So, it means that we are implementing now and,
you know, I would think within the next week or until we can
get back to you with a plan and what our plans are.
Ms. Underwood. Fantastic. Thank you, Mr. Miller. I know
that my constituents share my concern about the well-being of
the children who made this difficult journey to our border.
And I look forward to working with you to ensure that their
stays are safe and as short as possible.
Thank you, Madam Chair, and I yield back.
Mr. Miller. Thank you, ma'am.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Rutherford.
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Miller--
Commissioner Miller, you know, one of the things I want to make
sure is that many on this committee are doing all we can to
help you be successful, particularly, on our Southern border.
And I know when Congressman Palazzo asked about the
operational--the percentage of operational control, I would
like--I want that same information so that we can help you, but
I would actually like to see it served by region.
Because I know as you travel from San Diego all the way
east of the Rio Grande Valley, there is a whole myriad of
different types of enforcement taking place, and I think that
would give us a good idea is--you know, because there is some
areas as Mr. Cuellar said, that they don't want a wall. And you
know what, every area doesn't need a wall. There are areas
where surveillance technology, access roads, is maybe all they
need. And so what I want to make sure is we are giving you what
you need where you need it.
And one of the things that I want to focus on, also, is I
know, for example, in the Forwatooth (ph) area in Arizona,
tremendous work going on there. And I would suspect that is
probably one of highest control areas because we have local
state and federal working together there, integrated through
the big pipe. You have got the UAS going on there. So all of
that, I think, works together.
One of the things I want to make sure is as we tighten the
Southern border, we are going to see more and more--people are
either going to go over the wall, under the wall, which is why
I want to help you with the tunneling--or they are going to
want to go around. And when they go around it, they are going
to go to the maritime corridors.
And I have an AMO training center in my district in
northeast Florida, and I want to make sure that we have got
good throughput there for you to give you the men and women
that you need for the air and maritime operations. I know there
is some throughput issues at the training center there, and if
you can let me know how we can help you with that, we would
really like to step up on that as well as the tunneling
technology that we talked about earlier.
And so can you let he know, where do you think we are going
with the AMO in northeast Florida, and is it going to be able
to meet your needs? What do you need?
Mr. Miller. So I am going to start by addressing your first
request. And, yeah, 300 percent by region, we do track it by
region. And, you know, I just want to ensure that we get the
Office of Border Patrol up there briefing the folks on, you
know, the exact criteria that we use.
Mr. Rutherford. Yeah.
Mr. Miller. I appreciate your support for air and marine
and the continued support. You know, I believe that that the
facility that we build are meeting our training needs, but I
will certainly, if they are not, I will get back to you and let
you know what additional we need. You know, we are making a lot
of progress on modernizing our fleet and really standardizing
our fleet.
So, you know, I think we are making progress there as well.
On the maritime issue--
Mr. Rutherford. What I should add, commissioner, they have
had some upgrades there, and they have been great. But I do
believe there is some additional things that we can do. So I
would appreciate you looking into that.
Mr. Miller. Oh, no, I certainly will. And on the maritime
front, we are already seeing that in San Diego. You know, we
are working very closely. You know, obviously, Border Patrol,
air, and marine, but also the U.S. Coast Guard, the state and
locals to address that out there. So that is something we are
seeing.
Mr. Rutherford. Okay. Well, thank you. And Madam Chair, I
see my time is just about out. I will yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Aguilar.
Mr. Aguilar. Thanks so much, Madam Chair. And acting
commissioner, I wanted to pick up on a topic that the chair had
mentioned. The President's Fiscal Year 2022 Discretionary
Request states that requested funding for DHS will support the
safe and humane treatment of migrants in CBP custody.
I wanted to raise a proposal that my colleagues in the
Hispanic Caucus have raised with the President and Vice
President to support CBP when there are larger numbers of
asylum seekers at our Southwest border. This proposal would
create a humanitarian response team at the borders staffed by
volunteers who have been trained to rapidly respond to the
border to assist the supporting asylum seekers and accompanied
children at the border.
These humanitarian response teams would model existing
disaster medical assistance teams, but would also include case
workers, social workers, child welfare professionals. We
believe that these teams will reduce the time that individuals
remain in custody and ensure that all migrants are aware of
immigration court dates and requirements and help with
transportation and logistics as they are reunited with family
members, working within the Homeland Security and the OOR
process obviously to create these teams.
Do you think this type of structure would be beneficial to
assisting CBP in processing individuals at the border.
Mr. Miller. You know, that is something I would have to
look at. I know we are looking at obviously, you know--thanks
to the committee for the funds for the Humanitarian Care Center
somewhere in South Texas. But the humanitarian response teams
isn't something that I have looked at, so I would love to see
the proposal and give you feedback.
Mr. Aguilar. Yeah, absolutely. And I would love for you to
have a conversation with some of our colleagues in the Hispanic
Caucus who have been fleshing out some of these ideas as well
to see, you know, what technical support or advice or concerns
you might have.
Commissioner, I am also concerned about some of the
language that was referenced earlier regarding individuals
presenting themselves at the border with different names. The
vast majority of children seeking asylum at the border are
fleeing dangerous and often life-threatening circumstances, and
we should be doing all that we can to ensure that they receive
the appropriate protections and care while--as often as we can.
Are you aware of widespread where migrant children are
presenting themselves under different names?
Mr. Miller. I am not at this point, no.
Mr. Aguilar. Are you aware of government trafficking
children as my colleague referenced?
Mr. Miller. Excuse me? I didn't--you broke up.
Mr. Aguilar. Are you aware of the government trafficking
children as was referenced in an earlier question?
Mr. Miller. We have, back in 2019, we did see quite a few
cases with children being trafficked. And that is why we work
with ICE to stand up to rapid DNA testing.
Mr. Aguilar. But not by the government?
Mr. Miller. Oh, not, not by the government, no. Excuse me.
No. I am sorry. I wasn't listening to the question.
Mr. Aguilar. Of course, of course. I just want to be
cautious about the language that we use because some of those
statements have consequences and are often based on little or
no evidence. So I just think we need to be either thoughtful
about, you know, how we talk about, you know, these incredibly
issues especially when it includes children.
So I appreciate you sticking around for a second round and
thank the chair for the indulgence, and I yield back.
Mr. Miller. Thank you, sir.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. I don't believe there are anymore
questions. However, Mr. Miller, in closing, I would like to ask
one more question that I believe is on behalf of all the
members of this subcommittee.
As noted during the hearing, more than 31 agents, officers,
and other personnel have tragically lost their lives in the
line of duty since January of last year. In addition to these
tragedies, every day CBP personnel interact with migrants who
are fleeing desperate circumstances, and the toll on them
cannot be discounted.
How are you addressing the mental health needs of the CBP
workforce as a result of COVID and current operation, and are
those services available to the families of CBP personnel?
Mr. Miller. Well, ma'am, thank you. Thank you for that
question. As you know, the tragedy of the pandemic has
obviously affected us all, but as you know, it has taken a toll
on the workforce and along with the additional stresses that we
see every single day.
So as you know, we have a very robust peer support program.
We have a very robust chaplaincy program. We have a very robust
Employee Assistant System or EAP. We have an advocacy program
for the survivors.
So we are in continual contact with the survivors of those
that we lose. But, frankly, I am worried about taking care of
those who take care of us. In other words, those groups have
had an incredible strain on them over the last, the last year.
So one of the things that we are looking at is we are
having some clinicians down on the Southwest border. We have
three of them, one in El Paso, one in Del Rio, and one in RGB.
I have had a chance to visit with the chiefs of the
Southwest border in San Antonio just last week, and the three
that had that program said it was very beneficial in that there
was somebody onsite with them. It wasn't a call, it wasn't the
EAP, it was somebody onsite with them that they could talk and
really think that they have averted some unfortunate
circumstances for our team members.
So I think looking at that program, expanding that program
to additional sectors and field offices across CBP would be
beneficial. But, frankly, I am willing to work with anybody
that I can to ensure that the men and women are getting the
support they need.
So I welcome any suggestions.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. As a follow-up, in calendar year
2020, the deaths of 60 BP personnel were attributed to suicide,
while there have been five such deaths already in 2021. What
are you doing, specifically, to help CBP personnel who may be
contemplating suicide, and how can we help you help your
workforce?
Mr. Miller. So, yeah, I think supporting the clinicians
that we talked about, that, you know, we believe that tragedy
has been averted because of that program.
So expanding that program to ensure that there is folks
onsite to talk to our personnel. Where the chief of Border
Patrol, you know, he is the one that brought up taking care of
those that take care of us.
So we are out there, they are out there talking to our peer
support, our chaplains, our advocacy groups every single day.
They spend an awful lot of time in the field. We have what is
called China like campaign going on right now where myself and
the senior leadership are talking to folks about ensuring that
they are getting the help they need, which is good. But, you
know, I think that one-on-one communication talking to folks on
the ground--I am trying to get out as much as I can to talk to
the men and women to see what additional support they need.
So it is really an all-in approach. But again, I am welcome
to take any additional ideas from the professionals that--even
we do consult with the professionals. But any additional ideas
that the committee thinks would helpful, we are all ears.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Well, please let us know as new
information comes up from the professionals that you talk to,
any way that we can be helpful, please let us know.
And with that, if there are no more questions, we will
conclude today's hearing. Mr. Miller, thank you very much for
your time, the subcommittee on Homeland Security stands
adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:02 p.m., the subcommittee was
adjourned.]RPTR MOLNAREDTR SECKMANDEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND
SECURITYAPPROPRIATIONS FOR 2022Thursday, May 20, 2021MEMBER
DAYDEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY APPROPRIATIONS FOR
2022Thursday, May 20, 2021MEMBER DAY
Ms. Roybal-Allard. The Subcommittee on Homeland Security
will come to order. During today's virtual hearing, we will be
joined by House colleagues who will speak about priorities for
their districts and communities. I look forward to hearing
their perspectives on the issues facing the Department of
Homeland Security's vital mission to protect our Nation.
After each Member provides testimony, I will ask members of
the subcommittee whether they have any questions or comments.
If you are recognized to speak, if I notice that you have not
unmuted yourself, I will ask you if you would like the staff to
unmute you. If you indicate approval by nodding, staff will
unmute your microphone.
To avoid inadvertent background noise, the chair or staff
designated by the chair may mute participants' microphones when
they are not recognized to speak.
As a reminder, subcommittee members can submit information
in writing at any of our hearings or markups, using the email
address provided in advance to your staff.
The testimony we hear today will provide important insight
as we work to draft our appropriation bills for fiscal year
2022. We appreciate our colleagues joining us this morning.
I would now like to turn to the distinguished gentlemen
from Tennessee, Ranking Member Fleischmann, for his opening
remarks.
Mr. Fleischmann. Madam Chair, thank you again for chairing
another very important hearing for the Homeland Security
Subcommittee. Today is very important to both yourself and to
me, where we hear from our colleagues who are going to make
presentations for the needs of their district. So, with that,
my comments will be brief.
I am solicitous of all the Members from both sides of the
aisle from across the Nation, and I do want to assure those who
are joining us today for the first time that, despite some very
contentious issues which face our Nation and our Conference and
this subcommittee, the vast majority of the issues that we deal
with, on both sides of the dais, there are large areas of
agreement. So we will certainly listen to you all with an open
mind today.
And I really appreciate the fact that you have come before
us today.
So, with that, Madam Chair, I will yield back, and I thank
you.
And to those, again, to the Members who are going to make
presentations today, we look forward to them. Thank you. I
yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Our first witness is Congressman Van
Drew from the Second District of New Jersey.
Mr. Van Drew? Thursday, May 20, 2021THE HON. JEFFERSON VAN
DREW, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF NEW JERSEY
Mr. Van Drew. Thank you. Good morning, Madam Chair and
Ranking Member Fleischmann, and thank you for providing this
opportunity to testify before the Appropriations Subcommittee
on Homeland Security. I am here today to advocate for an
incredibly important and urgent project.
I respectfully request that this committee provide $4.6
million in Community Project Funding for the Lake Lenape Dam
Rehabilitation Flood Mitigation Project. Through the Pre-
Disaster Mitigation Program account, this project is necessary,
eligible, of merit, and has unparalleled community support.
My testimony today will consist of three parts: the clear
and present danger of flooding present by the dam, the
eligibility of the project to receive funding through the PDM
account, and the merits of this request for Community Project
Funding.
The Lake Lenape Dam located in Mays Landing, New Jersey, is
a high hazard, class 1 dam, currently rated in poor condition
in August 2020's inspections.
The Lake Lenape Dam is in very real danger of total
failure. Here is a flood map showing the potentially
catastrophic results of such a failure, and you can look and
see what it does to the surrounding communities. You have the
very same flood map. It was supplied to you by my office, and
it is very illustrative of the danger that is there.
And immediately downstream from the dam is a dense
residential and commercial development. As Mays Landing is the
county seat, many key government offices are located within
what would surely be a flood path created by a failure of this
aged and deteriorated dam.
In most catastrophic scenarios, a breach during a hundred-
year storm, the resulting flood would nearly inundate half of
Mays Landing, resulting in almost certain fatalities, millions
of dollars of property damage, and severe damage to critical
infrastructure.
The threat of failure of Lake Lenape Dam is imminent. The
potential impacts are calamitous, and it is time to address
this, and it is time to address it now.
To achieve an effective remedy to flooding, the county's
engineer has concluded that the spillway must be completely
replaced with a modern solution. The county is prepared to
receive any PDM grant funds in fiscal year 2022 that
immediately obligate them to begin construction of the already
developed designs.
In the most recent BRIC funding round, one of the
priorities was to increase funding to applicants that
facilitate adoption and enforcement of the latest published
Building Codes and dam safety standards.
This proposed Lake Lenape Dam and associated infrastructure
components have been engineered to the latest Building Code
standards to rectify the current mitigation concerns of a
structure that has exceeded its useful life.
The Pre-Disaster Mitigation Program aims to categorically
shift the Federal focus away from reactive disaster spending
and towards research-supported, proactive investment in
community resilience. The Lake Lenape Dam is such a project
and, as such, would be eligible for BRIC. And it would be
eligible for the funding as well.
