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
Threats do not begin or end in a single country, ... must focus on common strategies and common systems of protection.
because our constitutional system really places the primary authority in each state with the governor.
but other parts of the system have nearly collapsed under the weight of numbers.
At the end of the day, if we don't give people in any business some sense that they have consistent rules ... then we're creating a regulatory system that is doomed to failure.
Completing the Border Infrastructure System will strengthen our efforts to reduce illegal entry to the United States. Congress provided us the authority to ensure this project is completed, and I intend to use it,
This new People Access Security Service, or PASS system card, will be particularly useful for those citizens in border communities who regularly cross northern and southern borders every day as an integral part of their daily lives. We're talking about essentially like the kind of driver's license or other simple card identification that almost all of us carry in our wallets day in and day out.
This is a system in desperate need, ... and people are rightly upset and distressed.
This is a system desperately in need of repair,
a systematic evaluation of the department's operations, policies and structures.
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.
I think we're going to be ready when it does hit land,
I think we have discovered over the last few days that with all the tremendous effort using the existing resources and the traditional frameworks of the National Guard, the unusual set of challenges of conducting a massive evacuation in the context of a still dangerous flood requires us to basically break the traditional model and create a new model -- one for what you might call kind of an ultracatastrophe,
I think we need to prepare the country for what's coming, ... What's going to happen when we de-water and remove the water from New Orleans is we're going to uncover people who died, maybe hiding in houses, got caught by the flood, people whose remains are going to be found in the streets. . . . It is going to be about as ugly of a scene as I think you can imagine.
I think that that predication unhappily turned out to be correct and one of the things I said was we're racing the clock. Unfortunately, the hurricane beat us,