Portland

Chad Wolf wasn’t Donald Trump’s first pick for homeland security secretary – he wasn’t even his fifth or sixth.But now he is the figurehead for the federal government’s intervention in Portland, where his department’s militarized agents have been recorded pushing protesters into unmarked vehicles.When criticism of the government’s tactics flared late last week, Wolf tweeted: “Our men and women in uniform are patriots. We will never surrender to violent extremists on my watch.”The tweet has since been deleted – probably because the embedded photo was unauthorized – but it focused attention on Wolf, a former lobbyist who has ignored calls from local government officials in Oregon to remove federal agents from the city.The state’s governor, Kate Brown, said last week that in a phone call, Wolf’s “response showed me he is on a mission to provoke confrontation for political purposes”.Such an allegation tracks with how Donald Trump has used the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has become more politicized because of its role in enforcing the president’s hardline immigration policies.The department was founded in 2002 in response to 9/11. Its 240,000 staff are also charged with overseeing natural disaster response, anti-terrorism efforts and cybersecurity.Since becoming acting DHS secretary in November 2019, Wolf has denied there is a problem with systemic racism in US law enforcement and downplayed the threat of Covid-19. He has also overseen the implementation of extreme immigration restrictions the White House claimed would stem the spread of coronavirus.Wolf is the fifth person to serve in the role under Trump in an acting or confirmed capacity, while George W Bush and Barack Obama each had three people in the job over the course of their two presidential terms. Wolf was named to the post only after two of the president’s preferred candidates were ruled ineligible to take up the job.The Plano, Texas, native moved to Washington DC after graduating from Southern Methodist University. He was an architect of the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) and left DHS in 2005 to become a lobbyist.After more than a decade lobbying, Wolf returned to the department to work for the Trump administration, where he has held multiple roles. The most glaring item on his resume, until Portland, was his central role in the Trump administration’s family separation policy while working as the chief of staff for then DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.At a June 2019 hearing, Wolf testified that he learned about family separation in April 2018, just before it was publicly announced.“My job was not to determine whether it was the right or wrong policy,” Wolf testified. “My job at the time was to ensure that the secretary had all the information that [Nielsen] needed.”Months later, NBC News revealed that Wolf included family separation on a list of 16 policy recommendations he drafted for senior department figures in December 2017.Wolf’s name is on the list, and Trump approved the policy, but it was Nielsen who was the face of family separation. Her dismissal last year was emblematic of the Trump administration’s chaotic rule over the agency.Nielsen was pushed out of the job in April 2019, during a purge of senior homeland security officials orchestrated by the White House adviser Stephen Miller.Miller, who has white supremacist views, has an outsized role in the agency and has filled it with allies comfortable supporting his anti-immigration agenda. He is known to call and meet with junior staff to gather information or circumvent their managers.Miller, like Trump, is also a proponent of leaving “acting” in a senior official’s title instead of getting department leaders, such as Wolf, confirmed by the Senate. Trump has said doing so gives him “more flexibility”. Research has shown cabinet secretaries in temporary positions have less stature in the department and are less able to implement their own agendas.Skipping the confirmation process also allows Miller and Trump to insert their favored individuals into senior roles, without intervention from Congress.One of two people deemed ineligible to be DHS secretary, Ken Cuccinelli, is now acting deputy secretary of the agency and is performing the duties of director of US Immigration and Citizenship Services (USCIS), the agency which handles immigration administration.In the past decade, Cuccinelli has said homosexuality is “intrinsically wrong”, been tied to anti-Muslim and anti-LGBTQ+ campaigners and was criticized for a comment that seemed to compare rats to immigrants.On Monday, Cuccinelli said the use of unmarked vehicles to pick protesters off the streets was “so common it’s barely worth discussion”.Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, and Senator Gary Peters, a Democrat from Michigan, wrote to Trump in November warning that DHS vacancies threatened government accountability and national security.Similar fears are now being shared by DHS staff and former senior officials because of the government’s deployment in Portland.Tom Ridge, the first homeland security secretary, said DHS was not created to be “the president’s personal militia” in an interview with SiriusXM on Tuesday. Ridge said: “It would be a cold day in hell before I would consent to an uninvited, unilateral intervention into one of my cities.” More