Leadership Journal joins The Blog @ Homeland Security

We thank you for your loyal readership of the Leadership Journal; our online forum discussing policy issues from the perspective of the Department’s senior leadership.

Starting today, we will be combining the Leadership Journal and The Blog @ Homeland Security to form one unified blog for The Department of Homeland Security.

On The Blog @ Homeland Security, readers can still expect to see blog posts directly from the Secretary and senior leadership, as well as feature stories from across the Department, all in one convenient location. 

We encourage and welcome your thoughts and comments on The Blog.

This page lives as a standing archive of the Leadership Journal.   Here you will find all of the content published on the Leadership Journal from its beginning in September 2007 to the latest post in January 2011.  Long term, the Leadership Journal will be permanently archived and the URL http://journal.dhs.gov/ will discontinue.

Right now, you can still view any past Leadership Journal entry, each with its original comments still intact.

Please note that the e-mail subscriber list for Leadership Journal will discontinue.  We encourage you to sign up for the e-mail subscriber list on The Blog to receive the latest news and updates from the Department.

Veteran's Day Message from Secretary Janet Napolitano

As our Nation pauses to honor the millions of military veterans who have served our country as members of our Armed Forces, I’d like to take a moment to recognize the nearly 48,000 veterans who are continuing their service to America at DHS.

Last August, I directed the Department to implement a new Veterans Coordination Strategy to broaden our efforts to draw on the vast expertise, dedication, and commitment to service of our Nation’s veterans. This Strategy has already yielded significant results.

Veterans currently comprise 25 percent of our DHS civilian workforce, in addition to the 42,000 active duty members of our U.S. Coast Guard. Every day, these men and women bring their skills, talents, and experiences to bear in fulfilling our many missions – from guarding against terrorism, strengthening aviation and maritime security, and protecting our cyber networks and critical infrastructure, to securing our borders, enforcing and administering our immigration laws, and preparing for, responding to, and recovering from disasters.

Beyond our own employees, veterans are also an integral part of our larger homeland security team. Over the past year, we’ve expanded opportunities for veterans to do business with the Department, exceeding our goal of awarding over $1 billion in contracts to veteran-owned businesses in fiscal year 2010. We also expect to be one of only a few agencies that will surpass the Small Business Administration’s goal for contracting with businesses owned by service-disabled veterans.

We plan to do even more in the coming months through additional veterans outreach, recruitment, and hiring, with the goal of having 50,000 veterans working at DHS by the end of 2012 and continuing to promote business opportunities and other partnerships to get veterans to get involved in the Department’s work.

This week USCIS will hold a number of naturalization ceremonies around the country and throughout the world – including one in Baghdad, Iraq – for military personnel who will become our newest U.S. citizens. In 2010, USCIS naturalized more than 11,000 noncitizens serving in our military, more than any year since 1955.

The service and sacrifice of veterans enriches our Department and our nation. I hope you will join me in thanking our veterans for all that they have done – and all they continue to do – in support of our country.

Janet Napolitano

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Launches New Website

We here at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) encourage you to stop by and take a look at our newly redesigned website - ICE.gov. Directly on the homepage, you can access the latest news, photos and videos, as well as learn about what the Department of Homeland Security’s largest investigative agency does to combat everything from terrorism to drug or human smuggling as well as enforce our nation’s immigration laws. It’s been our experience that the Web is a great way to tell ICE-related stories. The revamped ICE.gov allows us to do just that using a compelling, accessible and informative platform.

The new site focuses on our two main program areas— Homeland Security Investigations and Enforcement and Removal Operations. By clicking on “Investigations” or “Enforcement and Removal” from the homepage, visitors can find information about all of ICE’s programs.

ICE.gov also features tools that the public can use.

• Family members, legal counsel or advocacy organizations searching for detainees can use the Online Detainer Locator System to determine where the person is located.
• Individuals can also report counterfeit or copyright crimes through the IPR Center Referral Form.
• Or if you witness suspicious activity related to ICE’s mission, I encourage you to drop us a line at our Tip Line, 1-866-DHS-2-ICE.

