Two ex-Homeland chiefs suggest Trump border crackdown hurting terror fight, but quickly get mocked

Two Homeland Security chiefs of the past suggested on the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks on America that President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown might be hurting counterterrorism efforts and called for their old agency to be re-imagined.

But the remarks from Obama-era Secretary Jeh Johnson and Bush-era Secretary Michael Chertoff got a brutal response from the current guardians of the homeland, who noted the 19 hijackers a quarter-century ago slipped through weak border screening and that more than 2,000 foreigners with terror ties were removed from U.S. soil in the last two years alone.

"I guess they keep their front doors unlocked at night," White House counterterrorism chief Sebastian Gorka said mockingly during an interview Friday night on the Just the News, No Noise television show. "...I mean, really, these people must be cretins or, you know, clinical imbeciles. Or they just they're just doing politics."

He also said: "None of the hijackers crawled across the border illegally. They weren't smuggled in by coyotes. They were here legally. They applied for visas" and that "complete lack of coordination 25 years ago between the State Department, the CIA, the FBI" was a fundamental flaw exploited by the terrorists."

You can watch the interview in the video player above.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford, R-Ark., said the suggestions by Chertoff and Johnson created a false choice that wrongly divorced border security from counterterrorism protections.

"We have to walk and chew gum at the same time. Yeah, we've got to protect the homeland. But protecting the homeland means we've got to protect the border," he told Just the News on Friday night. 

"Border security is job one: collecting biometrics on the way in, but also collecting on the way out, knowing who's in the country, where they are, when they are, and when they're leaving, and if they haven't left, why," he also said. 

"Because they're only given a visa for a period of time. And we should be tracking that and making sure that we know who's in the country, for how long, where they are, and when they leave, so that we have a good account of any potential threat that might exist to the homeland."

Both men were reacting to a story published Friday by NBC News that revealed Johnson and Chertoff believed their old Homeland Security Department "has strayed from its core mission" and needs to be reinvented into a new agency with less focus on immigration enforcement,

“The job assignment I was given, and I suspect the job assignment Mike [Chertoff] was given, was to keep this country safe,” Johnson was quoted as saying. “The job assignment in the current administration is to be the hammer for a very aggressive enforcement policy.”

Chertoff, who was Bush's second Homeland Security secretary after the Sept. 11 attacks, agreed the Trump administration was too focused on immigration enforcement overall and nonviolent offenders more specifically.

“I think that we’re spending most of our time worrying about gardeners and home health aides and getting them thrown out of the country, as opposed to focusing on people that actually are doing a lot of damage,” Chertoff said. 

“And so there has to be some balance between enforcing even routine laws and focusing on the threats that would have real consequence if they came to fruition.” 

The current Homeland Security Department strongly disputed their ex-bosses' assessments.

“Counterterrorism and immigration enforcement go hand in hand”," the department told NBC. "...Under President Trump’s leadership, ICE is targeting these public safety threats. DHS has been recruiting, reforming, and modernizing at a record pace – including in areas of counterterrorism.”

Homeland earlier in the week released new data showing how immigration enforcement was directly tied to counterterrorism, revealing that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested more than 2,150 known or suspected terrorists between Jan. 20, 2025, and Sept. 9, 2026, and deported 2,015 of them.

Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst and chief of staff to the National Security Council, told the John Solomon Reports podcast that NBC deserved part of the blame for airing a story suggesting border security doesn't affect counterterrorism.

"NBC is in the tank with the left," he said. "It's in the tank with the Biden administration, anything Trump proposes, they're against. They're just finding ways to denigrate something that most Americans think is working. They don't want to see an open border."

He also suggested that Johnson and Chertoff are tied to Washington's elitist circles, far removed from the reality of Americans who suffered years of border crime under President Joe Biden.

"There's all these people who want to be accepted in the Georgetown cocktail receptions, and that means they have to oppose things that Trump wants to do," Fleitz said. 

"Chertoff is certainly one of those people. He's a never Trumper. He has a consulting firm that is not supportive of Trump in any way. He's part of this Bush alliance of people who were not serious about national security, and Trump had to fix up many of the problems they caused."