Playing partisan games with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding is a profound disservice to all Americans and could potentially embolden our adversaries. Despite tired attempts to portray DHS as a mere immigration enforcement department, the department’s core mission is to protect Americans from terrorism, cyberattacks, and other threats to public safety and national security. Its importance to our national security cannot be understated.
The American people deserve a DHS strengthened by recent resource increases, and as agile, focused, and effective as possible in carrying out this mission. Now is the time to improve and expand the department’s capabilities, not play politics with its ongoing operations.
For decades, homeland security has been closely associated with our sovereign border — particularly our southern border with Mexico. America has built numerous systems, authorities, and law enforcement agencies designed to prevent adversaries from entering the homeland, with limited success. Narcotics, weapons, and human trafficking have plagued us for years. The foreign terrorism threat, the original reason behind the creation of the DHS, persists from a variety of actors, including increasingly desperate Iranian proxies watching as the Ayatollah clings to power in the wake of crippling military and social upheaval.
The Trump administration has had notable successes securing our border, including ongoing Smart Wall system deployments by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a nine-month period of zero releases of illegal aliens into the U.S., and a remarkable reduction in fentanyl overdoses. Our southern border has been strengthened considerably with physical barriers, drones, sensors, and other surveillance capabilities. The administration has also pushed through an impressive number of new hires for CBP and Border Patrol.
Yet we know our adversaries will adapt to this enhanced enforcement environment. But what if we could keep Americans safe by interdicting threats before they reach our border?
Projecting the Border Outward
Previous failures in border security were not due to lack of effort, but to a structural misalignment between modern threats to the homeland and how we organize to confront them. In today’s environment, treating terrorism, transnational crime, cyber threats, and counterintelligence as separate problem sets is no longer viable. Our most sophisticated enemies don’t attack us on one front at a time — they coordinate their attacks from multiple directions. To both the cartels and our modern nation-state adversaries, conflict is a zero-sum: anywhere they can hurt us, they will. To them, economics, geopolitics, business, culture, and civil society are all legitimate battlegrounds they target each day.
The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) represents the first cogent demonstration of a more holistic strategy to countering that zero-sum approach. Through its explicit emphasis on the importance of Western Hemispheric security in all facets, the NSS provides a strategic vision that fully integrates defense of the homeland from today’s evolving threats into the foundations of our larger foreign and national security policy. In doing so, the strategy establishes our southern border as a final protective barrier, not the first, and provides a generational opportunity to ensure our first interactions with nefarious actors happen hundreds of miles before they reach our border.
Today, emerging and existing threat actors are fundamentally different from our adversaries of the past. Transnational criminal organizations, malign state actors, cyber-enabled influence operations, and illicit trafficking networks operate at unprecedented speed and scale to target us. They operate in information dead-zones, especially on the dark web and on anonymous social media platforms. They use encrypted messaging and payment platforms to finance and plan their illicit activities and deploy rapidly evolving technologies such as drones to move fluidly across jurisdictions and create new methods of attack.
Most importantly, they routinely exploit gaps in how the United States collects, integrates, and acts on information about global supply chains and trafficking routes to ensure their global operations — whether for profit, social upheaval, or force projection — are able to reach our borders undeterred.
Our adversaries know that despite the immense capability of our intelligence agencies, Department of War, and notable efforts by DHS to expand interdiction capacity abroad, the full force of all these organizations has never truly prioritized preventing these threats from reaching our border in the first place.
Expanded Resources and Capabilities
Today, thanks to historic investments from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA),DHS has vastly more resources to keep Americans safe from threats beyond our border. With a new strategy and more funding, homeland security preparedness should now enhance powerful existing capabilities that enable DHS to deploy its resources abroad in greater coordination with other national security departments and agencies.
Powerful DHS-abroad capabilities, such as the Container Security Initiative, the Joint Security Program, and U.S. Preclearance, have the ability to contribute greatly to our homeland security through advanced threat interdiction and should be resourced and strategically expanded to meet the national and economic security demand. In their current state, each of these programs already provides value to DHS’s national security mission.
In today’s world, leveraging technology is a key aspect of effective force deployment. Multiple DHS component agencies, including CBP, ICE, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Secret Service, use and share AI and machine learning to identify and interdict threats. But such capabilities are nascent and must be expanded using OBBA and ongoing annual funding. Information-sharing between agencies must increase, merging foreign and domestic data, law enforcement and intelligence reporting, and both classified and open-source information to target foreign adversaries seeking to enter our country, and those who already have.
The key technological challenge for DHS is to select the fastest, most innovative, and interoperable technologies going forward. Traditional contractors, whose business models thrive on slow, hourly billing to the government should be forced to improve their speed and efficacy. While tech darlings should be commended for what they do well — going fast and forcing innovation — DHS should not be made to rely on their branded systems, a process referred to with frustration inside the department as “vendor lock.”
DHS Needs Support, Not Political Interference
To defend the homeland, we must constantly remember a simple theme: most homeland security threats come from abroad. The sooner we identify them, the more effective our deterrence. The NSS, new technologies, and increases in CBP and ICE manpower and funding create a potentially generational opportunity to secure our nation by interdicting threats hundreds of miles from our borders. Rather than shutting down our homeland security agencies, Congress should continue to invest in DHS capabilities and enable the department to see farther, sooner, and more clearly — through the expansion of existing programs and the acquisition and deployment of powerful new technologies.
Chad F. Wolf serves as chair of homeland security and immigration at the America First Policy Institute. He previously served as acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security during President Donald Trump’s first term. Thomas K. Plofchan III is a senior fellow for homeland security and immigration at the America First Policy Institute. He previously served as senior counselor for counterterrorism and intelligence to the secretary of Homeland Security and commissioner of Customs and Border Protection.