The sentiment is echoed by the New Jersey Office of
Emergency Management. As elaborated by New Jersey's OEM's
letter of endorsement, quote, this project's overall risk-
reduction goals are consistent with the goals and objectives of
the New Jersey State Hazard Mitigation Plan, and the successful
completion of the plan will result in a more resilient and
viable community.
In furtherance of the project's eligibility, it has been
determined to have a positive cost-benefit ratio of 1.42, and
this was calculated with the official FEMA benefit-cost
calculator versus 6.00. This rating places it well within the
range of viability.
Finally, and most importantly, for Community Project
Funding, this project has unparalleled community support.
Nearly 2,000 residents of the local community have signed a
petition in support of this project. Literally, everyone
supports it.
The project has letters of support from local governments,
local businesses, and local residential organizations as well.
The County Board of Commissioners unanimously has letters of
support as well, and the board itself unanimously passed a
resolution, and it supports providing a 25-percent standard
match to completely fund the proposal.
The project has total and passionate support from the
community, and it is understandable why it does. This project
has unparalleled community support, is eligible, and is
meritorious of funding, and is critically needed.
Chair, Ranking Member, I urge you to provide this grant
funding so that the community can quickly and decisively
address this existential threat. I thank you so much for your
time, and I yield back.
[The information follows:]******** COMMITTEE INSERT
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Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay.
Thank you, Mr. Van Drew, for your testimony. And based on
the information that we have, this seems like it is a good
mitigation project and will hopefully meet all the criteria for
the program.
The total project cost is above the maximum amount that
will likely be funded in this bill for mitigation projects,
which is likely to be more like a million dollars. Do you know
whether or not there are sufficient local resources available
to cover the remainder cost of the project?
Mr. Van Drew. There are. If we need to do it, we can,
absolutely. There is so much concern about this dam and the
need is so great, and the safety concerns are real, so whatever
it takes.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay.
Mr. Fleischmann, do you have any questions?
Mr. Fleischmann. No. I just want to thank the gentleman
from New Jersey for a very well-articulated presentation and
for the education on that. Thank you. That is certainly going
to help us in our decisionmaking process. So I thank the
gentleman, and I yield back.
Mr. Van Drew. Thank you, Ranking Member.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Next, I would like to call on
Congressman Pat Fallon from the Fourth District of Texas.
Thursday, May 20, 2021THE HON. PAT FALLON, A REPRESENTATIVE IN
CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF TEXAS
Mr. Fallon. Thank you, Madam Chair, and Ranking Member
Fleischmann, and members of the subcommittee, I appreciate the
opportunity to visit with you today. As we all know, we are
currently facing a crisis at the southern border.
While we can certainly debate what caused this crisis and
what is the best way to handle the surge of immigrants crossing
our border, the fact remains that we are currently
underresourced and understaffed in this fight.
With this in mind, I ask if you would respectfully consider
a commonsense appropriations request to support the men and
women of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol by providing them
adequate resources to accomplish the mission that we have
tasked them with. Because of the surge of migrants, a
significant number of our agents on the border have been forced
to divert their attention from law enforcement activities to
mundane administrative tasks and processing immigrants. I mean,
they are changing diapers and things of that nature.
We are talking hundreds of thousands of folks every month,
and it is the right and humane thing to do, and also we don't
want the drug cartels to win. And they are very powerful, and
they are very dangerous.
This has compounded the effects of the surge that our
Border Patrol are doing so many other things, and the
immigrants, as we know, there is fewer agents covering the
border for security purposes, what we have actually hired them
to do.
And the migrants themselves are at risk, and the drug
smugglers and the human traffickers are the ones that are
profiting. Previously, this committee has recognized the issue
of diverting the BPAs from law enforcement activities by
providing funding for Border Patrol processing coordinators.
These coordinators seek to alleviate the administrative
burdens put on our agents so that they may, you know, instead,
focus on law enforcement duties.
Last Congress, this committee increased funding for these
positions by $7 million. I want to thank you; it was the right
thing to do, and I appreciate that.
This year, we are at a critical juncture, even more so than
last year, and there seems to be, unfortunately, little hope
that the tide of migration is going to slow anytime soon. As
such, we must use every tool that we have to prevent the
migrants from entering illegally and also being harmed in any
way by the evil drug smugglers.
And we still have a chance and want to work to fix the root
causes of the problem. Hopefully we can do that in a bipartisan
fashion.
Ensuring that the Border Patrol agents are able to do their
jobs, that is nonpartisan and that is apolitical. And with this
in mind, I ask respectfully if you would continue to invest in
the critical roles of our Border Patrol agents and our
processing coordinators by supporting the highest level of
funding possible for the Border Patrol operations and their
support staff.
Thank you very much for allowing me to share my thoughts
and my request, and I stand ready to answer any questions, and
I yield back.
[The information follows:]******** COMMITTEE INSERT
********
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Fallon, thank you so very much for
your comments. And as you noted, the Processing Coordinator
Program is one that we have supported for several years. So we
were very excited to see that the first class graduated this
past year, and in June, we understand that CBP will be
graduating the second class from the Federal Law Enforcement
Training Center in Charleston, South Carolina.
So, as you know, this is something that is very important
and that we will, you know, continue to support. So, again, I
just want to say thank you for your comments and for your
support of this program.
Mr. Fallon. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Fleischmann, do you have any
questions or comments?
Mr. Fleischmann. Just want to reiterate and affirm what you
have said, Madam Chair, and to the gentleman from Texas, thank
you again for again a well-articulated, well-reasoned
presentation. I am so glad that you have come before us today,
but I could not agree more with the chair's comments in that
regard.
And, with that, I will yield back.
Mr. Fallon. Thanks.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. Thank you.
Is Congresswoman Jackson Lee here yet?
Chuck, if it is okay with you, I am going to maybe just
recess for about maybe 5 minutes to see if she is coming, and
then, if not, then we will just adjourn.
Mr. Fleischmann. Yes, ma'am, whatever you wish. We will be
here. So, either way, you can stay open or adjourn, I will be
here. It would be my pleasure.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. For a few minutes.
Mr. Fleischmann. Yes.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. Thank you.
[Recess.]
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Fleischmann? Apparently Ms. Jackson
Lee has been detained, and we don't know exactly how long. So I
am going to conclude today's hearing, and she can submit her
testimony to the subcommittee.
[The information follows:]******** COMMITTEE INSERT
********
Mr. Fleischmann. Yes, ma'am, and please convey to Ms.
Jackson Lee, who is a friend, that I will be more than glad to
look at that with you, in whatever way she decides to submit
that, and we understand.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. Thank you.
Mr. Fleischmann. It is a pleasure.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. The Subcommittee on Homeland
Security then stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 10:24 a.m., the subcommittee was
adjourned.]RPTR BRYANTEDTR SECKMANDEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND
SECURITYAPPROPRIATIONS FOR 2022Wednesday, May 26,
2021DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY RESOURCEMANAGEMENT AND
OPERATIONAL PRIORITIES DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
APPROPRIATIONS FOR 2022Wednesday, May 26, 2021DEPARTMENT OF
HOMELAND SECURITY RESOURCEMANAGEMENT AND OPERATIONAL
PRIORITIESWITNESSTHE HONORABLE ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS, SECRETARY,
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
Ms. Roybal-Allard. The Subcommittee on Homeland Security
will come to order.
During today's virtual hearing, members are responsible for
muting and unmuting themselves. When you are recognized to
speak, if I notice that you have not unmuted yourself, I will
ask you if you would like the staff to unmute you. If you
indicate approval by nodding, staff will unmute your
microphone. To avoid inadvertent background noise, the chair or
staff designated by the chair may mute participant microphones
when they are not recognized to speak.
If there is a technology issue during the member's speaking
time, we will move to the next member until the issue is
resolved, and you will retain the balance of your time.
We will be following the 5-minute rule. With 1 minute
remaining in your time, the clock on your screen will turn
yellow. When your time is expired, the clock will turn red, and
it will be time to recognize the next member.
We will follow the speaking order set forth in the House
rules, beginning with the chair and ranking member and followed
by members present at the time that the hearing is called to
order in order of seniority, and we will alternate by party.
Next, we will go to members who were not present when the
hearing was called to order until every member present has had
a first round.
Members can submit information in writing at any of our
hearings or markups, using the email address provided in
advance to your staff.
Now, let's begin. I am going to keep my opening remarks
brief to allow maximum time for questions.
I welcome the Honorable Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of
the Department of Homeland Security, who is here to discuss the
Department's operations and resource requirements.
Mr. Secretary, this is your first appearance before this
subcommittee in your current role, but you are certainly not
new to the Department and its diverse set of missions. I can
think of no one more qualified to lead the Department at this
very challenging time.
We scheduled this hearing with you late in the month,
hoping that we could discuss the details of the Department's
fiscal year 2022 budget request. Unfortunately, we will not be
getting the full budget request until Friday, which means you
are limited in what you can say about it. Nevertheless, I hope
to have a good discussion this morning, not only about the
current operations of the Department and the use of its
appropriated resources but also about what it will take to
continue addressing the many challenges you face in the coming
fiscal year.
Mr. Secretary, I recently visited the border with you, and
I want to commend all the DHS personnel who have been working
so hard over the last few months to manage an incredibly
difficult challenge.
Working closely with the Department of Health and Human
Services, you were able to reduce the number of unaccompanied
children in CBP custody from over 5,000 to now around 500. And
I understand that CBP and ICE recently established a
coordination cell to help prevent overcrowding of families at
CBP facilities. We look forward to seeing progress on this as
quickly as possible.
Your Department is also facing a significant challenge in
the cybersecurity area, with several breaches of government and
private sector systems over the past several months. The
Colonial Pipeline breach in particular was a wake-up call to
many Americans about how malicious cyber actors, often backed
by foreign states, can disrupt the U.S. economy and all of our
lives.
I was pleased to hear yesterday about the impending TSA
directive on pipeline cybersecurity reporting. I was surprised,
however, to have found out about it in the press, particularly
given our engagement with TSA and CISA on the Colonial Pipeline
issue over the past few weeks.
Mr. Secretary, since January 2020, the Department has seen
51 line of duty deaths, 43 of which were reported as related to
COVID-19. On behalf of the subcommittee, I convey our most
sincere condolences to the families and colleagues of the
members of the DHS family who have lost their lives over the
last year.
Mr. Secretary, the Department has a varied and challenging
mission set that is not always fully appreciated, and I want
you to know this subcommittee does appreciate what you and the
240,000 men and women who work for you do every day to help
keep our Nation safe.
Please convey to the men and women of the Department that
they have our continued support during this very challenging
time, that we will continue to do our best to provide the
resources necessary to protect their health and well-being, and
that they have our deep gratitude for their service to our
country.
I now turn to the distinguished gentleman from Tennessee,
Ranking Member Fleischmann, for his opening remarks.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
And thank you, Mr. Secretary, for your presence here today
and for stepping up to serve at a most difficult and
challenging time in our Nation's history, sir.
I welcome you to the subcommittee, and I thank you for
reaching out to me the other week. I very much enjoyed our
conversation, and I look forward to meeting with you in person
as soon as possible.
I know we were all hoping that we would have had a chance
to talk about the fiscal year 2022 budget for the Department of
Homeland Security, but timing is not on our side. I am sure
your people have briefed you up and up and down on all the
facts and figures, so please feel free to share any budget
information with us today that you can that you would deem
helpful.
We have had some very positive oversight and readiness
hearings with the components of this Department: Coast Guard,
Secret Service, TSA, CISA, FEMA, CBP, and ICE. And it is good
to know that you have some very capable leaders and people in
the components working to keep our country safe. I wish we
could have discussed the budget proposal, but we covered a lot
of ground in our earlier hearings.
Mr. Secretary, though, there are some difficult issues that
this administration needs to address about the security at our
borders and our infrastructure and how laws are upheld. As the
Secretary, we are looking to you to provide answers. I fear we
are at a crisis point. Border apprehensions are at an all-time
high, but ICE apprehensions are at an all-time low. We have
lost balance.
I have been to the southwest border this year, as well as
in the past, to meet with agents and officers on the front
lines. We have hundreds of youths coming through an airport in
Chattanooga on the way to HHS facilities across the region.
What we are seeing today is not sustainable, and I am not
seeing any actions from the administration that progress is
being made to address these problems. Instead, we are just
seeing more problems.
I told Mr. Johnson with ICE when he was with us about 2
weeks ago that ICE is a crucial component in our ability to
enforce immigration, customs, and trade laws in this country.
The Washington Post last night published an article about
how ICE is basically doing nothing because they have been
basically told not to do their jobs. Now, this was a Washington
Post article.
I worry that, without operational law enforcement, we will
lose the battle against bad actors coming into our country
unvetted, cartels, smugglers, and traffickers. If the
administration continues to send the signal that people who
enter the country illegally face no consequence for breaking
the law, the cartels are emboldened to continue victimizing
people and raising their profits by exploiting a lax system.
I do look forward to your testimony today and everyone's
questions. As appropriators, we must come to an agreement for
the annual spending bill. I am sure we are all up to the task,
and I am optimistic we can return some balance to the system.
Thank you, Mr. Secretary.
Madam Chair, I yield back the remainder of my time.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Secretary, we will submit the full
text of your official statement for the hearing record. Please
begin your oral summary, which I would ask that you keep to 5
minutes.
Secretary Mayorkas. Thank you very much, Chairwoman Roybal-
Allard, Ranking Member Fleischmann, and distinguished members
of the subcommittee.
Good morning. I very much appreciate the opportunity to be
with you today. The Department of Homeland Security is
confronting serious, complex, and dynamic threats to the
security of our Nation on a daily basis. Under the Biden-Harris
administration, we are aggressively pursuing efforts to address
our most pressing security concerns, from cybersecurity to
domestic violent extremism to the COVID-19 pandemic and more.
This is hard work, but that is what 240,000 colleagues in
the Department of Homeland Security do every day. Their
dedicated efforts keep our communities safe and secure. And the
resources afforded by this Congress help ensure we can
effectively meet our mission and recruit and retain our
Nation's most talented professionals.
The President's proposed budget will invest in our broad
mission set, including preventing terrorism, securing and
managing our borders, repairing the broken immigration system,
safeguarding cyber and critical infrastructure, and
strengthening national preparedness and resilience. It will
provide DHS with the resources we need to keep our country
safe, strong, and prosperous.
