She Ran Dhs. Now She’s Watching It Mishandle Minnesota.

Few understand immigration policy, law enforcement and how they intersect in the sprawling bureaucracy of local, state and federal government better than Janet Napolitano. The longest-serving Homeland Security secretary in the 23-year history of the department, Napolitano also served as Arizona’s governor, attorney general and U.S. attorney.

After leading DHS under President Barack Obama, she was president of the University of California, Berkeley for seven years. Napolitano is still happily ensconced at the university, where she’s on faculty. In recent weeks, though, she’s been spending more time than she’d prefer yelling back at her television while watching mismanagement turn to tragedy in Minnesota.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has, remarkably, never reached out to her predecessor and fellow former governor. So I thought I’d have Napolitano offer her advice through an open channel. It isn’t just the Trump administration for whom she has some suggestions. The former secretary also has some blunt talk for her own party about how to address a key issue, immigration, that has dogged them.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What should the administration be doing now in Minneapolis narrowly and then on the larger issue of immigration enforcement broadly?

Well, I think the goal needs to be to re-establish the credibility of the operation that they're doing and how they're conducting it. And that requires a change in on-the-ground leadership. And that's been done with [Dan] Bovino out and [Tom] Homan in. And the approach that Tom seems to be taking seems designed to try to reduce the temperature a bit.

If I were advising Tom, I would have either the attorney general or the deputy attorney general immediately announce an open and transparent investigation into both shootings. And I would work with my state and local police and prosecutors so that there's a sense of fairness here. When people announce a federal investigation, that has inherent credibility. But because there was such a rush to judgment and such rhetoric that came out of the administration, that credibility was lost. So they've got to regain that. And that should be one of the first things that they do. And I think they're trying to take some actions there, but they're not there all the way.

Should the immigration enforcement agents be moved out of Minnesota?

Yeah, I think they need to develop a plan. They need to begin removing all of the agents that were not originally assigned to Minnesota back to their home stations. Part of the problem here was the size of the operation. You had thousands of ICE agents and another 800 or 900 from Border Patrol. And in a city that you could drive across in 15 or 20 minutes and that only has 600 officers on its own police force! You know, that is an intensity that we haven't seen in any of the other operations they've done so far this year.

Is that why this went so badly, because of the sheer volume of officers that we were bound to have conflicts?

Well, not only the sheer volume, but the lack of seeming planning and coordination. And combined with that was the pattern they'd already set in Los Angeles and in Chicago, in terms of how they were operating. And the lack of real guidance from their leadership. In fact, the guidance and language being used by Bovino and Secretary Noem and by the White House and by [Kash] Patel at the FBI, really served to escalate the situation, not to solve a problem. I mean, the problem they were there to solve was they wanted to pick up undocumented individuals living in the Minneapolis Twin Cities area.

But the way they went about it was so contra best practices in any law enforcement operation that they created this mess.

And they should revise and extend the training of the officers?

One of the issues here is that in the press, everything is conflated as being ICE. But Border Patrol had a big presence here, and, you know, Border Patrol are trained differently. They're trained for operation at ports of entry, and it's a different use of force policy, it is a different method of training. It's a different environment totally. And I noticed Bovino himself came from the border patrol. He was acting like just a cowboy.

So you had ICE, which previously had done really good investigations — targeting those in the country illegally who had committed other crimes and identifying them, finding them and putting them into the deportation process. Now all of a sudden, you've got this massive incursion of Border Patrol, and then you've got them all showing up in battle wear, like they were going into Fallujah. It's not surprising that the public reacted the way it did.

By the way, do you know Secretary Noem? Has she reached out to you at all?

No.

OK, putting Noem aside, what should the White House be doing now?

Well, the first thing they should be doing is directing all appointed officials in the government to hold their powder dry. This rush to statements on social media, calling people domestic terrorists when we can see the videos by ourselves. They must have made those statements without seeing any of the video. Or else they don't think we can believe what we see with our own eyes. But it has totally undercut their credibility.

They should respond to these things the way you do in a situation where you have an officer-involved shooting. You go out and you say: We are assessing the facts, we're going to do a careful, open and transparent investigation. The officers involved are put on leave while that investigation is underway. And we will not rush to judgment until a thorough investigation is done. Instead, in contrast, their language almost gives permission to the agents in the field to keep operating the way they've been operating. And I don't think, as I said before, it's done them any good. I don't think it's done the federal government any good. I don't think it's done the president any good.

Well, he clearly realizes that, because he wouldn't have climbed down Monday like he did.

