Janet Napolitano, the longest-serving Homeland Security secretary in the department's 23-year history, offered a scathing assessment of the agency's current leader, Kristi Noem.
The veteran bureaucrat and law enforcement official led DHS under former President Barack Obama, and she told Politico that she has been horrified by President Donald Trump's violent immigration crackdown in Minneapolis that has led to the fatal shootings of two Americans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in the past month.
"I think they need to develop a plan," Napolitano said. "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."
She said the Trump administration keeps repeating the same mistakes in each of its immigration surges.
"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," Napolitano said.
"In fact, the guidance and language being used by [Greg] 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," she added.
Noem has never reached out to her for guidance, Napolitano said, but she offered some unsolicited advice to her and the White House.
"Well, the first thing they should be doing is directing all appointed officials in the government to hold their powder dry," Napolitano said. "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."
Those social media statements and attacks only make the problem worse, she said.
"Their language almost gives permission to the agents in the field to keep operating the way they’ve been operating," Napolitano said, "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."
Napolitano praised the president's move to put his border czar Tom Homan in charge of Minneapolis instead of Border Patrol commander Bovino or Noem, whom she called incompetent.
"Oh, yeah – yeah, she clearly is out of her depth," Napolitano said.