While I am unable to address specific details of the
President's budget until it is officially released later this
week, I welcome this opportunity to discuss several key agency
priorities for fiscal year 2022 laid out in the President's
$52.2 billion discretionary request for DHS.
This request includes approximately $1.2 billion for border
infrastructure improvements to fund modernization of our land
ports of entry and border security technology, and to ensure
the safe and humane treatment of migrants in Customs and Border
Protection custody. It would also support our enhanced efforts
to combat the smuggling and trafficking of people, illicit
drugs and weapons, while providing for more efficient travel,
trade, and commerce.
We are working tirelessly to rebuild our immigration system
into one that upholds our Nation's laws and is fair, equitable,
and reflects our values. To achieve this, the fiscal year 2022
request includes $345 million to U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services to address naturalization, asylum, and
other program backlogs. The budget request also supports up to
125,000 refuge admissions for fiscal year 2022.
To meet the President's bold vision for combating climate
change, the discretionary request includes an additional
investment of $540 million above the fiscal year 2021 enacted
level to increase resilience efforts and enhance predisaster
planning.
It will support resiliency in infrastructure, particularly
for vulnerable and historically underserved communities, and it
would resource the Federal Emergency Management Agency with the
ability to hire additional staff to prepare and respond to the
increasing number of emergencies and disasters our Nation has
experienced.
In recent months, DHS has made it a top priority to address
domestic violent extremism, which I believe to be the most
lethal and persistent terrorism-related threat to the United
States today.
The fiscal year 2022 request includes $131 million to
support innovative methods to prevent domestic violent
extremism while reflecting and respecting privacy, civil
rights, and civil liberties. It also supports critical research
of the root causes of radicalization, enhanced community
outreach, and funding for locally driven efforts.
Finally, in the face of increasing cyber threats, it is
critical that we promote resilience not only within the Federal
Government but across the public and private sectors in our
critical infrastructure systems. The recent ransomware attack
on the Colonial Pipeline serves as a stark example of this
ever-present threat.
Our discretionary request includes $2.1 billion for our
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which leads
DHS and interagency efforts to defend against today's threats
and build a more secure and resilient future.
We will also further strengthen the cyber capabilities of
the Transportation Security Administration, the U.S. Secret
Service, Homeland Security Investigations, and the U.S. Coast
Guard.
The budget also proposes $618 million for needed
investments in research and development and innovation across
DHS, laying out a strong foundation to not just respond to the
threats of today but prepare for and defend against the threats
of tomorrow.
Thank you for the opportunity to be here today. I am
grateful for your continued support for the dedicated public
servants of the Department of Homeland Security and for the
work they do each and every day.
I look forward to discussing the President's proposed
fiscal year 2022 budget in greater detail when officially
released, and I welcome your questions today. Thank you very
much.
[The information follows:]******** COMMITTEE INSERT
********
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Thank you, Mr. Secretary.
I want to commend you and the DHS personnel who have been
working so hard over the last few months to manage an
incredibly difficult situation on our southern border.
Significant challenges remain, of course, but you and your team
have been able to impose order on what otherwise could have
spiraled into an unmanageable situation.
Can you update us on the current status of the border, what
trends you are seeing, and how they may be different from what
we saw during the last major influx of migrants in 2019?
Secretary Mayorkas. Thank you very much, Madam Chairwoman.
I must echo your commendation of our frontline personnel, of
course, the United States Border Patrol, also the men and women
of FEMA and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, whom we
have deployed to address the influx of unaccompanied children
at our border.
You correctly noted that we have reduced the number of
unaccompanied children in Border Patrol custody from almost
5,000 children a little bit more than 30 days ago to less than
600 today.
We continue to see the migration, the irregular migration
of unaccompanied children, but we continue in our success of
managing that flow, moving those children more rapidly to HHS
shelters that are properly equipped to address the needs of
unaccompanied children. And we are reengineering the process
from beginning to end, not only to achieve the more facile and
expeditious movement of the children from Border Patrol
facilities to Health and Human Services facilities but,
importantly, to more expeditiously move those children from the
HHS facilities to the parents and legal guardians who are
responsible for their care here in the United States.
So we continue with our success. The challenge is not
behind us, but nor is the progress in reengineering to better
improve the system. And so I appreciate that opportunity.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Now, DHS continues to use the title 42
authority granted by CDC in March 2020 to rapidly expel most
migrants. When do you think the title 42 authority will be
lifted, and are there specific metrics that the CDC will use to
make this decision?
Secretary Mayorkas. The title 42 authority that we employ
to expel individuals and family members at the border is the
authority of CDC, and it is based upon a public health
imperative. And we use it based upon the CDC's assessment of
the public health conditions and what is needed to protect the
health and safety of the American public and the migrants
themselves.
We are watching the data. We are watching the science, led
by the CDC, and we will no longer rely upon title 42 when there
is no longer a public health imperative basis to do so. We do
not have metrics, we in the Department of Homeland Security. It
is not necessarily based on the flows that we see but, rather,
the public health details and facts that underlie our actions.
And we are in close touch on a daily basis with the CDC to
understand the public health conditions that serve as a
predicate for our use of that authority.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Okay. Once title 42 does go away, CBP
will begin giving migrants their full due process, as required
by law, such as the right to claim asylum. How are you
preparing for this change, and what additional resources will
be needed to effectively manage it?
Secretary Mayorkas. Madam Chairwoman, we in the Department
of Homeland Security, our personnel have dealt with surges many
times before. These surges occur periodically and, more
specifically, seasonally.
We are not only looking at the tools that we have
historically used under our different authorities, under title
8 of the United States Code, but, once again, we are looking at
the processes that we have and how we can build upon them and
improve them.
And so we are looking at, for example, the asylum system
and the duration, the length of time it takes to achieve a
final adjudication and how we can use our regulatory
authorities to bring far greater efficiency to that system.
So we are looking not only at the tools that we
historically have had but also how we can improve the processes
that have existed. And it is our sincere hope and our urge that
Congress pass legislation to reform a system that we all
understand to be so fundamentally broken.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Fleischmann.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And, again, Mr. Secretary, thank you for being with us
today. As you know, sir, I want to thank you again. And my
colleagues know that when I deal with administration officials
in any administration, such as yourself, I want to deal with
you with the utmost humility and respect, but today, sir, I
have got to ask some very pointed questions, and I do that with
the utmost respect towards you and towards your office. But I
am deeply troubled, sir.
In my opening statement, I mentioned the recent article
from The Washington Post about the near shutdown of the agency
charged with enforcing our Nation's immigration laws. The
Washington Post states: The agency's 6,000 officers currently
average one arrest every 2 months--one arrest every 2 months.
My first question, sir, is that an accurate statistic, and
is that the intended outcome of the various orders and
directives, a near stop of all immigration violation arrests,
sir?
Secretary Mayorkas. Mr. Ranking Member, I have a few things
to say, if I may. And let me answer your question at the top
and then address, if I may, a few of your preliminary remarks.
That is a data point with which I am completely unfamiliar. I
do not believe it is accurate, and we will provide your office
with accurate data.
I think there are a few important things to say in addition
to that. Number one, I very much appreciated our conversation a
few weeks ago and the respect that you have for this office and
for our Department and the support that you provide to the men
and women of our Department. And I welcome the pointed
questions. I well understand it is our shared responsibility to
both ask pointed questions and to deliver answers for them.
Law enforcement effectiveness is not a quantitative issue;
it is a qualitative one. The question is, as to whom are we
dedicating our resources, what will deliver the greatest public
safety results for the American public? And that is what I am
focused on.
And I have a tremendous amount of experience in this realm,
not only because of my service in the Department of Homeland
Security but my 12 years of service in the United States
Department of Justice as a Federal prosecutor, investigating
and prosecuting criminals for 9 years on the front lines, in
the trenches, in the Federal courtroom, as well as serving as a
United States Attorney for 3 years.
So I am very well aware of what is needed to deliver for
the American public the public safety that we all deserve and
to which we aspire.
Mr. Fleischmann. And I do acknowledge and honor your
experience, sir. But another quote from this article: One of
the priority groups, recent border crossers, are effectively no
longer subject to arrest once they reach the U.S. interior.
I have two questions, sir--well, two separate sets of
questions. Is this true? Has President Biden already abandoned
the directive that recent border crossers would be held to
basic immigration laws?
And then, as a followup, are there no consequences for
illegally crossing the border at this point? Because, frankly,
sir, it appears that President Biden's message to one and all
is that the U.S. has no limits to whom can come because the
administration will not enforce any of its immigration laws. Is
that the message, this country will not enforce its immigration
laws? And I will let you respond, sir.
Secretary Mayorkas. No, it is not. And the President could
not have been clearer in his articulation of this
administration's position, nor could I have been clearer and
continue to be, which is the border is closed.
And this administration administers and enforces the laws
of the United States of America. And that is not only the laws
of accountability but also the humanitarian laws that Congress
passed many years ago.
And there are three priority areas specifically and
explicitly articulated in both the January 20th memorandum of
then-Acting Secretary Pekoske and the February 8th guidance of
Acting ICE Director Tae Johnson. And those three priority areas
are: national security, public safety, and border security. And
border security is specifically defined as recent border
crossers.
And I think that those documents and our actions speak
powerfully to the fact that the border is closed and that we
enforce the laws that Congress has passed. But we will do so
effectively to ensure the greatest impact and outcome from the
resources that we have.
Mr. Fleischmann. Mr. Secretary, my time has expired. I
thank you for your responses, and I will reserve for round two.
Madam Chair, I yield back. Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Cuellar.
Mr. Cuellar. Thank you so much, Madam Chair, Ranking
Member.
Mr. Secretary, thank you so much for what you do. Some of
us have dealt with the Homeland Secretaries since the Bush
administration, and everybody comes in with their own thoughts
and philosophies, and I understand that. And no matter what you
do, some people think you are doing too little, some people
think you are doing too much. So I know you have a very
complicated job, and we want to be as supportive as we can to
help you succeed.
My question is: I need for you to help me give a message to
my border communities. What would you tell my border
communities when we talk about reopening the southwest border
to nonessential travel?
In Laredo, for example, downtown Laredo, in bridge number
one, there have been about 150 businesses that have closed,
people that got their--earned savings, they lost their
businesses, they lost their savings, because, one, you had the
COVID-19 situation, the pandemic, and on top of that, some of
those businesses depend 30, 40, 50 percent on the Mexican
shoppers.
Some of them are asking me, you know, why is it that the
Mexicans can fly in or the undocumented people can come in
through either a bridge in Laredo through the metering system
or at the bus stations we see them or at the airports in
Laredo, and I see them every time I fly to D.C., families going
into the interior.
So we have done everything, talked to the Mexicans. I
talked to your health adviser, Gary. He is an excellent person.
I talked to CDC. In fact, this Friday I have a call with DHS,
CDC, and NIH on border openings. I have talked to the Mexicans.
Everybody says we are ready to open up this month.
I am hoping that we can get some good news, Mr. Secretary,
because when we said it was temporary restrictions, you know,
it has been over a year. And that word "temporary" to me was
going to be a little earlier. I know it is health-driven. I
understand that. I am with you.
But what message could you give us of some hope and
optimism to my border communities from Laredo down to the
valley and up and down the border from California, New Mexico,
Arizona? And, of course, I know it affects the northern border.
But gives us some news that hopefully this month will be the
last time, that at least we can open up in a phased-in way. And
I understand it is health-driven. I understand. I just want to
be very helpful to you to help you open up the border.
Secretary Mayorkas. Thank you very much, Congressman. I had
the privilege of visiting the border with you when I served as
Deputy Secretary, and I know how much of a champion you are for
those border communities.
And thank you also for mentioning Gary. That is Gary
Rasicot, who is a fantastic public servant. I am going to take
the luxury of 30 seconds since we did give a shout-out. I must
give a shout-out to the budget team of the U.S. Department of
Homeland Security, which is just as good as it gets, I must
say.
Congressman, we are watching not only the public health
situation on a daily basis, but also the economic situation on
a daily basis. And we very well understand the economic
consequences of our use of title 42 on the one hand and, more
importantly, the public health situation that it reflects and
its impact on the border communities and how much the flow of
people and goods, its criticality to the prosperity of those
border communities.
We confer every single day on that. And the assurance that
I can give the people whom you represent and throughout the
border communities on our southern border and on the northern
border is that we will not restrict travel one day more than
the public health imperative requires. That is the assurance I
can give.
Mr. Cuellar. All right, thank you. I know I have got about
20 seconds left, so we are going to have this conversation.
And, hopefully, you will allow your Under Secretary, Gary, to
join us so we can talk to CDC, because the last time I talked
to the CDC they said it was Homeland's decision, and then you
are telling me that it is CDC's. So, hopefully, you are
allowing to be part of this conversation on Friday morning on
that.
But thank you again for your service. I have some other
questions, but I will save it for the second round. Thank you,
Mr. Secretary.
Secretary Mayorkas. Thank you, Congressman. And let me be
clear, and I apologize if I wasn't. This is an all-of-
government effort, and we are working across the Federal
Government enterprise to make these decisions.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Palazzo. Mr. Palazzo.
I will then go to Mr. Rutherford.
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Ranking
Member.
And, Mr. Secretary, it is great to be with you.
Listen, I first want to ask you a question about--I know I
read with actually great delight the support from your
administration and the President concerning the Jones Act. And
I think that is critical to our national security that we have
a strong maritime organization in this country, and I think the
Jones Act helps in that regard.
But I do have to ask you a question because I see, when the
Colonial Pipeline shutdown occurred, there were two waivers,
two Jones Act waivers granted. We see them being granted during
hurricanes oftentimes, but it is my understanding that during
these two requests for waivers, one vessel never arrived until
the weekend, when things were actually back up and running, and
the second waiver might never be used.
So my question is, Mr. Secretary, are we getting to a point
where these Jones Act waivers almost become, you know, a box
that is checked when we have any kind of national disaster?
Because I don't know that that is helpful for our maritime
industry.
Secretary Mayorkas. Congressman, thank you very much. The
Jones Act is a very important statutory framework to protect
American-flag vessels. The Colonial Pipeline cyber attack that
emanated from a very pernicious use of ransomware, with which
we are all too familiar, posed a very significant threat to the
flow of materials that are much needed in a particular region
of the United States.
