Ali Noorani [00:00:18] This week, why the Biden administration needs to balance compassion and national security and the policies that can help them do so.
Elizabeth Neumann [00:00:25] It sends a very strong signal to the rest of the world that we, the American people, are welcoming those who are in dire straits, that we want to be a generous and hospitable country. And we are rejecting the nationalism and the closed doors isolationism that Trump is in represented.
Ali Noorani [00:00:44] From the National Immigration Forum, I’m Ali Noorani, and this is Only in America. When Joe Biden takes office, this week is expected that his administration will prioritize rescinding Trump’s Muslim ban or travel ban almost immediately, a welcome end to a terrible policy. While this will be an encouraging step, it does not end the conversation on security and immigration, as Elizabeth Neuman explains the latest paper, the Trump administration’s travel bans damaged our nation’s reputation and an unnecessary distraction from needed security enhancements. Nationality has not been proven to correlate to terrorism, nor has religion. Elizabeth, who worked in the Department of Homeland Security under Trump, speaks from firsthand experience when she says that the bans were a thinly veiled political move that damaged the country’s reputation and security interests. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter what the policy is, when the motives behind it are clearly xenophobic, it’s likely to do us more harm than good. Rescinding the travel ban early on would send a signal to immigrant communities and our allies abroad that we are rejecting the nationalism and isolation of the past four years. Building an immigration system that meets our security needs while honoring our values as a welcoming nation is no simple task. But it’s one the United States government can and should accomplish.
Underwriting [00:02:39] Support for the National Immigration Forum comes from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, supporting innovations in education, democratic engagement and strengthening international peace and security and from Humanity United. When humanity is united, we can bring a powerful force for human dignity.
Ali Noorani [00:03:04] As I mentioned earlier, Elizabeth Newman recently authored a paper on the impacts and the future of the travel ban, and today she’s joining us on Only in America. Elizabeth was working at the Department of Homeland Security under the Trump administration at the time the first travel ban was announced. And since leaving the administration, Elizabeth had become an outspoken critic of Trump’s rhetoric and policies. She’s a senior adviser to the National Immigration Forum on National Security Matters and a former DHS assistant secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention. In her most recent paper for the Forum, she outlines the harms inflicted by the bans and makes recommendations to the Biden administration about how to rescind them, while also maintaining appropriate security measures. In our conversation, we discuss how to make our country safer by creating the immigration system that treats migrants with compassion.
Ali Noorani [00:03:55] Elizabeth, thank you so much for joining. I really appreciate your time. I know it’s an incredibly busy time for everybody, but particularly for you. So thank you.
Elizabeth Neumann [00:04:03] Thanks for having me, Ali. It’s just been such an honor to be able to work with the Forum and be able to work on some of the things that I thought went wrong and the last four years and think through how we might be able to fix them.
Ali Noorani [00:04:16] Well, I know on behalf of everybody on staff of the forum, we really enjoy working with you and also learning from you. So let’s jump right into this. Over the last couple of months, you’ve been working with us in terms of advising the Forum on national security issues and with particular respect to what the Biden administration should be thinking about in the first hundred days with respect to lifting the travel ban and raising the refugee ceiling. So even before we start to kind of get to the top lines of those reports, tell me a little bit about what you bring to these particular issues in terms of your expertize over time. And then we can talk to your puppy in the background a little bit later on in the conversation. So tell me a little about yourself.
