Janet Napolitano becomes homeland security secretary

On 21 January 2009 Janet Napolitano, the Democratic governor of Arizona, was confirmed by the Senate and sworn in as U.S. secretary of homeland security in Barack Obama's administration. She was the first woman to lead the department and served until September 2013.

Appointment, enforcement choices and accountability

The immediate civil-rights question in January 2009 was whether the new homeland security secretary would reduce the harmful effects of immigration enforcement while retaining the security powers expanded after September 2001. President Barack Obama selected Janet Napolitano on 1 December 2008 after she had governed the border state of Arizona since 2003. The Senate confirmed her on 20 January 2009, and she took the departmental oath on 21 January. She inherited immigration agencies responsible for border arrests, detention and removals as well as national emergency response and counterterrorism. Her Arizona tenure had combined support for border enforcement with opposition to some punitive state immigration proposals.

In 2009 the department shifted some workplace operations toward employer audits rather than highly visible workplace raids; its enforcement priorities continued to pursue recent unauthorized border crossers and noncitizens with criminal convictions. The Migration Policy Institute's December 2009 assessment described greater use of employer sanctions, targeted criminal priorities and attempts to change immigrant detention arrangements. The wider protection of minority rights question remained acute: formal removals reached almost 420,000 in fiscal 2012, and 2014 analysis documented the growing use of rapid removal procedures with limited judicial review. In fiscal 2013, border removals accounted for about 70 percent of removals, while interior removals of noncriminals had fallen compared with 2009. Those were system-wide outcomes, not actions attributable to one cabinet secretary alone.

Napolitano left DHS in September 2013 to lead the University of California. Her term illustrates a contested tradeoff between expanded enforcement capacity and procedural protections for migrants. It also placed immigration enforcement inside the Obama administration's wider debate over political competition: executive priorities moved while congressional legislation stalled. The distinction between an appointment, an operational decision and a measured social consequence is especially important because the 2009 oath itself did not establish whether enforcement became fairer.