And we by no means addressed the waiver requests in a
check-the-box approach. Far from that, we worked around the
clock, methodically and thoroughly assessing the statutory
requirements, addressing the question whether, in fact,
American-flag vessels were sufficient to deliver product on an
emergency basis, and we made the decision that, in fact, they
were not.
And if, in fact, the region needed a supplemental supply,
because Colonial Pipeline could not come through in time and
bring its system back up, that we would permit foreign-flag
vessels to bring the much needed supply to the American people.
Whether or not those waiver requests were used speak of
Colonial Pipeline's ability to bring its systems back up and
deliver in a timely fashion. But we felt, as a matter of law
and as a matter of the market, the assessment was that we
needed to have that facility available should, in fact,
Colonial Pipeline not be able to come through. That was a very
measured, scientific, and legal analysis under the law.
Mr. Rutherford. Okay. Thank you very much for that. You
know, the administration is facing several crises at one time
here. We have got an economic crisis, with the inflation that
is creeping in, the energy crisis.
I want to talk to you a minute about the national security
crisis also, and looking at domestic violence intervention--I
am sorry--domestic violent extremists. And I notice your
national priority area, one of them for the UASI was for DVEs.
And, as a former police officer, I really do appreciate that
focus.
Can you talk a little bit about the $20 million that you
just directed toward targeting violence prevention and
terrorist prevention?
Secretary Mayorkas. Thank you very much, Congressman. And,
also, thank you very much for your prior service as a police
officer. I had the privilege of bringing police officer work to
bear in a Federal courtroom and vindicate the tremendous work
that law enforcement performed.
The $20 million grant program is to equip communities, our
State, local, Tribal, and territorial partners, to develop
innovative programs to address the rise of domestic violent
extremism and the serious threat that it poses.
And that grant program is designed to equip local
communities because, as you well know, it is the local
communities, the neighborhoods, the people, the family, loved
ones, friends, who can identify individuals who are beginning
to exhibit traits of concern and intervene so that we can
prevent the further development of violent tendencies born of
hateful ideologies and extreme ideologies.
It is the front lines that are our best defense to
preventing this type of violence. And so that grant program is
designed to resource and equip our local authorities and our
nongovernmental institutions in that fight.
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you very much, Mr. Secretary.
And I will have a followup in a second round on that.
Madam Chair, I see my time has expired. I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Ms. Underwood.
Ms. Underwood. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And, Mr. Secretary, it is a pleasure to see you here today.
The chairwoman and I are both concerned about shortcomings in
the way medical services are managed across the Department,
both for DHS personnel and for individuals in custody. Mr.
Secretary, I understand that you and the chairwoman have
discussed this issue and that you share our concerns as well.
The Department's Chief Medical Office is currently
isolated, confusingly, within the Countering Weapons of Mass
Destruction Office. Rather than reporting directly to you, the
CMO instead reports to the Assistant Secretary in charge of
that Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office. At the same
time, each DHS component has its own medical officer overseeing
its own medical contracts, leading to disparate guidelines and
little to no meaningful coordination across the Department.
Mr. Secretary, what is your view on how the current
organizational structure hinders coordination and effectiveness
of medical services across DHS?
Secretary Mayorkas. Congresswoman, thank you very much for
your question. This is an issue that, indeed, I did discuss
with the chairwoman and an issue that I am studying very
closely with our team here in the Department of Homeland
Security.
We have an extraordinary Chief Medical Officer in Dr.
Pritesh Gandhi. And I am concerned that our organization is too
fractured in this area, both with respect to ensuring the
health and safety of our personnel but also in addressing
medical issues that arise in the course of our day-to-day work
across the Department of Homeland Security enterprise.
I am studying this, based on materials that I have been
provided. I have been speaking with a number of people. My
intention, so that I can assure you that this is receiving the
utmost focus, is to actually speak with people across the
Department.
I owe it to the experts who work in this area on a day-to-
day basis to speak with them to receive their assessments, to
understand the arguments for and against the current structure,
and to reform it accordingly, which I intend to do.
Ms. Underwood. Great. What kind of organizational changes
would you like to see to address the problem? I am sure in your
assessment and conversations you have already begun to gain
some information.
And with those organizational changes, could you use your
existing authorities or would it require congressional action?
Secretary Mayorkas. Congresswoman, it is my understanding
that congressional action will be required because the
placement of a Chief Medical Officer in the office that is
known by its acronym CWMD was, in fact, a legislative change,
the separation of the Chief Medical Officer and the office that
now resides in our management directorate. But that is not to
say that reforms cannot be implemented outside of the
legislative construct, but it is something that I am looking at
very carefully.
Ms. Underwood. Okay. And when can you provide us with a
path forward, you know, how much time?
Secretary Mayorkas. I would expect to be able to do so in
just several weeks, Congresswoman.
Ms. Underwood. Thank you. Well, I look forward to working
with you, sir, and my colleagues on the authorizing committee
to strengthen medical coordination and oversight across the
Department and ensure that your entire workforce as well as
everybody in DHS custody has consistent access to high-quality
care.
Now, Mr. Secretary, we all know that vaccination remains a
critical part of ending the COVID-19 pandemic and saving lives.
For DHS, vaccinating both your workforce and your detainees is
essential, both for their own well-being and for the health and
safety of communities across the country.
And I want to start by talking about your workforce. I know
you have worked hard to stand up Operation Vaccinate Our
Workforce, or VOW, to rapidly increase access to vaccines. And
you testified that 77 percent of your frontline workforce who
elected to receive the vaccine have been vaccinated. Can you
clarify what percentage of the entire DHS workforce is fully
vaccinated?
Secretary Mayorkas. Congresswoman, two things: Number one,
by my response to your earlier question that I will have an
assessment to you within several weeks, by your expression of
surprise, I clearly imposed upon myself too aggressive a
timeline.
Ms. Underwood. No way.
Secretary Mayorkas. Congresswoman, we have focused so
intensely on Operation VOW, Vaccinate Our Workforce, for the
well-being of our frontline personnel. I don't have an answer
to your specific question, and I will get that information to
you as soon as I can.
Ms. Underwood. Okay. Excellent.
And, with that, Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Palazzo.
Mr. Palazzo. Yes, Madam Chair. Can you hear me this time?
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Yes, we can.
Mr. Palazzo. All right. Well, Madam Chair, thank you.
Ranking Member Fleischmann, thank you.
And, Mr. Secretary, thank you for being here today.
Listen, I just got back from the border late last night. I
was down there with 12 of my colleagues. And, you know, what we
are seeing and what we are hearing on the border isn't what we
are really hearing from the administration or the mainstream
media.
There is absolutely an invasion taking place on our
southern border. Single adult men by the hundreds every night
trying to break into our border. Unaccompanied children, family
units are just walking up and turning themselves in. And, I
mean, you know, there is one winner in all this, and right now
it is the cartel, and the one loser is the American people.
And, you know, just my understanding is families will pay
thousands of dollars to have one person smuggled into America
or smuggled across the Northern Triangle, through Mexico.
Sometimes it costs several thousand dollars per state to pass.
But the cartels bring them in. And just as we have seen a
couple weeks ago, they will dump children even over the border
fence. And if it wasn't for our brave and committed CBP
officers, those children's, you know, lives could have been in
danger.
But it is not just children. On my flight back last night,
there was a lady who also paid smugglers to get into our
country, and she had a full body cast on. They pushed her over
the fence, and she broke her back, where then the American
people took care of her and provided for her medical services,
and now she is off to whoever knows where, to her sponsors. But
she wasn't alone on that flight. I mean, there were several
illegals who came in our country, minors, that are flying all
across the United States.
So, effectively, Mr. Cellular is not the only person that
is practically living on the border because we are turning all
of our States into border States with our policy.
So, I guess, real quick, what is the administration doing
to stop this? Because it doesn't look like what they are doing
is working. It looks like you rolled out a big welcome mat to
say: Send us your kids. And that is criminal, because, you
know, as long as they know if they get to our border, that we
are going to take them and we are going to turn them into
American citizens and let them, you know, roam free around the
country, these people desperate in these countries are going to
continue to take that risk, unnecessary risk I might add. And
so please tell me what this administration is doing.
Secretary Mayorkas. Congressman, a few things. First of
all, I appreciate your recognition of the bravery of the men
and women of the United States Border Patrol.
Secondly, I appreciate your articulation of the cruelty of
the human smuggling networks and the cartels. That is precisely
why we have enhanced our efforts to tackle the activities of
the smugglers, the traffickers, the cartels. We have operated,
for example, we have launched Operation Sentinel in the last
few weeks to build upon the work that preceded this
administration.
Your characterization, however, with respect to how we are
addressing individuals apprehended at the border, I must
respectfully disagree with from beginning to end. Individuals
are expelled under title 42 of the United States Code. Those
who are not expelled are placed into immigration proceedings,
where they are able to make claims for relief under the laws
that Congress passed. And if their claims for relief do not
prevail, then they are removed from the United States.
And so we continue to enforce the immigration laws. And I
should say that we are improving the administrative processes
in a way that has not been done before, not by the prior
administration nor administrations before then. Most notably I
should comment are to ensure that the asylum system, while
making sure that it follows due process requirements, is more
expeditious and delivers justice with greater speed for the
American public and for the migrants who are claiming
humanitarian relief.
And so it is not an invasion. People are not coming in
without regular order. They are being placed in immigration
proceedings. They have the ability to make a claim, as the law
provides, to an asylum officer, to an immigration judge, and
the courts of the United States.
Mr. Palazzo. I look forward to our second round of
questions.
Madam Chairwoman, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Quigley.
Mr. Quigley. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
Mr. Secretary, thank you for being here. Mr. Rutherford
touched on a little bit the UASI grants. And for those
watching, those are Urban Area Security Initiative grants that
assist high-threat, high-density urban areas like Chicago, to
help us build and sustain the capabilities necessary to
prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from acts of
terrorism, all threats, foreign and domestic.
Let me ask broadly, what is your vision for UASI? I guess
before I say that, I should thank you as well. I was pleased to
hear that DHS, under your leadership, prevented some of the
quick changes to the formula that were proposed previously. So
I appreciate that.
But as we go forward and as we always see evolving threats,
what is your vision for this, and can you talk about some of
the challenges the UASI program currently faces?
Secretary Mayorkas. Thank you very much, Congressman.
Indeed, I did put a halt to changes in the grant formula that
would have redirected Urban Area Security Initiative grants in
a way that, in my view and in the view of fellow experts, would
not have delivered public safety and security in the most
effective way to the urban areas across the United States.
Those grants we have calibrated to address the most urgent
priorities affecting our Homeland. And so two important changes
that I made was to require a certain percentage of the grant
funds, 7.5 percent to be precise, dedicated to combating
domestic violent extremism. That equates to approximately $77
million. In addition, again, to address the most urgent threats
facing our Homeland, I increased the minimum amount that must
be dedicated to cybersecurity from 5 percent to 7.5 percent.
One of the things that I am looking at very closely,
Congressman, in partnership with the law enforcement community
and the emergency and first responder community writ large, is
whether the formulas do need to be redesigned to better deliver
for the urban areas that the grant program is designed to
serve.
And so we are going to be engaging with stakeholders across
the country to better understand their concerns with the
existing formula and see what changes, if any, are suitable to
meet more effectively the moment.
Mr. Quigley. And you would come back to us before
implementing those, I would assume, at least for some thoughts
and consultation.
Secretary Mayorkas. Most certainly, Congressman.
Mr. Quigley. No, and part of this is, as the threats grow--
and, obviously, we have seen it in what you had to address with
cyber and your talk about increasing that, others asking for
this, which in the formula changes would have diluted the
effort, right?--is there a need not just to reassess who needs
what, but just how much we need and perhaps an overall
increase, given the enhanced threats, again, not just foreign
as we were focused on, but clearly domestic now?
Secretary Mayorkas. I would welcome that conversation,
Congressman. I think that is a very, very important one to
have.
Mr. Quigley. Finally, any new tools that you are talking
about with State and local leaders? And the example I hear
about is updating integrated information-sharing networks to
improve analyzing, synthesizing, and disseminating info to
prevent such attacks.
Secretary Mayorkas. Thank you so much, Congressman. Indeed,
we are engaged in discussions with our State, local, Tribal,
and territorial partners.
One of the things which you mentioned is the provision of
information to them, not only in real time but to make sure
that the information we provide is actionable for them.
One of the things that we discussed, I discussed with our
Office of Intelligence and Analysis is whether that office,
I&A--everything seems to be known by an acronym in the Federal
enterprise--
Mr. Quigley. Yes.
Secretary Mayorkas. --the Office of Intelligence and
Analysis has the infrastructure to deliver real-time actionable
information on both a secure environment and an unclassified
environment. And we, with the support of this subcommittee and
Congress, are building a better infrastructure for that.
Mr. Quigley. We appreciate that. And my time is up, but I
look forward to those communications and working with you and
giving you the resources you need. Thanks again for your help.
I yield back.
Secretary Mayorkas. Thank you.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mrs. Hinson.
Mrs. Hinson. Well, thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
And thank you, Mr. Secretary, for joining us today. I
appreciate this hearing.
And I do wish to echo some concerns that I know several
members have talked about, that we had been given more complete
information on the Department's budget plans in its entirety so
we could look at those details more closely.
But my line of questioning actually centers today on an
experience we have right here in the district, Mr. Secretary.
In August of 2020, a derecho storm descended on eastern Iowa
and much of the Midwest. It took hours to work its way through.
Weeklong blackouts. Some people didn't have power or internet
for over a month. Damage from which our communities will take
literally years to recover from. Accord to NOAA, the August
derecho is considered one of the top 10 most expensive
disasters in the past 5 years, at a price tag of $11 billion.
One of the primary concerns that I hear from my
constituents is about their interaction with FEMA's Individuals
and Households Program specifically when seeking Federal
disaster assistance.
I am grateful for all the work that FEMA has done for
Iowans through several disasters, including this one, providing
more than $11 million in individual assistance grants in
response to the derecho specifically. However, I believe there
is significant room for improvement in IHP, particularly when
it comes to clarity and transparency with the average American
who is going through this process.
And so I recently wrote a letter to Administrator Criswell,
requesting some data on the IHP program, the acceptance rates,
the appeals process to a FEMA ruling denying assistance. And in
September, the GAO issued a report on the effectiveness of IHP,
citing that of the 4.4 million people who applied for that
assistance, only 2 million were actually found eligible and
received that aid.