Best of all, ICE has integrated several Web 2.0 functions into the site. Visitors can share our stories on their Facebook pages, bookmark us through de.li.cious, follow us on Twitter or view short videos about our latest investigations on YouTube.

Next time you have a moment, visit ICE.gov. We’re just a click away.

John Morton
Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
Department of Homeland Security

The Release of Department of Homeland Security Counternarcotics Doctrine

I am honored to announce Secretary Napolitano’s recent signing of Department of Homeland Security Counternarcotics Doctrine - a set of fundamental principles that reflect what experts in the field of counternarcotics have learned from decades of experience combating dangerous drug trafficking organizations. This document will guide the ways in which we develop our policy and plans, structure and employ our forces, and procure our resources -- directly affecting our operations on the ground. 

The experts who worked on DHS Counternarcotics Doctrine – many of whom have extensive front-line counternarcotics experience – were clear that we need to view this issue comprehensively. We cannot just concentrate on one drug, one way of moving that drug, or one geographical area of the world.  Rather, we have to address the whole problem – including demand, production, transport, and consumption.  We also can’t do it alone—we must work closely with our federal, state, local, tribal and international partners in order to maximize our efforts to detect, deter and disrupt the illicit movement of drugs.  DHS Counternarcotics Doctrine reflects all of these concepts.

The Doctrine also reflects the fact that our efforts to counter drug trafficking are most successful when we work to understand – through good intelligence – what drug producers and traffickers are doing, and how they are doing it in order to anticipate their behavior and in turn more effectively target our operations. DHS Counternarcotics Doctrine stresses that our counternarcotics efforts must be guided by results – we must make sure our strategies and operations reflect the methods that have proven to be the most successful for achieving our mission.

I commend the members of the counternarcotics community who contributed to this document, and I hope all of our interagency, federal, state, tribal, local and international partners will use it as a resource. 

Grayling Williams

Director, Office of Counternarcotics Enforcement
Department of Homeland Security 

How Fusion Centers Help Keep America Safe

Secretary Janet Napolitano’s speech today to the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) in Orlando, Fla., is a good opportunity to update the American public on the important role that state and major urban area fusion centers are playing in keeping our country safe.

Fusion centers grew out of a recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, which found that the federal government had no systematic way for sharing information and intelligence with state and local governments.

Today, we have a national network of 72 recognized fusion centers – one in every state and 22 in major urban areas – and, with Department of Homeland Security support, they are being woven into the national and homeland security fabric of the United States.

What does that mean for the American people? It means you now have a dedicated and well-trained group of men and women in your own communities, working with DHS, FBI, and other federal partners, to keep your police officers, firefighters, public health and safety officials, and other first responders informed about terrorist, criminal, and other homeland security threats.

The DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis, where I serve, takes information and intelligence from across DHS and the national Intelligence Community, processes and analyzes it, and then shares it with the fusion centers, often in joint products with the FBI. The fusion centers then disseminate it to the some 18,000 state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement organizations, and to thousands more first responders throughout the country. They also support the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces in their terrorism investigations.

Conversely, fusion centers provide the federal government with critical information and subject‐matter expertise from the state and local level, enabling the effective communication of locally-generated information about terrorism back to Washington.

Fusion centers have already proven their value in countering terrorist attacks. For example, they played important roles in the case of the attempted Times Square bombing by Faisal Shahzad and the plot to bomb New York subways by Najibullah Zazi.

DHS is working with each center to improve its baseline level of operational capability. Through the use of grant funding, each center is expected to achieve and maintain the capacity to receive and share threat-related information generated by the federal government, as well as the capacity to gather, assess, analyze, and share suspicious activity reports generated by local law enforcement and the private sector. These same baseline capabilities also ensure that fusion centers establish and maintain privacy and civil liberty protections.

In addition, the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and the DHS Privacy Office, provide privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties training to all DHS intelligence officers before they deploy to the fusion centers, and support the training of all fusion center personnel nationwide.

Secretary Napolitano has talked about how our homeland security begins with hometown security.  Fusion centers are vitally important tools for keeping both our home towns, and our homeland, safe.

Bart R. Johnson

Principal Deputy Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis

Department of Homeland Security