Elizabeth Neumann [00:04:58] Yeah, so I moved into Homeland Security shortly after it became an enterprise in 2003. And I worked in the Bush administration White House. And at the time I was on the domestic counterterrorism directorate, which that term meant I was looking at foreign terrorist threats to the homeland. So it wasn’t what we have been talking about more recently in terms of domestic terrorism. And during that process, I got exposed to a number of different policy issues, particularly around screening and vetting, information sharing, many of the things that the 9/11 Commission acknowledged is leading to the failure that led to 9/11 and all of the policy fixes that came out of the 9/11 Commission. It was an honor to serve back then, and the Bush administration I left in 2006, did some consulting work, ended up coming back as a contractor to work in the ODNI for about four years. And then, you know, life happened. I got married, I had kids. We ended up moving around the country following my husband’s career. In 2017 a friend of mine called and asked me to come into the Trump administration. She actually asked three times. I said no the first two times, and by the third time I was sufficiently concerned that the people that were coming in to serve didn’t have backgrounds with the experience necessary to help the Department of Homeland Security. So after a lot of prayer and discussions with my husband, we decided to go ahead and move back to Washington, D.C. And I served as the deputy chief of staff for about a year, Under Secretary Kelly and then Acting Secretary Duke and a short period of Secretary Nielson’s tenure. And around the second year of the administration, I moved to our policy office and became the assistant secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention and came to the conclusion that the security was being used as a cover for more nefarious intense.
Ali Noorani [00:07:02] So let’s focus first on the travel ban. This was one of the first actions by the Trump administration when they came into office in 2017 and went through many iterations over the course of the first few months of the administration. And now the incoming Biden administration is in a position to lift that ban. So from your perspective on the report that you wrote, what’s the national security case to lift the travel ban?
Elizabeth Neumann [00:07:26] I’d like to start with the the argument that they used for the security justification on its face, the idea of encouraging countries to strengthen their internal standards for identity management and information sharing. That’s a good thing, and that’s, I hope, what comes across in the paper that we wrote that there are some good tools that came out of this process. But it became really apparent as we worked on it, that the president’s primary interest is adding countries to the list like there was there was pressure being placed on the various cabinet secretaries that served at DHS over the years, there was pressure put on them by the president, when are we going to add somebody to the list? So it wasn’t actually from a security justification standpoint, it was more this vision that they had of preventing certain types of countries from being able to allow their individuals to travel to our country. Once that kind of clicked in for me, I did my best to protect my team from having to be involved in politics that were clearly at play. And we made some very strong cases, worked with lawyers, worked with people at the State Department to try to build an argument that you didn’t want to immediately ban a country, you wanted to démarche them first, work with them to see if they could fix some of the deficiencies, give them a legitimate period of time to be able to fix them, and then if they’re unwilling to fix those deficiencies, then sure, start adding slowly but surely certain types of travel restrictions to certain categories of either nonimmigrant visa or visa applicants. And we were somewhat successful in the second round of being able to kind of lessen the pain of what might have originally envisioned. So much so I suspect that part of the tension that I felt, especially in the last year when I was serving, that I was not exactly well liked by many in the West Wing. So I think that in that sense, I look at that moment of being able to try to steer the travel ban in a very narrowly tailored way, trying to tie it to security standards as much as possible. I’m proud of that because I do think that had myself and several others not been there to try to keep this very narrowly tailored, we would have ended up with a lot more countries banned. That said, now that I’m on the outside, it’s very refreshing to be able to say we can leverage these security tools that have been built without having to ban countries. Like there, again, is security value in the assessments that were run and identifying where their deficiencies in identity management and information sharing. But you can achieve the enhancement of security without having to issue a travel ban.
Ali Noorani [00:10:28] So then where there were other national security implications, consequences, let me put it that way, for having the ban in place in terms of our relationships with other countries, our ability to keep the US safe, were there kind of collateral consequences that people may not have realized?
