Michael Chertoff
Michael Chertoff
Michael Chertoffis an American attorney who was the second United States Secretary of Homeland Security under Presidents George W. Bush andBarack Obama, and co-author of the USA PATRIOT Act. He previously served as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, as a federal prosecutor, and as Assistant U.S. Attorney General. He succeeded Tom Ridge as United States Secretary of Homeland Security on February 15, 2005...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPublic Servant
Date of Birth28 November 1953
CountryUnited States of America
The cost of identifying all those people and sending them back would be stupendous. It would be billions and billions of dollars,
The one thing about an episode like this is if you talk to someone and you get a rumor or you get someone's anecdotal version of something, I think it's dangerous to extrapolate it all over the place.
I think that the lesson of this hurricane, which we will clearly look at as we go over an after-action evaluation, is going to be very valuable in moving forward. I mean, this was an ultra-catastrophe, but we have to be prepared even for ultra-catastrophes, even things that happen once in a lifetime and once in a generation. So, yes, we will be studying that.
Mike Brown talked about the need to take seriously this hurricane ... It was difficult to know where on the Gulf Coast it was going to land.
Michael Brown has done everything he possibly could to coordinate the federal response to this unprecedented challenge,
If an ultra-catastrophe occurs, there's going to be some harmful fall-out.
Obviously, people feel strongly about their home communities and they tend to see their own risks to the exclusion of others. Our job is to balance.
Return every single illegal entrant -- no exceptions,
It's as if an atomic bomb was dropped,
You've got to make sure you've built the entire system so that once you apprehend people, you can hold them and then remove them in a prompt way.
People have got to take some responsibility for preparing themselves, ... That means you get yourself three days' worth of food, three days' worth of water; you get yourself flashlights, batteries, either a hand-crank radio or a battery-powered radio, a first-aid kit precisely because you know it's going to take 48 to 72 hours to be able to fully service everyone.
As far as my agency is concerned, port security really rests principally with the Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection.
FEMA has better resources and ... it brings more to the table now than it did in the previous five, six, seven years.
The world is not going to stop moving because we are very focused on Katrina. Part of the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security is to deal with all hazards, everything that's out there, and to continue to be able to keep our eye on everything that may happen in the future,