Nominated by President Obama as Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Gil Kerlikowske has been serving in this position since 2014. In this role, he has the responsibility of both protecting national security objectives while promoting economic prosperity, all while running the largest federal law enforcement agency. Prior to this experience, he served as Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and before that, as Chief of Police for Seattle, Washington over the course of nine years.
Harvard Political Review: How does your agency [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] look to regulate individuals coming back from war zones, especially in the Middle East? We’ve seen the potential for ISIS [Islamic State in Iraq and Syria] sympathizers to come back and incite acts of terror at home. What does your agency do to regulate that, and what is the United States’ role in stopping those acts of homegrown terror?
Gil Kerlikowske: First of all, the concern is varied, whether it is Canada accepting 25,000 Syrian refugees, and the President’s administration advocating for 10,000 Syrian refugees from a war zone. Refugees in this country are a part of our history, and we have a process that is very time consuming, as a result of the ISIS issues in particular. It is a very thorough, impressive set of hurdles that someone would have to go through coming from a war zone like Syria in order to enter the United States. Keep in mind the context that both the Director of National Intelligence and the Director of the FBI, along with a number of other law enforcement officials, have continually said that we see the threat of home-grown, violent extremism more than we see extremism [as] somebody coming into the country.
The refugee process is run by another part of the Department of Homeland Security, USCIS [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services], but we are very involved with that. People, of course, go through an extensive background check; they provide a set of fingerprints, photographs, and multiple interviews. I think the process is up to two years before someone would be given refugee status. The government of Canada recently gave me an overview in a meeting, about the steps that they’re taking. Remember, too, it is not as if refugees have just left Syria and just crossed the border; these are people who have been in camps for actually some period of time. As you know, in Canada, they are not accepting single males, unless they have LGBT concerns. It is family units that are being accepted… And any derogatory information that would deny them admissibility is shared among the different federal agencies.
HPR: I think that a timely topic, especially with the presidential race that is going on, is border protection. What are your feelings towards some of the candidates––particularly Donald Trump––of building a wall across the entire border? Is that doable and appropriate, and what would its impacts be on immigration?
GK: For me, I am very much out of the politics of both the race and border security, but it is the responsibility on border security that I have. So two things, I think that it is clear that the terrain from the Rio Grande Valley to mountains and desert, to the urban areas of San Diego, would make building a wall––if not extremely difficult and expensive––impossible. We have experience with a variety of fencing that already exists, several hundred miles of fencing. It is very expensive, it is difficult to maintain and to keep up, and as you saw from an ABC piece of news footage the other day, even with a very large fence, people can scale that fence. So there are a couple keys: one to remember is that we have more resources on the border than we have ever had in the past. We have unmanned aircraft, we have tethered aero stats with sensors, we have buried sensors, we have cameras, we have towers with cameras, we have portable cameras, we have night vision, and we have almost 18,000 border patrol agents on the southwest border. Our apprehensions are significantly down from what they were up to ten years ago. The crime rates in cities, whether it’s Tucson, or El Paso, or San Diego, are crime rates that many cities further inland in the United States would be very happy to have. Given the complexity of the immigration issue and border security, without getting into the politics of it, we say that if someone provides a simple issue to a complex problem, you can be pretty well assured that it is not going to be the right answer.
HPR: There has been a surge of unaccompanied minors, particularly from Central America, escaping violence in their respective countries. What has been the role of the United States in helping those children?
GK: The summer of 2014 saw an unprecedented number––almost 68,000 unaccompanied children––enter the United States. It was not a border security issue; it was a border management issue. They [the children] were turning themselves into the agents and walking right up to them. They weren’t being pursued. We didn’t have resources in health care, in logistical resources, in transportation, in food, and it was very overwhelming to the border patrol stations, particularly in the Rio Grande Valley. We have a lot more resources now in holding facilities, in contracts for all of those things mentioned, but the legal ruling on making a decision about those children is that the decision is made through the Department of Health and Human Services about where to place that child that is in his/her best interests.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Image source: Wikimedia Commons/Office of National Drug Policy