Specifically, GAO found that FEMA needs to increase its
clarity in the application process for those who need to supply
more information in their applications. We saw that happening
with our constituents. And in this report, GAO recommended 14
actions directly to FEMA on how to improve this program.
So, Mr. Secretary, my question to you today is, can you
provide a status update on the Department's work to implement
those recommendations from GAO? RPTR MERTENSEDTR SECKMAN[10:57
a.m.]
Secretary Mayorkas. Congresswoman, thank you very much. I
am familiar with the program. I am familiar with the GAO
report, and I will circle back with your office to provide you
with the status of our actions in response to the 14
recommendations.
I know that one of the primary reasons why the assistance
rate is what it is, is because one of the thresholds that must
be met is the inadequacy or the lack of insurance coverage.
And, in fact, people who do have insurance and who recover
insurance proceeds in response to a disaster may not be
eligible for the individual assistance under the FEMA grant
program.
I am also very well aware of the concerns with respect to
clarity and transparency in terms of the eligibility criteria
and making sure the public understands what the assistance
program is for and when its resources can be triggered. It is
something we are very focused upon because this impacts real
people in real ways. And so I would welcome the opportunity to
circle back with you personally, and, of course, with our
respective teams so that I can deliver the specificity in
response to your question that you deserve.
Ms. Hinson. Yeah. And I appreciate that, Mr. Secretary,
because if there is one thing that we have heard, it is that
there is some challenging going through this process. And when
you think about constituents during their greatest time of
need, it is when they don't have a roof over their head or they
don't have that power. So we need to find a meaningful path
forward here so we can best serve the people who are going
through the process, you know.
You know, a lack of clarity in the application process,
obviously, is contributing, I think, to lower acceptance rates.
Do you think that, if that is the case, that the agency should
be working to prevent this?
Secretary Mayorkas. Well, we have an obligation to be clear
and transparent and to communicate things appropriately to the
American people, and so we are taking a very serious look at
this. And, of course, we have an obligation to remedy any
infirmities.
I do want to say, though, I must champion the men and women
of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They are just
extraordinary in what they do. We all have room for
improvement, and that does not diminish their excellence. But
the room for improvement we will use as an opportunity to be
better, rest assured.
Ms. Hinson. All right. I appreciate that.
Mr. Secretary, and I will reserve some followup questions
for round two, but we appreciate FEMA's work. They helped us
through a major flood in 2008 and obviously this derecho in
August. So thank you, Mr. Secretary.
And, Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. I understand that the chairwoman of the
full Appropriations Committee is with us, and so I will now
yield to her.
The Chair. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Madam
Chair, and I apologize to you and to Secretary Mayorkas. I am
chairing another hearing, but I did want to have the
opportunity to really greet the Secretary, thank him for his
great work, and his years of great work in public service. And,
if I can, I just want to get a question asked here of Mr.
Secretary.
As chair of the Labor, Health and Human Services
Appropriations Committee, and we have had conversations before,
I spend a significant amount of time on the unaccompanied
children program. And I know the Department of Health and Human
Services has been in contact with you and advocates as to how
we could potentially divert children from entering the
unaccompanied children program; in particular, discharging
children to the non-parental relatives they enter the United
States with. So I have heard from advocates that the number of
children in the UC program who came with a nonparental relative
could number in the thousands. So, look. I would also note I am
not advocating for family detention, but I am looking at how we
are able to discharge a grandmother and a granddaughter
together as quickly as possible.
So, with that, can you tell me what the status is of these
conversations with HHS? And are there barriers on your end to
delaying the removal of these relatives so that they can serve
as sponsors while the children go through their immigration
court proceedings?
Secretary Mayorkas. Madam Chairwoman, thank you so much for
this important question, and I know that we discussed this
previously a number of weeks ago. One of the things that we are
very, very focused on is expediting, moving more efficiently in
the union of the unaccompanied child with a parent, legal
guardian, or qualified sponsor here in the United States. We
are reengineering that process.
When a child arrives in the custody of a relative who is
not a parent or legal guardian, then that child is, in fact,
defined as an unaccompanied child. And to change that would
require legislative action, I believe, to change the terms of
the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, the
TVPRA. But we are looking at processes in the meantime with
respect to how we can more effectively unite an unaccompanied
child with a qualified sponsor here in the United States. That
is where our current focus is.
The Chair. I appreciate that, and I will look into it along
with my colleague, the chair of the Homeland Subcommittee. Both
of us are particularly interested in these areas and to look at
what may be required in terms of legislative language.
Your goal, as well as our goal, is to see that the
children, when they are in our custody, for the lowest length
of time in custody and that they can move to be discharged as
quickly as possible. And we want look for the ways in which
with keeping the child safe and in good hands be able to
expedite this process.
We are also very, very much aware that we have had to cut
back on the licensed shelters that children are in because of
COVID, and we will revisit that to see--with some of the new
guidance and the science behind that guidance to see whether or
not those--at least some of those licensed beds can be used.
But the issue is--and I appreciate what you said about
reimagining. I mean, I think that is the right word here, of
what we can do to expedite discharge. We know, you know, that
the longer these children are held in an emergency intake
shelter, that it is so disruptive of their lives. It has, you
know, physical, you know, repercussions. It has very serious
mental and traumatic repercussions. And I know what you want to
do, and what we want to do is to try to work with you to see if
we can't reimagine with you ways in which we move to discharge
as quickly as possible and, at the same time, protect the child
and continue to try to protect that child with the services
that he or she may need while they are in the custody of the
United States, which is what we are charged with by law.
I thank you for, you know, your work, and I thank you for
understanding this issue and the compassion that you and the
professionalism that you bring to this issue. So thank you
very, very much.
Secretary Mayorkas. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Price.
Mr. Price. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Welcome, Mr. Secretary. I think congratulations are still
in order for your early appointment and confirmation. Happy to
work with you, and I appreciate your appearance here today.
I want to pursue a line of questioning I began with the
acting ICE Administrator a few weeks ago. It has to do with the
Department's philosophy, the Department's approach with respect
to enforcement actions, particularly the targeting of those
actions and the exercise of prosecutorial discretion. You are
probably aware that this has been a difficult issue over many
administrations in many years.
With this subcommittee, there was a particular effort 14
years ago to push for more precise and more targeted ICE
enforcement, to focus on dangerous individuals who shouldn't be
in the country when it came to detention and deportation. We
directed funding back then with the assumption that most
deportations would be of such people and that they would link
up with the penal system as people emerged, actually, from the
criminal system. It does raise the question of direction to
local law enforcement, which I will get to later or maybe in
the next round.
But the result was eventually the Secure Communities
Program in the Bush administration. And as you, I am sure, also
know, that program turned out to be controversial, pretty
difficult, mainly because it was much less targeted, much less
discriminating, as we had hoped, much less focused on dangerous
individuals.
So, during the Obama administration, there was discussion,
agitation about the blanket policy of secure communities and
the establishment of the Priority Enforcement Program, PEP,
during the Obama administration. That program came a way of
achieving greater targeting, greater prioritization of
individuals for immigration enforcement.
Unfortunately, the Secure Communities Program was brought
back with a vengeance by the Trump administration, bringing
back a much more capricious targeting strategy that swept up
nonthreatening individuals along with those who posed a threat.
I quoted some figures from the Syracuse University program that
tracks these things. The number of people in ICE detention rose
from 41,163 in 2016 to 49,319. At the same time, the number of
individuals who had serious level 1 criminal records declined
from 7475 in 2016 to 2019. The percentage of those detained
with no criminal record at all rose 57 to 64 percent.
In other words, ICE raids became both more frequent and
less discriminating. I saw this in my direct, the impact of
more raids and a more random quality to those raids and a lot
of anxiety and fear in the community as a result.
Given this framework, can you tell us where this
administration intends to go?
Secretary Mayorkas. Thank you very much, Congressman.
When I was a Federal prosecutor in the United States
Attorney's Office, we had 186, approximately 186 assistant
United States attorneys who enforced Federal criminal law. And
we dealt with drug trafficking, business crimes, public
corruption, Federal Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, cybercrime,
the whole panoply of crimes. And 186 criminal prosecutors could
not address every single Federal crime that occurred in a
jurisdiction that was populated by 18 million people. And,
therefore, we set forth guidelines that guided our use of
resources are to bring to bear the greatest impact for the
safety of the people in the Central District of California.
That approach is mirrored across prosecution offices from coast
to coast and border to border.
That is no different than what we are endeavoring to do
here in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. How can our
resources be dedicated in the enforcement of Federal
immigration law to deliver in the enforcement arena the
greatest public safety impact.
And so we are not pursuing cases indiscriminately. We are
not pursuing them devoid of factors that educate and inform the
administration of criminal justice or civil immigration
justice, but we are doing so by looking at what poses the
greatest threat, what resources do we have, and what delivers
the best outcome for the American people, and that is what we
are doing.
Mr. Price. Thank you, sir.
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Aguilar.
Mr. Aguilar. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And thank you, Mr. Secretary for being here.
I wanted to follow up briefly on the line of questioning
that my colleague, Ms. Underwood, talked about. You know, given
kind of the Byzantine nature of the DHS, you know, medical
officer perspective, I wanted to ask what role that individual,
DHS' Chief Medical Officer, will play in establishing
guidelines to safely process individuals at the southern border
as we lead into or as we look toward a post-title 42 world.
Secretary Mayorkas. Thank you, Congressman. The Chief
Medical Officer, Dr. Pritesh Gandhi, and one of his colleagues,
Dr. Alex Eastman, and their team have done extraordinary work
not only on the border but, quite frankly, with the workforce
in tandem with other colleagues in delivering on Operation VOW
that was referenced earlier, Vaccinate our Workforce. They have
built--they have designed and built an architecture across the
southern border to ensure in partnership with State and local
authorities and community-based organizations with the Mexican
Government the testing, isolation, and quarantine, as needed,
of individuals who are apprehended and placed in immigration
proceedings. They have done an extraordinary job, and I would
be quite privileged to provide the details to you and your
team.
Mr. Aguilar. Sure. But I guess the question is what will--
specific to title 42, will they continue to--will you continue
to follow their guidance and follow their lead when it comes to
the conditions and the processing of individuals in a post-
title 42 world, in establishing those guidelines to process
individuals who present themselves for lawful asylum?
Secretary Mayorkas. So we, our Chief Medical Officer, our
experts elsewhere in the Department, are connected with the
CDC, and we communicate with respect to the data, the science,
what the public health imperative requires, both with respect
to the situation now in a title 42 environment as well as
planning for what will occur when the use of title 42 is no
longer needed because the public health imperative no longer
requires it. I hope I am answering your question, but they are
integrally involved in the planning and execution of those
plans to ensure, on the one hand, the public health of the
American people and, on the other hand, the health of the
migrants themselves.
Mr. Aguilar. I appreciate that. I wanted to talk briefly
about detention facilities. Since I have been in Congress, I
have heard from immigrants and individuals in detention,
advocates about the mistreatment within detention centers
across the country. And I was pleased to see DHS chose to close
the Carreiro Immigration Detention Center and is preparing to
close the Irwin County Detention Center. These closures are one
step closer to ensuring that we treat individuals in our
custody with the dignity and respect. Now, as DHS continues a
review of the detention facilities across the country, can we
expect to see the closure of additional detention facilities,
including family detention facilities?
Secretary Mayorkas. Congressman, we are studying the issue
very carefully. My direction could not have been clearer, which
is that we will not tolerate the mistreatment of individuals in
detention or substandard conditions, and we will take whatever
actions are needed to ensure that that directive is honored
across the board.
Mr. Aguilar. I appreciate that. And specific to the budget,
ahead of this week's budget release, can we expect to see
decreased immigration detention funding in exchange for support
of safer ATD programs?
Secretary Mayorkas. Congressman, one of the things that I
have observed is the detention of individuals that do not pose
a threat to public safety or do not pose a risk of flight such
that we are not confident in their appearance in future
immigration proceedings. I am concerned about the overuse of
detention where alternatives to detention, ATD, would suffice
in ensuring the integrity of the immigration system. And we
will, indeed, be looking at that and executing accordingly.
Mr. Aguilar. Thank you, Mr. Secretary.
I yield back, Madam Chair.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. That completes the first round, so we
will be going into a second round.
Mr. Secretary, before I go on to my questions with regards
to the detention, I just want to point out one other thing.
With regards to the article that was referenced in The
Washington Post, it also states that ICE agents arrested 645
people who matched the administration's new priorities in March
and then more than doubled that number in April to 1,552 and
that the data shows that it is the individuals with the highest
level of criminality that are now being targeted, which is
really the intent in terms of being sure that the American
people are safe by targeting those with the highest criminal
and the most dangerous in our country. So I just wanted to
reference the other part of the article that talked about who
exactly was being targeted.
Mr. Secretary, to help free up space in overcrowded CBP
holding facilities, ICE recently began using its two large
family detention centers as family staging centers or FSCs
where migrant families are held for up to 72 hours while being
processed. ICE has also begun using several hotels as emergency
family staging centers or EFSCs. How are decisions made about
whether to release families directly from CBP custody or to
transfer them to ICE FSCs or EFSCs for processing?
Secretary Mayorkas. Madam Chairwoman, if I can make one
comment. I appreciate your citation to other data captured in
The Washington Post article. The one data that your colleague,
the Congressman, cited is a data point with which I am
unfamiliar, and I will drill down on that. The article makes a
very, very important point, and it is that article's
foundational point, which is that the resources of Immigration
and Customs Enforcement are going to be dedicated to the
greatest impact on behalf of the American people. We will not
be enforcing law indiscriminately, misusing resources that
don't deliver quality for the investment of resources.
With respect to the ICE facilities, the reason that we are
employing those facilities in the way that we are is because of
the fact that we are, indeed, still addressing the COVID-19
pandemic imperative, and we need facilities to test and,
importantly, isolate and quarantine family unit members as the
science requires. And so we have transformed those facilities,
and we are using the hotels for that purpose if and when, for
example, local facilities or community-based organizations that
could provide similar services are inadequate. So what we have
done is built an architecture to ensure the appropriate and
required testing, isolation, and quarantine of family unit
members whom we are unable to expel under title 42.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. The use of hotels has received some
criticism. What was the process for awarding this contract for
managing the EFSCs? And what are your plans for that contract
going forward? And what are your plans, more broadly, for
family detention in the future?