Yeah, I've been thinking, why that change? And it seems to me, it's not about the actual operation or concern about people's constitutional rights or the sending of thousands of military-garbed federal agents into a community. That wasn't a concern. But what was a concern was when the politics began to change.

Something that I think you thought about, which has sort of been sitting uncomfortably with me is the “what if” — if all these folks are diverted from the FBI, from the U.S. Attorney’s office, from other agencies, to focus on the issue of the border and deportations, are we exposing ourselves to other acts of criminality or public safety risks because we have so many people focused on this one issue?

My understanding is that a high percentage of FBI agents, DEA agents, ATF agents and assistant U.S. attorneys have been diverted from other important work — cybersecurity, human trafficking, large financial crimes, etc. — to do these deportation cases. They need to go back to their original caseloads and their original work because otherwise we have huge security needs that are not being met.

And by the way, in the department itself, this overwhelming amount of money that Congress gave to ICE and CBP — well, at the same time, they've eliminated some divisions. They cut the cyber infrastructure security agency dramatically, as if cyber was no longer a threat to the United States. And so that needs to be revisited. And finally, the federal courts in places like Minnesota are just being overwhelmed. Why? Because as they arrest people, they're ordering them to be detained regardless, it seems like, of whether they need to be detained. And so they are just overwhelmed with petitions to get out of detention while their hearings are being scheduled. So the federal courts are also being waylaid. And that means that other cases that are in the queue can't get scheduled.

Let me ask you about your party for a minute. Obviously, Democrats took on a lot of water in the last five years over “abolish the police.” Do you worry that the backlash to ICE is leading some in your party down that same path?

In my view, the Democrats ought to be very strong and say, "You know what? We'll give the president credit for the border. And when we’re in power, we will continue those efforts.”

But Trump also campaigned that in the interior of the country, he was going to focus on the so-called worst of the worst. And then that turned into a quota where they need 3,000 arrests a day. And so you end up with these roving raids and these sweeps and the targeting of communities and the kinds of inappropriate and abusive [actions] — I’m sorry to say because I had ICE and CBP under me for almost five years, and I thought we did some good work. And I get immigration's a tough, tough topic. But we had nothing like this. I think people are saying — aside from maybe the MAGA right — this is not what we want and it's not what we voted for.

So the key for Democrats being: Try to focus on the excesses of ICE without being painted as soft on the border?

Or soft on immigration enforcement. You can say, “Look, we can have immigration enforcement because that's a key interest for our country” — if you do it in a smart and professional way that respects the great traditions of law and law enforcement.

What should congressional Democrats do with this DHS funding bill? What reforms should they seek if they have a couple of weeks to come up with a new measure?

I hope by ICE reforms, they're not limiting it to ICE, because Border Patrol needs to be in that mix. They should act with best practices in law enforcement. They should ask for body cameras. I think they should ask for training and conduct designed to de-escalate situations. I can go through 10 things in Minneapolis that escalated the situation. They should require additional training for every federal agent who's doing immigration enforcement.

In the military, occasionally they do these one-day or two-day — I don't know what they're called — a stand-down or something like that. But they do it when there's a real problem. They focus everybody on that problem. We need something like that to really focus agents on the fact that they are federal law enforcement. They carry a badge, and there are requirements that go along with that. They need to require consistent reporting and monitoring of all of the deportation operations, and they also need — and this may not be in a bill — but they also need to up their oversight game, and they need to follow and monitor carefully all of that money they gave to DHS, which right now is like a deportation slush fund.

You obviously speak from experience, and I'm sure it's been tough for you the last couple of weeks watching this. You probably wanted to scream at the TV a few times, huh?

Yes, my TV has received some vituperation. But listen, the genesis of this problem was a poorly conceived initiative out of the White House to do these mass arrests. A lack of professional leadership in the operation and leadership in the department. And then third, it's a failure to appreciate that there are people in the country illegally, and they are not all the same.

Do you know Homan at all?

Yes, he worked at DHS when I was the secretary. He was not a direct report, but I did talk and meet with him a couple of times. He’s very conservative on immigration matters. But he's also a professional. And what we need in this role now, we don't need any more preening. We need professional leadership, people who know how law enforcement is supposed to act and what is supposed to be said.

You feel more confident of having him there than having Noem as the point person?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. She clearly is out of her depth

But fundamentally, this is Stephen Miller's policy, and I’m not sure how that changes. But as you pointed out, the politics got pretty rough last weekend, and obviously that is how you get this president's attention: tough coverage, tough politics. That's what moves him.

Well, when even Miller said maybe the officers that shot Pretti were acting outside of protocol, I was like, "Ya think?”