Elizabeth Neumann [00:10:46] Absolutely. I remember the initial travel ban, which I was not involved with because it was an order that came from the White House, had some of our strong military partners listed, and that caused significant problems for DOD. I’m sure that it’s not obvious to the average American, but a lot of the ways that we have been prosecuting the war on terror is not necessarily by sending our own troops, or a significant number of troops, to a place where Al-Qaida is operating, but rather we train and support other countries to be able to rid themselves of that problem that might be manifesting in their borders. So if we criticize a country, it usually, in normal circumstances, any time you’re going to take action against a country that is a strong military partner, that’s done in consultation with DOD and State Department, there’s this balancing and weighing of is this need to pressure a country for this this objective? Does that outweigh the military’s objectives and needs to have a strong partnership with that country? So the most obvious practical consequence were some of those military relationships were damaged in 2017, and you saw an effort to quickly try to alleviate that. When the second round of travel restrictions came out in September 2017, they removed a few of the countries that had been originally on the list, mainly because of pressure from Secretary Mattis and those in the military world. But more broadly than that, it certainly damaged our reputation because it was just such a thinly veiled xenophobic effort, starting from the president’s commentary on the campaign trail, we called it a Muslim ban. And even though I’ve been told I didn’t go back and do this research to know for sure, but what I was told is that he only used that phrase once, but it has stuck with this effort in perpetuity at this point. So everybody knows what he was trying to do when that order originally came out that first weekend of January, further that if everybody remembers that weekend when it came out, the Department of Homeland Security was completely caught flat footed. They did not know it was coming out. I think Secretary Kelly tried to take the hits for it, so to speak. I think history will show that this was one of Stephen Miller’s first efforts to try to implement his agenda. And since this is a guy that has never worked in the executive branch, he really didn’t know how something like that requires extensive coordination and planning before you can just say it goes into effect immediately. And so you had chaos in airports and customs, ports of entry where people were not sure how to implement it. DHS employees not sure how to interpret it. And, of course, it caused fear and panic, and a number of people that were planning to travel or were on their way, it just was a disaster. And, of course, that made news around the world. So it immediately honed in like one of the first acts of this presidency is to implement what he called on the campaign trail, a Muslim ban. So that sent a chilling effect across the world that America was changing, that the messages that had been sent by President Bush, by President Obama, that we are not at war with Islam, we are at war with terrorists. That clearly was- there was a shift there in the world’s mind that, no, America only wants people of maybe the Christian and Jewish base to be here. You add to it some of the other rhetoric related to building a wall, Mexican invasions or Hispanic invasions. And you very quickly get this picture that they only wanted white people to be able to migrate. And that was further emphasized in some of the leaks that came out about the president saying we need more people from Sweden or we don’t want people from those asshole countries kind of referring to countries that are not as developed, right? And you really started to get the sense that whether he realizes it or not, there was a very strong bias and preference towards white Anglo-Saxon countries as opposed to what the majority of the world is made up of. So when you would go overseas and as a homeland security official, I didn’t have to do this nearly as much as, say, state or the intelligence community or the military, but you would occasionally get together with your counterparts in other countries and they could detect where I personally stood on those things. But they would make comments about, man, you guys really changed. And is this how America really is and is this going to be the way it is forever? I mean, it was concerning to our allies because they you could see them making decisions about, OK, maybe we need to partner with somebody else. Maybe we need to share information with somebody else because you guys do not seem very trustworthy.
Ali Noorani [00:16:10] So then in that context, how should the public understand what hopefully President Biden will do in terms of lifting this ban? So it looks the upside of lifting the travel ban or the Muslim ban?
Elizabeth Neumann [00:16:21] Well, there’s been such a stain on the United States that there is no way to salvage what Trump did. And that, sadly, is going to be true in a number of his policies. It’s funny, even after the horrific events of what happened at the Capitol last week, you still have people that keep trying to point to but the policies and look at all the good that he did. And even if you are a conservative and want those types of policies, there’s just no way to get around the racism, the xenophobia that pollutes the intention behind those policies. So I think you’re going to see a kind of a pendulum swing here of needing to completely denounce that for the sake of not just the world recognizing that that we, the United States, the people of the United States in electing Joe Biden have said, no, we reject what Trump stood for. But you also need to do that for the people here in the United States who have been marginalized and living in fear for the last four years, whether you are a US citizen or undocumented. This has been a fearful place for people of color to live in the last four years and sending that signal by removing the travel ban, saying this is not who we are as Americans, this is not what we stand for, is one small step and beginning to recover the state that we have been in. I think we have a lot more that we have to do to rebuild our reputation, but this is it’s almost like a necessary precondition for us to begin to rebuild.