Secretary Mayorkas. Madam Chairwoman, I am not familiar
with the particulars of the contract and how that was arranged.
It is not appropriate for me to be involved in the specific
advertising and selection of contractors, but I know that that
has received questions and is the subject of a review by the
Office of Inspector General.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Our understanding is that these
facilities have not been used to their full capacity even
though the Border Patrol has continued to release families
directly from their custody to prevent overcrowding. Can you
describe what changes will be made as a result of the CBP ICE
coordination cell that was recently established?
Secretary Mayorkas. Madam Chairwoman, that coordination
cell is but one coordination cell because we also have a
transportation coordination cell that speaks to the partnership
not only across the Department of Homeland Security enterprise
but across the all of government enterprise that is addressing
the migration of unaccompanied children to our southern border
and both bringing greater efficiency to the processes that we
currently have as well as reengineering the processes.
So that coordination cell of which you speak specifically
is designed to take a look at the influx of unaccompanied
children and family members whom we are able to expel under
title 42 because of limited capacity in Mexico to receive them
to understand the available resources we have here along the
border for the testing, isolation, and quarantine as needed of
the individuals and to make sure that those resources are being
utilized efficiently and effectively, and including most cost-
effectively.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Just one quick final question on this.
When migrants are being released from either ICE or CBP
custody, are they being enrolled into alternatives to detention
and offered ICE-funded case management services, such as legal
orientation programs and trauma counseling?
Secretary Mayorkas. They are, and that is our objective,
Madam Chairwoman. They are in immigration proceedings. They
receive a notice to appear either at the border or at an ICE
facility. They are placed in immigration proceedings, and we
are working to build a better infrastructure in partnership
with community-based organizations to provide them with legal
process and guidance along the way. The data demonstrates,
quite powerfully, that individuals who are guided in the
process who receive information and access to counsel have a
far higher appearance rate in immigration proceedings than
those who don't.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Fleischmann.
Mr. Fleischmann. Thank you, Madam Chair, and Mr. Secretary.
I appreciate the questions of folks on both sides of the
dais.
Let me just say this: While I applaud ICE for going after
some very dangerous criminals in this country that are posing
threats, the Biden administration--and I am adamant about
this--is doing nothing to disincentivize the wave of migrants
coming in, that are just pouring in and overwhelming the entire
system, including ICE, so you are forced to pick and choose. If
we kept illegal immigration at a minimum, we would not have the
system overrun at all levels.
And, with that, Mr. Secretary, you were once the head of
USCIS, so you know what is involved in applying for citizenship
and asylum, sir. It is a commitment, and there is a defined
process spelled out in statute. Do you think it is fair that
migrants who cease participating in the legal processes related
to their immigration status be allowed to remain in this
country? I am talking about people who knowingly fail to show
up for their court hearings and are no longer checking in with
their local ICE offices. If so, why, sir? And a followup to
that, do you think that migrants who have been issued final
orders of removal by courts in this Nation should be allowed to
stay in this country? If so, why, sir?
Secretary Mayorkas. Mr. Ranking Member, let me first
express my disagreement with your statement that this
administration and this Department is doing nothing to
disincentivize people from irregular migration, and let me just
cite two examples, if I may.
First, we have engaged in robust communication, not only
along the migratory path, but in the countries of origins in
the Northern Triangle, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, to
seek to persuade individuals from taking the perilous journey
north. Secondly, we are investing in addressing the root causes
of migration so that individuals do not feel compelled to leave
their homes out of desperation, combating extraordinary
violence and poverty. And, thirdly, we are building legal
pathways so that individuals do not need to take the perilous
journey and can, in the countries of origin, avail themselves
of refugee processing, Central American Minors Program, and
other pathways that apply the laws of the United States to
their claims of eligibility so that they can avail themselves
of a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system that was the
intent of Congress.
We, as I articulated at the very outset of this hearing and
throughout the questioning, Mr. Ranking Member, do apply the
laws of the United States, will continue to apply the laws of
the United States, and we will do so to maximum effect for the
benefit of the American public as Congress intended. The fact
of the matter is that we cannot, with the resources that we
have, address the fact that we have over 11 million
undocumented individuals in the United States. And we all are
in agreement, although there is so much disagreement about
immigration policy, and it is so polarizing, there is unanimity
that the system is broken and is in need of reform. And it is
my sincere hope and I am working very hard to achieve
legislative immigration reform. That is fundamentally the
answer. And until that is achieved, and I hope that is very,
very soon, we will enforce the laws to ensure the best outcome
and most effective outcome for the American people.
Mr. Fleischmann. Mr. Secretary, I thank you for your
articulate and thorough answers to this. Obviously, there are
some broad areas of disagreements between us on these key
issues, but I do agree that the system is broken, is
overwhelmed, and these issues need to be addressed. And I do
commit to work on behalf of my constituents and the American
people, as I know you will, to come to some type of a solution
in this regard. But thank you for your service. Thank you for
your testimony today.
And, Madam Chair, I will yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Cuellar.
Mr. Cuellar. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Mr. Secretary, last time we spoke, we left off that we were
supposed to get together, so hopefully sometime soon we can
catch up.
Last night, Mr. Secretary, the EMC Guillermo heard from the
city of Laredo, and the Laredo Health Director, Richard
Chamberlain, told me that the city of Laredo has been aiding
NGOs throughout the past couple of months. But they noted that
their initial volume that they are getting from the valley has
now increased from 50 persons a day; now they are getting 250
to 350 people a day from the valley or from the Del Rio area.
Laredo has two shelters, NGOs, that have been helping with food
and shelter and health assessments, but this is a--the
directors from Laredo, they are getting a little concerned
because what they are saying is that about 6 out of 100 people
that are coming in every day are testing COVID-19 positive,
that is, the migrants or the asylum seekers.
And then the other issues that when the shelters are full
because there are only two shelters in Laredo, Border Patrol is
self-loading them directly at bus stations or at the airport.
And as I mentioned, every time I fly from Laredo to D.C. to do
my work, I see folks there. So this is not my words; this is
the health directors in Laredo. They are saying that they are
worried about U.S. citizens being exposed to infectious disease
threats. And keep in mind the frustration that the border
nonessential are closed, but they are seeing literally
thousands of people every week being brought down from the
valley where I am at right now.
So my question is, what can you do to help, number one, and
what do I tell the city of Laredo? And the second part has to
do is what do I tell the Starr County Sheriff, Rene Fuentes?
What do I tell the Zapata Sheriff, Raymundo Del Bosque, or the
Webb County Sheriff, Martin Cuellar, which is my brother, or
Claudio Trevino, the Laredo Police Chief, or the La Salle
Sheriff, Anthony Zertuche, or the McMullen, Emmett Shelton,
where they are now seeing increases of criminal activity? And
this is from the sheriffs. This is not me saying this, and they
are seeing stash houses growing. They are seeing this illegal
activity. So, instead of the regular work that they are doing,
they are now focusing on this immigration-related activity.
I know that we increased Stone Garden, and I was hoping
with that money that I fought to increase, it would go down to
south Texas, but President Trump sent a lot of it to Florida,
and I hope it comes back to the southwest border. And I also
would like to follow up with you on the $1.3 billion that was
appropriated for the border wall in the Laredo sector, which I
fought against President Trump. And now that that money is
there, you know, and we will wait for the budget, now they want
to take it out when there were security requirements in the
Laredo sector. Now they want to take that money out. And I am
glad that the wall is not going to be done, but my question is,
what do I tell the city of Laredo? What do I tell the border
communities in Roma, Texas, where I am at? What do I tell all
the sheriffs about the facts that I just mentioned. These are
not my words. These are words directly from them. So we need
your help on this.
Secretary Mayorkas. Congressman, that is quite a number of
questions, and I have quite a number of answers. Perhaps it
would be best for me to speak with you directly so I don't
consume the remaining time, but let me just answer as
succinctly as I can. In 1989--I started as a Federal prosecutor
on September 25, 1989. In 1989, 1990, 1991, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,
8, 9, 2000, and 2001, I left in April of 2001. On the border,
there were the challenges of stash houses. And so the work on
the border is dynamic, evolving, and there are threads of
consistency for years and years. And so I want to make sure
that the American public understands that the challenges that
our noble and brave law enforcement officers face on the border
are by no means new. And the threat of trafficking and the
threat that the cartels pose and the threat of criminality is
nothing new or specific to the border, quite frankly, as we
know all too well, and when we look at the homicide rates
across the country, over the all too many years.
I look forward to engaging with the border sheriffs and the
border chiefs. I have a periodic meeting with law enforcement
on precisely this issue, and I would look forward to hearing
from them and addressing their needs and the solutions that we
can deliver. Operation Sentinel is one of them, and enhanced
law enforcement in a task force model is a stark example.
I also would be very pleased to speak with the officials in
Laredo because we do have an architecture for the movement of
individuals, which also is not specific to this particular time
but is something that we have employed over the many years of
addressing irregular migration at our southern border and the
architecture that we have for the testing, isolation, and
quarantine of individuals. And so I would welcome the
opportunity to speak directly with the officials whom you
reference and, of course, with you in a one-on-one to delve
further into these important issues.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Palazzo.
Mr. Palazzo. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Mr. Secretary, listen. You have got a huge job and a huge
responsibility. The Department of Homeland Security, you are
over a huge amount of agencies, but the number one priority
that you have and that we have as Members of Congress is to
keep America safe. And so although we may disagree on some
adjectives and some language, I do still think that we do
have--it is not an invasion. We definitely have a huge crisis
on our southern border. Just ask the people under your command,
and I think they would agree with me.
But, you know, we also want to work with you. Like, this
committee wants to work for the common good of the American
people, and we have got to strive towards more bipartisan
legislation and not--by bipartisan, I don't mean just having
one Democrat sign on to Republicans or one Republican sign on a
Democrat, but we need to try to get more to a super majority.
Because we pass legislation, whether it is your immigration
reform, which people want to talk about, but it needs to be
bipartisan because if it is not partisan in a true fashion, it
will be good for the majority of Americans.
You mentioned you used title 42 to expel, you know, those
who are here illegally and should not be in our country, but
you also said, you know, once the pandemic is over, you are
going to get rid of title 42. What are you going to use then to
expel immigrants that are coming over to America? Please keep
your remarks brief.
Secretary Mayorkas. Congressman, thank you for your remarks
before your question, and thank you for the question. Title 42
is a public health authority of the CDC, and it requires a
public health determination of need, and it is not a tool of
immigration enforcement by law. It is not a tool to monitor or
to control flows of people as a matter of immigration policy.
It is a public health law. So the data from a public health
perspective, the public health data, has to support its use.
And when--
Mr. Palazzo. Mr. Secretary, thank you--
Secretary Mayorkas. --that title 42 authority is no longer
available, we will use immigration law, continue to use
immigration law and the other resources that we have available
to address irregular migration just as we have in the past.
Mr. Palazzo. Mr. Secretary, I do appreciate that. I do
appreciate that. I just know that the Border Patrol agents,
they really want to keep some form of title 42 in place or the
migrant, you know, protection protocols that were working.
Their fear is they are going to become overwhelmed once again.
Also, listen. We are fair people. We believe that, you
know, there are several things. We have been to the border, you
know. You need more resources on the border, right. You need
more boots because, you know, they are stretched to the max. We
need technology. Technology works, and we need the best
technology ever, but we also need barriers. Barriers work. You
cannot deny barriers don't work. We wrapped ourselves in the
Capitol with two barriers to keep people out. And so is there
any intention on finishing the fence? And, also, there was, and
you know, steps that was actually destroyed that was already
there to be replaced with the new bollard fencing. Can we at
least not replace the fence that we tore down because it is
requiring much more resources to patrol and secure our southern
border.
Secretary Mayorkas. Congressman, we are studying the issues
of parts of the wall that has been there for years that is no
longer sustainable and whether that can be or should be
rebuilt. We are looking at some of the very issues that you
have identified, and I look forward to circling back with you
to discuss our assessments.
Mr. Palazzo. And so using the immigration laws that you
just mentioned and once title 42 goes away, wouldn't it be
better if we could adjudicate these claims on our border faster
instead of releasing them into our interior? For many of them,
if they don't have a credible asylum claim, they are not going
to show up. They are going to disappear and add to that
undocumented number. Judges would help, right? If we could
adjudicate on the spot, on the border, we need more judges or
other resources. Can you please tell us what you need to do
your job, and we want to help you to do that.
Secretary Mayorkas. Thank you so much. Thank you so much,
Congressman. This is an area where I too will circle back with
you because we are, indeed, taking a look at the fact that it
is multiple years between the time of apprehension and final
adjudication of an asylum claim that is too long a period of
time. What can we do to improve the process to deliver an
outcome more rapidly, which speaks to the efficiency and
orderly immigration system and, quite frankly, delivers justice
for the applicants themselves more rapidly. This is something
that has not been tackled successfully in the past, and we will
tackle it now it is something that we are looking at both with
respect to the administration of the asylum laws, the credible
fear determinations, who can make them, how quickly can we
reach a final adjudication, and what are the needs of the
immigration court system. We are taking a very close look at
that in partnership with the Department of Justice.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Ms. Underwood.
Ms. Underwood. Well, thank you, Madam Chair.
Mr. Secretary, when you shared the percentage of your
workforce that has been vaccinated, can you break that down by
component?
Secretary Mayorkas. I would be very happy to provide that
data to you, Congresswoman. I don't have it at my fingertips.
Ms. Underwood. No problem.
Secretary Mayorkas. I apologize.
Ms. Underwood. Yeah. No problem.
So now that we have successfully gotten the vaccine supply
up, we have to focus on vaccinating every frontline worker,
increasing vaccine confidence, and combating disinformation.
How has vaccine hesitancy impacted your efforts to vaccinate
DHS personnel? And what proactive steps are you taking to
increase vaccine confidence and ensure your employees have
accurate information about not only the safety and efficacy of
the COVID-19 vaccine but also the critical importance of
vaccination to America's national security?
Secretary Mayorkas. We have invested so mightily not just
resources but individual energy in Operation VOW, Vaccinate our
Workforce. Not only to ensure that those who are willing to be
vaccinated have the vaccine available and accessible and can
receive it--and, indeed, the number of personnel has increased
dramatically as a part of Operation VOW--but to also inform and
educate and persuade those personnel who are hesitant to
receive the vaccine to, in fact, be vaccinated. That is an
ongoing effort. It is an effort of education, information,
persuasion, and accommodation.
