DHS has no top cop. Congress should fix that

The Homeland Security Department is the largest law enforcement organization in American history. It has no confirmed leader for law enforcement.

Last year, at least 32 people died in ICE custody, the agency's deadliest year in two decades. Then, in January, ICE agents shot and killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti in two separate incidents in Minneapolis. Without a top deputy beneath her accountable for law enforcement, there was only one place for responsibility to land. Ultimately, Secretary Noem paid for it.

Over the next three years, DHS must secure the 2026 FIFA World Cup, America's 250th anniversary celebrations and the 2028 Olympics. Simultaneously, the secretary oversees FEMA operations, CISA infrastructure protection, Coast Guard maritime missions and TSA aviation screening across 440 commercial airports. Together, these missions touch every American at the airport, on the coast and in disaster zones. No single official can run all of them well.

DHS employs approximately 80,000 federal law enforcement officers across nine agencies. ICE runs immigration enforcement operations nationwide with more than 22,000 officers and agents. CBP, with more than 45,000 agents and officers managing 328 ports of entry and nearly 6,000 miles of land border, is larger than the NYPD and LAPD combined. The Secret Service protects national leaders and investigates financial crimes with 4,500 special agents and uniformed division officers.

CBP has a confirmed commissioner. ICE hasn’t had a Senate-confirmed director since the end of the Obama administration because the law permits an acting director, and one has served ever since. The Secret Service director lacks a Senate mandate. And no one sits above all of them with confirmed authority overseeing use-of-force policy, detention standards and interagency operations. Each component answers to itself. No one answers for all of them.

That gap has a price. DHS has been partially shut down for nearly a month. TSA officers are missing paychecks. Airports in Houston and New Orleans are reporting hours-long wait times, weeks before the World Cup. Congress cannot agree on the terms of immigration enforcement — who authorizes it, who oversees it and what constraints apply. Members on both sides of the aisle want accountability for how immigration enforcement is conducted. Neither has a structural mechanism to deliver it. A confirmed deputy secretary for law enforcement would be exactly that. The political stalemate reflects the structural one. Accountability cannot be assigned because the structure makes it impossible.

In December 2024, then-acting director Ronald Rowe testified that the July 13 assassination attempt was an “abject failure” with breakdowns across communications, protective advance, command and control and coordination with external partners. In the aftermath, Sens. Grassley and Cortez Masto introduced bipartisan legislation to require Senate confirmation for all future Secret Service directors. It never passed. The structural problem Rowe described remains, and the new director has no Senate mandate to fix it.

Nearly three in four Americans want changes to how ICE operates. Eighty-seven percent, including almost three in four Republicans, say federal officers should not be immune from prosecution for unlawful conduct. Consensus exists. What doesn’t exist is a confirmed official Congress can call to account for it.

Congress has confronted a similar command-and-control problem before, at the Department of Defense and, more recently, the Department of State. At the Pentagon, the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 clarified lines of authority across the military services. In 2000, Congress established a second deputy secretary position at the State Department, deputy secretary for management and resources. While one serves as the nation's second-ranking diplomat, the other runs department operations. DHS should have that same structure.

DHS already has the Senate-confirmed position of under secretary for management. But that office functions as a chief management officer covering budget, procurement, IT and facilities, not operations. More telling is that this position has been filled by unconfirmed leaders since 2019 across three administrations, with two nominees being withdrawn. The department's own management infrastructure has operated without Senate-mandated leadership for nearly a decade. A deputy secretary for law enforcement would not duplicate this function. It would fill the operational gap that the function was never designed to cover.

The deputy secretary, in theory, serves as the department's chief operating officer. In practice, the portfolio is too large for one person to manage both operational and law enforcement missions at once. A confirmed official pulled between managing FEMA's disaster posture and responding to congressional hearings on ICE tactics is not running either mission. These are two distinct jobs, yet the current structure treats them as one. Splitting the deputy secretary role creates a COO for department-wide operations and a confirmed leader for law enforcement. The current deputy secretary retains the former. A new confirmed official owns the latter.

A Senate-confirmed deputy secretary for law enforcement would lead ICE, CBP, Secret Service, Federal Protective Service and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers. This is not a coordination role. The deputy secretary for law enforcement would hold statutory authority over use-of-force policy, detention standards, interagency operational protocols and congressional reporting requirements across all five components. When something goes wrong, this official answers for it. Not a component director. Not an acting appointee. Someone the Senate put on the record.

Special envoys and coordinators can be quietly installed and quietly dismissed. A confirmed deputy cannot. A confirmation hearing is Congress's one chance to demand accountability in advance. The Senate's confirmation vote is an expression of public trust. For the officials running the largest law enforcement apparatus in American history, that trust has never been extended.

Twenty-three years after its creation, DHS has never resolved the fundamental tension between its law enforcement and non-law enforcement missions. FIFA is only three months away. The country's 250th follows in July. Meanwhile, ICE has more than doubled its workforce in a year and shows no signs of slowing. DHS was not built for this scale.

President Trump has nominated Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., to replace Noem, and Congress has been simultaneously negotiating DHS's budget for nearly a month. These two moments rarely arrive together. Senators should use both. The DHS funding bill currently under negotiation is the right vehicle. Include a statutory deputy secretary for law enforcement as a condition of passage. At Mullin’s confirmation hearing on March 18, senators should ask one question before voting: Do you intend to run the largest law enforcement apparatus in American history by yourself?

Daniel E. White is a visiting fellow at the National Security Institute at George Mason University. He previously served as the deputy assistant secretary of Homeland Security for strategy and policy planning from 2024 to 2025.