Ali Noorani [00:18:05] Let’s transition to the refugee ceiling. So over the course of the Trump administration, you know, I think when Obama left office, the refugee resettlement cap was at one hundred and twenty five thousand and year after year of the Trump administration, that was whittled down so that in fiscal year 2021 and that’s the fiscal year that Biden takes in the transition, I think the number is down to fifteen thousand. And that’s a historic low for the program. Let’s go through the same process, right? What was the rationale by the Trump administration to whittle down and really just drastic cuts to the refugee resettlement cap?
Elizabeth Neumann [00:18:41] So the arguments, and I’m just going to lay it out as it was explained to me, not justifying them. The arguments in 2017 were look what happened to Europe in 2015, 2016 with the massive flood of refugees coming out of Syria and Northern Africa. It poses a challenge because our European allies are not doing as good of a job in screening and vetting those refugees. And so there’s a risk that you might have terrorists from ISIS, terrorists from Al-Qaida, terrorists from Hamas that may blend in or maybe they’re escaping something, too. But nonetheless, they’re they’re moving with this massive group of people, and it’s just so overwhelming the infrastructure in Europe that it might be easy for them through legitimate or illegitimate means, and there’s a lot of organized crime in various parts of Europe, so passport fraud is is a definite problem. And if they could obtain a passport, then those countries that are part of the visa waiver program, it would allow them to quickly be able to get to the United States with very little screening. Now, there are a lot of flaws in that argument, and one of the programs I oversaw was the visa waiver program. And that program alone, the way that we vet an individual who has asked to become a part of it, I’m fairly confident that today we would be able to detect somebody that was trying to get here, that that isn’t who they say they are. But the big picture, and this was a concern both for Democrats and Republicans, and there were laws that were passed during that period in 2015, 2016 to try to make sure that we had our guard up, that we were taking this potential threat seriously. So that was the context. And then, of course, you had Obama’s response to the horrible plight of refugees was to increase the ceiling, which was a good thing, in my view. But the challenge was there was a pressure to process a lot of people in a very short period of time. And the system that we currently use for processing refugees over at the US CIS – Citizenship and Immigration Services. They are, especially back then, were largely paper based and did not have built into their structure the ability to scale that quickly. They are and this gets kind of nuance, but their whole budget is not an appropriation from Congress as much as it is fee-based. So money that is used or paid as a fee to USCIS, say, as part of your visa application, funds the rest of the agency. So refugee services are directly tied to those dollars that come in through other immigration benefits. Why does that matter? It means that it’s not a particularly easy thing to scale up to hire people. I mean, my own personal experience of hiring people in the federal government, it can take up to a year. So if you jump the ceiling number really high, you have a problem of they don’t have enough people. Their IT systems literally were non-existent because they all paper based. So it’s not easy to keep track of where individuals are in the pipeline. And then you also have on the other side – something I’m less familiar with, but a lot of the ways that we process refugees is through partner relationships. So that includes the U.N. and that includes nonprofit organizations here in the United States that help resettle families. So the entire system was pressured, and in that pressure, it is possible, though to my knowledge, it is not proven documented. It is possible that people were rushed through without as stringent of vetting as we might like. So when you come into office in 2017, a lot of people were raising the alarm that did we let people in that weren’t properly vetted? And there were some cases, it was documented in the executive order, there were some cases of refugees that had come to the United States that now had open investigations into them for counterterrorism connections. And I think it’s important to note that usually there’s a lag there, the fact that they were documenting that in 2017 and an executive order, I think that came out March, means that those individuals probably didn’t arrive under the Obama surge. They probably arrived under previous years, and it wasn’t directly tied to the Syrian refugee crisis.
Ali Noorani [00:23:27] And I think even in the report, it was when you look at the total number of refugees, it was a minuscule percentage. I want to say it was like one percent.