Ms. Underwood. Great. Thank you.
Turning to detainees, I understand that DHS is currently
reevaluating its vaccination strategy for migrants in custody.
What can you tell us about your plans to improve access to
vaccination for your detainees? And how soon do you expect to
be able to offer the COVID-19 vaccines for every individual in
your custody?
Secretary Mayorkas. That is something that we are looking
at very carefully, Congresswoman. I spoke with our Chief
Medical Officer earlier this week about this very subject. That
is under review, and I will provide your office with a
timetable.
Ms. Underwood. And do you believe that better coordination
of medical care across the Department would facilitate further
improvements in this kind of vaccination effort and medical
operations in general?
Secretary Mayorkas. Congresswoman, I have not found
coordination of resources in our Department to be an obstacle
with respect to this particular issue.
Ms. Underwood. Thank you.
Vaccination for both DHS staff and detainees is essential,
not only for the health of both groups but also for preventing
community spread and protecting Americans. Please do keep our
office updated on your efforts to accelerate this process.
Now I would like to switch gears and talk about a major
threat to our homeland and a top concern for many of my
constituents: domestic terrorism and domestic violent
extremism. In fact, I would like to read part of a message that
I received last summer from a mother in my district, quote:
There is a malicious cell in Antioch that is becoming more and
more emboldened to take the law into their own hands. I am
becoming fearful to send my children to the same schools as
White supremacist militia members, end quote.
Unfortunately, the Federal agencies whose job it is to
track and respond to threats of violent extremism were caught
flatfooted when a horde of White supremacists and other
domestic extremists invaded the Capitol. ABC News reported
that, in the months leading up to the January 6 insurrection,
the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis had been
practically dismantled after it was revealed that, under the
Trump administration, it had inappropriately targeted
journalists reporting on the excessive use of force by Federal
agents in Oregon.
Mr. Secretary, I know that you weren't in charge during
these events, but since being confirmed, what steps have you
taken and what future plans do you have to repair the
department's operations so that it can provide essential
intelligence on real threats like the Capitol insurrection?
Secretary Mayorkas. I am, Congresswoman, very proud of the
men and women of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis. We
have prioritized the dissemination of real-time, actionable
information to our State, local, Tribal, territorial partners.
We are committed to doing so in an apolitical way, guided only
by the Homeland Security imperative. And, in fact, I penned
earlier this week a message to the men and women of the Office
of Intelligence and Analysis, underscoring the apolitical
nature of our work and expressing my gratitude for their
commitment to our values and principles as well as our
underlying mission.
Ms. Underwood. Now, Mr. Secretary, that is a policy change
that I appreciate, but my question was about operational
changes. Can you detail any operational changes over at
Intelligence and Analysis?
Secretary Mayorkas. So we are looking--I am sorry if I
didn't answer your question fulsomely at first. We are looking
at the very different products that we can disseminate to our
partners in the community. We issued a National Terrorism
Advisory System Bulletin in January. We renewed it, but within
the past 2 weeks, we have issued information bulletins. We very
well may issue an additional information bulletin based on the
threat landscape today. We are invested in the infrastructure
to more effectively disseminate information to local
communities to deliver the technological changes that are
needed to more effectively accomplish that. We also have
renamed an office, the Center for Prevention Programs and
Partnerships, to more ably equip local communities, to more
effectively work in partnership with them to address the threat
of domestic terrorism. And we are looking at our grant programs
and how we can both strengthen them and develop innovative
communication tools to inform the American public on how to
detect the evolving threat, how to report concerns, and how to
prevent, respond, and be resilient to them.
Ms. Underwood. Thank you.
Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Ms. Hinson.
Ms. Hinson. And thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you
again, Mr. Secretary, for sticking around for round two of
questions. I actually wanted to call your attention to another
communication issue within your Department, and I hope we can
work together to resolve this specifically.
This subcommittee has already heard from ICE and Customs
and Border Patrol this year, and there was a common thread that
stuck out to me in those conversations that the agencies didn't
seem to be effectively communicating on immigration issues. And
while they share, obviously, this common goal of keeping
Americans safe and protecting our border, they don't seem to be
sharing the information, and it is vitally important when we
are trying to manage this crisis at the border, track illegal
immigrants who have been caught and then released into the
homeland, and then arrest and deport those who have chosen not
to follow our laws or pose a risk to public safety, as we were
discussing earlier in this hearing. So, do you agree, Mr.
Secretary, that ICE and CBP should be sharing that data and
information specifically when it comes to tracking illegal
immigrants?
Secretary Mayorkas. Oh, absolutely. And I speak regularly
together with Troy Miller of Customs and Border Protection,
Dave Johnson of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, multiple
times a week. And so I would be very eager to and interested in
receiving the details with respect to the communication
concerns that you reference, Congresswoman.
Ms. Hinson. Yes. And, Mr. Secretary, the CBP should be
conveying that information to ICE. ICE should be in some way
tracking that individual or family unit, and whether or not the
NTA is met. And what Director Johnson told us just a few weeks
ago is that that is not happening once they are out of CBP
custody. So do you believe that your Department at any time
should be able to actually identify an illegal immigrant in
this country who the Department has processed and released into
this country?
Secretary Mayorkas. I am not sure I understand your
question. Congresswoman--
Ms. Hinson. Do you think that, once they are in the country
and we have issued--we have gone through this process, that we
should be able to know where they are? We should be able to
track them if they are in this country illegally?
Secretary Mayorkas. To know and track more than 11 million
undocumented individuals in the United States?
Ms. Hinson. We have no idea, Mr. Secretary, and this is a
direct response to one of our earlier questions; how many are
specifically in Iowa? Once they come across that border and
they are out of CBP custody, we have been informed there is no
way to track these individuals unless they actually show up for
that NTA hearing, which, as we know, sometimes they do not. So
do you believe that we should be able to?
Secretary Mayorkas. I am not sure I agree with the premise
of your question, Congresswoman. When an individual is placed
into immigration proceedings, they are done--they are placed
into immigration proceedings through a Notice to Appear. When
they are properly informed of the hearing date, time, and
location, they have appropriate information. They have
assistance of counsel. The appearance rate is extraordinarily
high.
I am not aware of the fact that we have the tools,
resources, and capabilities to track the more than 11 million
unlawfully present individuals in the United States, which
speaks to the fundamental broken system and the need for
immigration reform. So many--
Ms. Hinson. And I am speaking, Mr. Secretary, specifically
to the people who have been through CBP and processed and then
released into the homeland, not the ones who made it across the
border and are in this country illegally that we maybe didn't
go through that process. I think the point I would like to
make, Mr. Secretary, is I would ask the administration to
seriously look at this. I stand ready to look at the resources
necessary to make sure these departments can actually talk to
each other and communicate to each other. This is a safety and
security issue if we can't exactly know how many immigrants are
coming to a State like Iowa. When we are looking at over a
million, possibly, as we have heard this number keep going up
this year, that is highly concerning to me, and I would ask you
to seriously look at policies that we can make sure these
departments can track these individuals once they are in the
country illegally even if they do have that NTA. We know that
sometimes they don't appear, and that is a safety and security
issue.
Secretary Mayorkas. Let me, if I can, Congresswoman. I
really welcome the opportunity to speak with you about this
because I am not sure we have a common understanding of the
problem that you have identified because if we have a common
understanding of the problem, I assure you that we have a
solution. Because what we do is we place individuals in
immigration proceedings, and an individual who is a recent
border crosser who does not appear in immigration proceedings
is a priority for enforcement action under the guidelines that
were issued on January 20 and revised on February 8.
Ms. Hinson. All right. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. I will
have some questions for followup as well.
Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Price.
Mr. Price. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Mr. Secretary, I want to acknowledge your forthright
response earlier on the question of the targeting of ICE
enforcement actions. Of course, the question of enforcement
discretion, the discretion that you exercise, that also raises
the question about how well targeted is the work you do with
other law enforcement agencies. So that is what I want to turn
to now.
As you know, the 287(g) program in particular greatly was
increased by the last administration from 30 to 150
participating jurisdictions. The way the 287(g) program works
or doesn't work has been at the center of these discussions
about discretion. Are you talking about dangerous people at the
point they are released for the penal system, or are you
talking about people picked up for minor offenses, or are you
talking even about local law enforcement being commandeered to
take proactive actions, which often, it is argued, compromises
their local community policing role?
Then there is the weaponizing of 287(g). This was of great
concern. For example, the Atlanta Director of ICE at one point
in the last administration acknowledged that the targeting of
immigration raids, of ICE raids was--it was targeted at
jurisdictions where the local sheriffs had chosen to withdraw
from these voluntary 287(g) agreements. There were provocative
billboards, even, purchased by ICE across the State in areas
where 287(g) agreements were being ended.
So I want to register my hope and my expectation that in
this new administration, we are going to see some serious
changes, we are going to see a renewed focus on targeted
enforcement, and we are going to see the reform, if not the
elimination, of 287(g).
And that leads to my question. Would you describe where the
administration is in the process of the 287(g) program, if the
administration will be ending some of the agreements possibly
made in the last 4 years, or has the program, perhaps, outlived
its usefulness? What do you see as the future of that program?
And then that does raise the further question of what is the
appropriate relationship to local law enforcement? ]RPTR
BRYANTEDTR SECKMAN[11:59 a.m.]
Secretary Mayorkas. Congressman--
Mr. Price. Identifying people who are truly dangerous
clearly could be a matter of working with local law
enforcement. And so, if not some of these flawed programs, then
what would you look for in those relationships?
Secretary Mayorkas. Congressman, I am certainly aware of
the abuses of the 287(g) program, and I believe that I brought
an example of that abuse to an end recently.
We are focused on smart and effective law enforcement. And
in that regard, I am engaging with the men and women of ICE in
the development of Secretary's enforcement guidelines. And once
we have done that, I do intend to continue my dialogue with
sheriffs and chiefs of police across the country to see how we
can most effectively partner in the service of the new
architecture of smart and effective law enforcement.
And I do believe that they have a vital role to play, such
that when an individual who, indeed, poses a very significant
public safety threat is in local custody and is about to be
released, that that individual is not released into the
immigrant community, whom that individual will victimize, but
that we can bring our resources to bear for the protection of
the public.
And so I do think that we can achieve a valuable
partnership that addresses and ends the pernicious practices of
the past and serves a more intelligent and effective law
enforcement goal.
Mr. Price. I do think that is an important enterprise, and
I am glad to hear you are engaged in it. There is a good deal
of confusion I think and uncertainty about what that
relationship would look like, and so it is important I think to
firm that up and make these expectations clear.
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Aguilar.
Mr. Aguilar. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And, Mr. Secretary, I wanted to continue down the line of
detention and specifically talk about the Office of the
Detention Ombudsman, which was a product of the chairwoman's
leadership and the work of this committee. This office reports
directly to you and has access to inspect and conduct oversight
of all detention facilities and can assist individuals who
report mistreatment or abuse in DHS detention facilities.
What is the status of the office and its operations, and
can you describe your interaction with this office since you
have been Secretary?
Secretary Mayorkas. Thank you very much. And I very much
appreciate Congress' support in creating the Office of the
Detention Ombudsman. I have met with the leadership of that
office. I know that the office leaders have traveled to the
border and have visited facilities in the interior. We have
discussed the focus of their work and how to most effectively
prioritize that work.
And, right now, our thinking is to really address casework
to, in fact, address complaints and concerns about mistreatment
and conditions brought by individuals in detention, community-
based organizations, and tackling the challenges that those
complaints surface.
So we have been in touch. And, of course, I have also been
in close touch with the Office for Civil Rights and Civil
Liberties that has jurisdiction and responsibilities itself
that are intertwined with those of the Office of the Detention
Ombudsman, to make sure that we can most cohesively bring the
different resources to bear.
Mr. Aguilar. So, if Members of Congress understand one
thing, it is casework. And so, you know, given that fact, will
there be metrics associated with it? Will you be, you know,
making public number of cases open, number of cases closed, you
know, open cases, you know, average length of a case? You know,
will you be making those metrics available?
Secretary Mayorkas. Congressman, I have not actually looked
at what metrics we will develop and publish. It is a very
important question, and I will act on that immediately.
Mr. Aguilar. I appreciate it, Mr. Secretary.
And I will just go briefly to USCIS. I am concerned about
the ongoing and growing backlog, which has ballooned to over 3
million cases. I understand that the pandemic has obviously
made it more difficult for caseworkers to process, as offices
were closed and unable to conduct interviews.
Given your background with your previous role as Director
of USCIS, can you share your plans in reducing the backlog in
the upcoming fiscal year?
Secretary Mayorkas. Congressman, this is something that we
have studied very carefully. You will see in the President's
fiscal year 2022 budget a request for an appropriation of
approximately $345 million to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services for a number of objectives, one of which is, indeed,
to address the backlog.
It is also that time when U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services is considering a new fee rule to address the cost
structure that guides its adjudications, the fees it receives.
We are in dialogue about that. We are very, very focused on the
backlog and know the obstacle it creates for those who are
seeking access to our legal immigration system.
Mr. Aguilar. I appreciate it.
I will yield back, Madam Chair.
Thanks, Mr. Secretary.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. I believe that completes the second
round. And I have had a request from some members for a third
round, so we will go into a third round. The request, Mrs.
Hinson, Mr. Palazzo, Ms. Underwood have made that request. Are
there any other members who would like to participate in the
third round at this time? Please let us know. And Mr. Cuellar.
Mr. Secretary, TSA Administrator Pekoske has talked about
the relatively low level of compensation for Transportation
Security Officers. He believes it is not commensurate with the
training, technical skill, and responsibilities of the job and
that it contributes to chronic recruitment and retention
challenges.
Do you believe that migrating the TSA workforce to a GS pay
system would alleviate some of those hiring/retention
challenges?
Secretary Mayorkas. Madam Chairwoman, I do, and that is
something that we are studying right now.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Since the creation of DHS, employee
morale has consistently ranked among the worst in Federal
Government. And this is based on the Federal Employee Viewpoint
Survey conducted yearly by the Office of Personnel Management.
Each administration has tried to address this issue, but
the problem persists. What are your plans for improving morale
within the Department?