Elizabeth Neumann [00:23:36] Right, exactly. And when you compare it to the entire population of people that immigrate here, it’s it’s the refugees are not disproportionately represented in counterterrorism cases, right? So it’s not that you’re not going to have failures from time to time, but the administration, in my view, overly sold that argument that we are in dire straits of terrorists being able to infiltrate through the refugee system. And therefore, we have to shut it all down or we need to reduce the ceiling. Now, from a security perspective, there is no doubt that we need it to help USCIS strengthen some of their capabilities. They have this IT modernization project that’s been underway that’s going to help make sure that human error on paper doesn’t take place because they’re they’re now moving to electronic records. And there were opportunities to strengthen the way that we vetted. Because the old way of vetting, which is still in use today, but the old way is it is very manual and leads to sometimes longer processing times than are necessary. And one of the advents that came around during the Trump administration, but I would argue was not necessarily a Trump administration idea, it just was maybe the latest iteration of screening and vetting capability and information sharing proposals that really date back to the 9/11 Commission. But the National Vetting Center came online about two years ago, and they are in the process of incorporating the refugee population into their processes. And once they do that, we should be able to do the security side of screening of refugees so much more faster than we could with the old manual way of doing it. So there are some bright spots in the last few years of of being able to enhance our screening and vetting by modernizing and leveraging technology. Sadly, though, and the moment that I realized that this wasn’t about security was actually related to the ceiling number. For two years we had told partners- I met with many of the people that help process refugees or resettle refugees here in the United States in 2018. And I was explaining to them what we’re trying to do with the vetting center and how this is going to help. And over time you should see the number go up that we lowered the number to be accurate to what we felt like we could operationally process, and now in the future it should go up. But the exact opposite happened. We made these improvements. We were able to process faster, and instead the number kept going down. And it became very obvious to me when I had been a part of those conversations for two years, and then I was excluded, as were several of my counterparts, that had similar views. It became very clear that the intention was eventually to get the number to zero. And I think the only reason it ended up at fifteen thousand this last year instead of zero is because everybody knew with with covid processing was going to be slow anyway. But but yes, I mean the intent by certain individuals in this administration, not all a lot of people in this administration fought very hard – some of them lost their jobs over fighting for a higher refugee ceiling. There were a few handful of powerful people that made it their mission to try to ensure that we accepted as few refugees as possible.
Ali Noorani [00:27:08] So with the changes in the vetting system that were in kind of motion before the Trump administration, but really, as you’re saying, kind of came to fall into place during the Trump administration, for Biden, is there a national security case to raise the refugee ceiling?
Elizabeth Neumann [00:27:25] Absolutely. Again, as the strongest, most obvious argument is our reputation in the world has been so damaged by Trump’s rhetoric, by Trump’s actions, and it’s just so patently obvious to everybody that it’s racist and xenophobic. So returning the refugee ceiling to at least the norm, if not higher, which is what he has indicated he wants to do, sends a very strong signal to the rest of the world that we, the American people, are a people of welcoming those who are in dire straits, that that we want to be a generous and hospitable country, and we are rejecting the nationalism and the closed doors isolationism that Trumpism represented. So the signal alone is super important. But I would also argue one of the things that I had the privilege to to do during my tenure was to visit some of the refugee processing centers where we would do the interviews, the screening of individuals to determine whether they were eligible for resettling in the United States. And I also visited some of the U.N. camps in the Greek islands. This is well after the surge of 2016. But they continue to receive, and I think it was in the news in the last year that they had a kind of a resurgence of of people, again, trying to cross from Turkey into those Greek islands. And the main point of me being there was to look at and understand their screening mechanisms and which, getting down to the database level, which database is talking to which database and how we would get flags if a known terrorist showed up and what happens then. And so, you know, we were getting more into the security side, but just the being there and seeing individuals enduring what, quite frankly, is unimaginable to me, I can’t imagine having to leave your everything that you know is home for the sake of survival and taking very risky journeys. I’m sure most people listening as podcast remember the the images of the people that drowned and trying to cross the it’s kind of a small, it’s a short path between Turkey and these Greek islands, but you could see it with your eyes. But it’s still it’s not something you could swim unless you’re a super strong swimmer. And many of the boats that were being used were overflowing with people and they sank and, you know, just horrible pictures of people washing up on shore, drowning, having drowned and kind of being in that place in that moment and trying to put yourself in the position of the moms and dads and the teenagers that were there without anybody. You started to realize, it is really urgent to create opportunity for them to have hope and for them to feel like they are on their way to being able to get to normalcy again. And that’s the concern I had, and I saw it more more poignantly in Egypt, there were protesters outside of our resettlement processing center. And I turned to my host and said, what are they protesting? And they said, well, that happens every time that we have a circuit and we have our officers in town because many of them have been waiting for 10 years for an answer. And at that point, you’re like 10 years? Why is it taking 10 years to say, yes, you can come or no, you can’t come? And it was learning opportunity for me that once you get put in the queue by the U.N. For destination us, you are not allowed to say never mind I don’t want to go to the U.S. I want to go to Germany. You are in that queue waiting for a yes or no answer and for you to wait for 10 years, especially in certain countries, where those countries are not in a financial position to be able to help refugees very much, they may allow you to work. Many of them do not. They may allow your children to go to school. Many of them do not. So you’re living a scraping by, and of course, it creates opportunities for human trafficking, sexual abuse. It’s just a very, very difficult set of circumstances that refugees are enduring. And the longer that you leave them there waiting, the more that they are vulnerable to bad actors potentially grooming them for other things, it could be grooming them for sex trafficking. It could be grooming them to join violent extremism. It really left an impression on me that not only do we need to raise the ceiling and help where we can, but this problem is massive. Ali maybe you can help me with the numbers. I think it’s 79 million that are displaced at this point. Is that right?
Ali Noorani [00:32:20] It’s approximately 70 million, yeah.
Elizabeth Neumann [00:32:21] Yeah, so we’re talking about bringing in one hundred and twenty five thousand, hopefully next year. That’s nothing. It’s a drop in the bucket. So we really have to get back to the table with partners around the globe to figure out how we deal with this. We can’t have that many people in the world that vulnerable and expect that it won’t eventually turn into an extremism problem. That’s not to say that I want to be really, really, really, really clear, because it’s been so perverted by this administration. We have no evidence that refugees are more likely to be terrorists than any other population set. And refugees are the most vetted population of anybody that sets foot in the United States. That is so important to understand, but if we do not address this problem of 70, 80 million people, and that they’re expecting the numbers to go up, that are displaced and left in limbo, not all of them are left in limbo for 10 years, but if you’re left in limbo for 10 years, that is a ripe place for people to have a lot of grievance and a lot of the risk factors that extremism experts look at when somebody is committing an attack or join an extremist group. We have researchers that go back and say, well, what what were the contributing factors that led them down that path? What I’m suggesting is that by not addressing this, we will still be dealing with this 10, 15, 20 years down the road. But just in a different form, it’s absolutely critical for us to start helping refugees again and get back to that global table and discuss how we we solve the bigger crisis.
Ali Noorani [00:34:08] For the purposes of this conversation, let’s assume that President Biden moves forward with raising the ceiling for refugee resettlement and lifting the travel ban. So we know that if he does that, when he does that, that the opposition will say that these are two moves that are a security threat to the American worker and their families. So my question to you is, what do you say to the American worker and their family who are scared and are going to be fed information that will just tap into that fear?