Secretary Mayorkas. Madam Chairwoman, I am incredibly proud
of the men and women of the Department of Homeland Security. I
am very invested in their well-being, their sense of
fulfillment, their dedication to mission and the opportunities
that they have before them to realize their greatest hopes and
highest aspirations.
I have collected information with respect to all of the
efforts across the Department to invest in our workforce. I
have studied those efforts, and I am developing plans to
enhance and strengthen them.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Palazzo.
Mr. Palazzo. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And, Mr. Secretary, thank you for hanging out with us to
answer our questions for a third round. So, during my trip to
El Paso, we went by Fort Bliss, and we actually visited the
emergency intake site. Very impressive how it was, you know,
built so fast.
I think it is going to help, you know, provide some of that
compassion that we expect to address the humanitarian crisis at
the border. But the one thing they could not answer is they
could not answer what is it costing the American taxpayers.
And, as appropriators, I thought--there were two appropriators
on the border trip. They couldn't answer it.
So, if you could, could you please provide to myself and
perhaps the committee, if they are interested, the actual
daily/monthly cost of the emergency intake site.
Secretary Mayorkas. I most certainly will. That information
is in the possession of the Department of Health and Human
Services. The emergency intake sites are operated by HHS. But I
certainly will--we work in an all-of-government effort to
address the needs at the southern border, so I will speak with
our partners and get that information to you, Congressman.
Mr. Palazzo. Thank you. And, yes, it is under Health and
Human Services. I appreciate that.
Also, this isn't really under your jurisdiction, but I
think, for the committee's benefit, they should know that we
also tried to visit the El Paso Intelligence Center. It is so
important to see what is going on to get a good idea of what is
really taking place at the border, from the smuggling--listen,
we know the drugs are off the charts. The Fentanyl, there is
already 6,000 pounds of Fentanyl in the first 5 months of the
year. Cocaine, hard narcotics.
I mean, as our Border Patrol agents in the awesome job that
they are doing, as they are misdirected and redirected to meet
this crisis at the border, the humanitarian crisis, that we are
just allowing who knows what.
Like someone mentioned, like, I mean, the got-aways, the
people that are coming across, we don't know their nationality.
We don't know what their intent is, and we don't know how much
drugs. I mean, there are sex offenders. Already 265sex
offenders have been apprehended this year alone that we know
of. Murderers, criminals.
And so that is why, you know, I support the boots on the
ground, the technology. And they really need technology. With
the limited resources that they have, they can redirect their
precious resources to the criminal activity if they have better
technology and more technology.
And, of course, barriers work. I just cannot understand why
we don't have more fencing or at least replace the fencing that
we have.
Real quick, listen, I know, again, you have a big agency.
There are so many things we want to talk about. There are other
borders as well. There is the maritime border, which is so
important to me and many of us who live amongst the coastal
regions of our Nation.
And I have just got to tell you, the Coast Guard is under
your purview, and they do an awesome job. You know, the
National Security Cutters. You know, they are smuggling drugs
across our border, we understand that, but your men and women
in the Coast Guard, or America's men and women in the Coast
Guard, they are doing a heck of a job, you know.
And they have multimissions, but I just want to let you
know we think it is a great investment, you know, with the
limited resources that we have, to support the Coast Guard's
cutter replacement program. It is desperately needed.
And I know that someone mentioned the Jones Act earlier.
That is extremely important, protecting America's industrial
maritime base. And I hope you will continue to support that
with the administration, maybe be a voice when others truly
don't understand how important the Jones Act is.
And I know I have a lot more stuff to talk about. If we
could do--Madam Chair, we need to start doing congressional
oversight and going on codels. And I would love to, you know,
make them more bipartisan. I know we weren't able to get any of
our colleagues across the aisle to join us on that 12-member
border trip. But I think it is really important for not one
party or the other to do it on their own, but to do it
together.
So, with that, I will be respectful of the Secretary's time
and my colleagues, and I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. As soon as restrictions are lifted, we
will be doing some traveling.
Mr. Palazzo. I understand.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Cuellar.
Mr. Cuellar. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And, Mr. Secretary, you have been more than generous on
your time on a third round with us. First of all, I want to say
thank you for filling up those gaps at that border levy in
south Texas in my district. And thank you so much for working
with the Army Corps on doing that, especially with hurricane
season around the corner, number one.
Number two, I would like to follow up with you when we get
together on what you plan to do on some of those gaps here on
the fence. I would like to talk to you about that.
But the other thing I want to talk to you about is, you
know, when the President--and I want to thank President Biden
for putting that order to stop the building of the fence
itself. You know, the Army Corps did its job, you did your job,
but the Department of Justice still has some lawsuits that are
going on. And I would like to see if there is any way you can
talk to the Attorney General because, I mean, there are some
people that are still afraid that they are going to be losing
their lands. They still have lawsuits, several of them down
here in the valley. So I would like to follow up with you on
those lawsuits because pretty much everything has stopped
except some of those lawsuits, and I would like to get your
assistance on that part.
And, with that, I just want to say thank you. You have been
more than generous with your time, and I look forward to
sitting down with you again in person when we open up on that.
Secretary Mayorkas. Thank you, Congressman.
Mr. Cuellar. Madam Chair--she is not there. So I will
just--well, I am the last chair, so I guess if she is okay with
that, I will yield back the balance of the time.
Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of the time and thank
you so much.
Thank you, Mr. Secretary.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mrs. Hinson.
Mrs. Hinson. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And thank you again, Mr. Secretary.
I wanted to go back to some comments that you made about
the immigration process being broken, and that is something
that I think we can all agree on. I did three public townhalls
yesterday in my district, and I want to echo that I heard that
from many people as we were having discussions about the border
that we need to talk about immigration reform as well.
Our process is onerous, it is expensive for people to go
through, and it incentivizes illegal immigration as a result.
So it is broken, and we need to fix it. But I think one of the
ways we start to tackle this problem to fix it is to ensure
that we can effectively manage what is happening at the border.
And as I learned--I went down to the Del Rio Sector and
visited with the CBP down there at Eagle Pass. And the local
sheriffs and the law enforcement there are fighting those
cartels every day. We heard it direct out of the mouth of one
of my constituents yesterday: The cartels are evil people, and
we can't let them win.
So I just want to go back really quickly to what you said
in response to the ranking member's question about your
administration, the administration's work on disincentives to
illegal immigration. But at the most basic level, wouldn't the
best disincentive be that it won't work, it won't be successful
when you come across the border. It won't be profitable for the
cartels and the coyotes and the human traffickers. Wouldn't the
best way to stop illegal immigration be to stop illegal
immigrants from being successful in entering into the country?
Secretary Mayorkas. Congresswoman, the law that Congress
passed, the law of the United States indicates that if an
individual arrives and is apprehended in between the ports of
entry and makes a claim of credible fear of persecution in the
country of origin by reason of their membership in a particular
social group, they have a right to make that claim of credible
fear and pursue their claim of asylum. That is the law of the
United States, and we are obligated to honor it.
We do not condone illegal immigration. We combat illegal
immigration. We enforce the laws of accountability, and we also
enforce the laws of humanitarian relief.
Mrs. Hinson. But, Mr. Secretary, there are many people who
do not have credible claims. So, if they are successful in
going through this process, then doesn't that send the wrong
message in the first place? I agree we need to make some policy
changes here, and that is very clear from our discussion and
our discussions with CBP and ICE as well.
But I think the point I am trying to make, Mr. Secretary,
is that, you know, we say the border is closed or you said the
border is closed, but we are seeing people be successful, and
that is incentivizing this process to continue.
And so my question is specifically, shouldn't we try to
send a clear message that it is not going to be successful? We
need to stop these cartels from being successful.
Secretary Mayorkas. Congresswoman, individuals who do not
make a claim of credible fear are removed. I just respectfully
disagree with the premise of your question.
Mrs. Hinson. Well, I will be following up with some
additional questions for the record.
Secretary Mayorkas. We are enforcing--
Mrs. Hinson. And I will be following up with some
additional questions for the record. Again, this goes back to
the question I asked a little bit ago about specifically not
only disincentivizing illegal immigration, but being able to
effectively communicate between departments and track as well.
I think there are a lot of parts of this conversation that we
need some additional answers to, and I will follow up with
questions for the record.
Madam Chair, I yield back.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Ms. Underwood.
Ms. Underwood. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Mr. Secretary, I want to pick back up on the domestic
violent extremism. I think you referenced this to the response
to my operational changes question. But earlier this month, a
DHS National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin warned, quote:
Violent extremists may seek to exploit the easing of COVID-19-
related restrictions across the United States to conduct
attacks against a broader range of targets, end quote.
Mr. Secretary, what does that broader range of targets
encompass, and what do local leaders need to be doing to
prepare for this high risk as they implement reopening plans?
Secretary Mayorkas. Regrettably, Congresswoman, some of
those may include, for example, houses of worship, regardless
of denomination.
And what we need to do and what we are doing is
disseminating information to faith leaders across the country
with respect to the detection of threats, the information that
we ourselves have in our possession that we are disseminating
to them, and best practices with respect to the hardening of
their facilities for the security of their followers.
Ms. Underwood. Okay. Counterterrorism researchers have
identified social media as a powerful propellant, fueling the
rise of violent extremism. So I was heartened by the State
Department's announcement this month that the United States had
finally joined the Christ Church call to action and
international pledge by dozens of countries and tech companies
to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online.
Secretary Blinken stated that at the Christ Church Call
Summit that countering violent extremism is one of our highest
counterterrorism priorities.
Mr. Secretary, given that counterterrorism falls within the
DHS mission, what is DHS' role, if any, in coordinating with
the State Department to fulfill our commitment to the Christ
Church call?
Secretary Mayorkas. Congresswoman, I am engaging with our
international partners, both in a bilateral context as well as
a multilateral context, in a unified and coordinated, I should
say, battle against domestic violent extremism.
I will say, though, that there was a very important
principle articulated by the Secretary of State and one that we
have articulated here domestically, of course, as well, which
is that we will battle the domestic violent extremism, we will
battle domestic terrorism, but we will also do so upholding our
constitutional principles, the constitutional rights, the
privacy rights, and the civil rights, and liberties of the
American public. We are not tackling the freedom of speech but,
rather, the connectivity between speech and violence.
Ms. Underwood. Yes, sir. So, while the pledge to eliminate
terrorist content online is a major step forward, our current
reality is that social media is a major platform for extremist
group organizing.
The Capitol attack was largely planned online in public
forums. And I was disturbed to read reports that hundreds of
extremist militias were still openly organizing on Facebook
months after the insurrection. We need to be identifying these
threats before they turn violent.
Now, 2 weeks ago, you testified to the Senate
Appropriations Committee that DHS now has analysts dedicated to
identifying linkages between extremist narratives on social
media and indicators of intention to commit violent acts. How
many DHS analysts are working on this full time?
And since you stated that domestic violent extremism is the
number one terrorist threat facing our country, do you need
additional resources to track publicly available online
extremist content and identify actionable threats of violence?
Secretary Mayorkas. I will need to get back to you with
respect to the precise number of analysts that we have
dedicated to this. I should say that not only do we rely on the
excellence of our own analysts, but we also harness the
resources in the private sector. Academic institutions have
conducted studies, and we utilize those, and we do so in open
source, through open sources as well as through contract
vehicles.
And we have also, you will see in the President's fiscal
year 2022 budget request, an augmentation of funds to best
address the fight against domestic terrorism and domestic
violent extremism. I believe the request will approximate $130
million for a variety of needs and utilities.
Ms. Underwood. Yes, sir. Well, I certainly look forward to
reviewing that request and working with you to keep our country
safe.
Madam Chair, I yield back. Thank you so much for the
additional time.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Secretary, I know you have a hard
stop at 12:30, because you have to go over to the Senate for
another hearing.
So, Mr. Rutherford, you [inaudible.]
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you, Madam Chair.
I will keep this very short. Mr. Secretary, I want to talk
a little bit about a program that is very important to law
enforcement, and I want to talk about it in a context of the
expansion of alternatives to detention that are being discussed
now for these illegal aliens, whether you call it a notice to
appear, notice to return. And everyone knows that the
compliance of those folks who are released with those notices
is pretty small.
But one of the--which is why I think--and I want to speak
for and in support of 287(g). Now, particularly the JEM model,
the Jail Enforcement Model, not the Task Force Model on the
street, because, quite frankly, I never used that in my
community because I thought it drove people into a subculture
that made them less accessible to services.
But the Jail Model, importantly, the Jail Model only
addresses those illegal immigrants who have actually already
broken some other law in my community, whether it is robbery or
aggravated battery, whatever it might be. And I know with your
experiences as a U.S. attorney, you know the numbers of crimes
that these individuals can be involved in.
And I guess my quick question is: I am hearing that 287(g)
may be eliminated by this administration, by the Biden
administration, your administration. And so my question is, is
that true, and is that true for both models? Is it true for the
Task Force Model only, or are we talking about the Jail
Enforcement Model also?
Because I can tell you, in Jacksonville, Florida, we had
tremendous, tremendous success with that program. I was able to
remove so many criminals from our community as a result of
that. And, as you know, Mr. Secretary, I probably removed, you
know, a couple hundred of them two or more times over the
period of years.
And so can you just give me your insight on where 287(g) is
going, both the JEM and the Task Force?
Secretary Mayorkas. I think, if I may, Congressman,
articulate what I mentioned in response to a question by
Congressman Price, which is I am very focused on smart and
effective enforcement, executing our responsibilities,
utilizing our resources to achieve the greatest public safety
impact, and I intend to do so in partnership with our State and
local law enforcement personnel across the country.
I don't intend to divorce our agency from that. I recognize
the importance and effectiveness of community policing. I
understand that different jurisdictions have different
dynamics, and I intend to work closely with State and local law
enforcement across the country, in partnership, to achieve the
greatest public safety impact on behalf of the American public.
That would be my response to your question.
Mr. Rutherford. Thank you very much, Mr. Secretary.
And I see I am almost out of time, Madam Chair, so I am
going to go ahead and yield back and let the Secretary get to
his next meeting.
Thank you very much, Mr. Secretary.
I yield back, Madam Chair.
Ms. Roybal-Allard. Mr. Secretary, thank you very much for
your time. You have been very generous with it.
And, with that, the subcommittee on Homeland Security
stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:30 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
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