Elizabeth Neumann [00:34:38] There was this theory that it was an economic drain on the United States or that a refugee would steal and Americans job and none of the facts back that up. So the first thing is to look at the actual facts and not necessarily the political arguments. But the second thing I would say is empathy goes a long way to distilling fear. And so if there’s opportunities to to participate in a local nonprofit that helps refugees or quite frankly, any immigrants that are new to our country that might need help with learning the English language or adapting to a very different culture, I think that opens our eyes a little bit to realize that there’s not much to fear there. They’re human beings just like us, and they have amazing stories and interesting perspectives. And they are a rich blessing to our community, and I would encourage if you do have somebody in your family or friends that are fearful, look for opportunities, usually yelling at people doesn’t change their minds, but look for opportunities to expose them to individuals that have had that immigration experience. And usually that’s where you see the most powerful changes when people are looking at somebody’s face to face and realizing, wow, they’re they’re just like me. They just have a different experience than I do.
Ali Noorani [00:36:03] Are you hopeful about the future?
Elizabeth Neumann [00:36:05] I am ever the optimist, but it is a dark time in our country and I am very relieved that we have a new administration coming in that is going to try to fix these problems. But they have a really hard set of tasks in front of them. These are not simple solutions in particular about the southern border and the pandemic and the complications associated with determining when we allow people to come back to the United States and declare asylum. Those are not my areas of expertize at all, but I know enough about it to know that it’s extremely complex. So, you know, I would certainly encourage your listeners to, if they’re of the praying type, to pray for wisdom, to encourage the men and women that are coming into the Biden administration in the Department of Homeland Security that have those tough decisions to make, that they would find the right balance there of being welcoming and opening and also addressing our security needs. I think that can be done. But I also don’t want to whitewash it and pretend that it’s easy. And I also think there’s room for grace. They may make some missteps or that maybe they’re not throwing open the doors as fast as everybody wishes that they would. One of the things my husband often comments on is, you know, I would come home and explain some of the back story behind a decision and he would say, wow, well, that makes a lot more sense. But none of that is in the public domain. So they don’t, you know, the public just sees this other side and it’s so easy to judge. So I think it would be a really great thing to offer grace to our public officials coming into the Biden administration. They have a really tough job on their hands. And there’s often more to the story than we get to see in the public. So certainly encouraging them to do the right thing, hold them accountable, but also offer grace that there’s probably more to the story than we might see out in the public.
Ali Noorani [00:38:11] And then last question for you. The name of the podcast is Only in America. So the request is just to finish the sentence. Only in America…
Elizabeth Neumann [00:38:20] Oh, Only in America. Wow. I could see so many things. Only in America can we endure what we did in the last four years and the mistakes that were made, and through the blessing of our democratic republic in the Constitution and the guardrails that, so far have held. They’re very bruised right now, but they’ve held. Can we have the opportunity to fix a lot of brokenness, and I hope that good men and women recognize that there is so much more to healing our country that happens in our neighborhoods and in our communities and not in Washington, D.C., but the way that we structured our country here in America. It’s always been about letting the people lead, letting the people demonstrate compassion and care for their neighbors. So I still have great hope for our country. There are a lot of really good people here. It’s going to take each of us being neighborly, putting down our judgment and being kind to one another, learning, learning how to be kind again to recover from the last four years.
Ali Noorani [00:39:35] Elizabeth, thank you so much for not just the time, but for everything that you’ve taught us of the Forum and your leadership role. It is really, really, really a critical juncture in our history. So thank you.
Elizabeth Neumann [00:39:44] Thanks for having me. I am so thankful for the Forum and the ten years of really important work that you guys have done. And I’m really hopeful that we see some of the fruit of that labor in the coming years.
Ali Noorani [00:40:09] Elizabeth Newman is a national security expert and former homeland security official. You can learn more about Elizabeth and read both of her new national security papers at our website, ImmigrationForum.org/Podcast. If you like what you hear, subscribe to Only in America, wherever you’re listening to this episode, and stay tuned for next week’s episode. We’ll be discussing the future of legal immigration under President Biden. Only in America is produced and edited by Joanna Taylor and Becka Wall. Our artwork and graphics are designed by Karla Leyja. I’m Ali Noorani. I will talk to you next week.