Department of Homeland Security

The Department of Homeland Security is the United States cabinet department established by the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (Pub. L. 107-296). Its first Secretary, Tom Ridge, took office on January 24, 2003.¹² Under the Act and the Department of Homeland Security Reorganization Plan of November 25, 2002, operating agencies were moved into the new department, among them the United States Secret Service, which was transferred from the United States Department of the Treasury on March 1, 2003.³⁴

Secretaries

The department's official list of Secretaries gives the following dates of service: Tom Ridge, January 24, 2003, to February 1, 2005; Michael Chertoff, February 15, 2005, to January 21, 2009; Janet Napolitano, January 20, 2009, to September 6, 2013; Jeh Charles Johnson, December 23, 2013, to January 20, 2017; John F. Kelly, January 20, 2017, to July 28, 2017; Kirstjen M. Nielsen, December 6, 2017, to April 10, 2019; Alejandro Mayorkas, February 1, 2021, to January 20, 2025; Kristi Noem, January 25, 2025, to March 24, 2026; and Markwayne Mullin, from March 24, 2026. The list names no Secretary for the period between April 10, 2019, and February 1, 2021.¹

Office of Intelligence and Analysis

The department's intelligence office is codified at 6 U.S.C. § 121, which now reads: "There shall be in the Department an Office of Intelligence and Analysis," headed by an "Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis." The section originated in the Homeland Security Act of 2002 as the "Directorate for Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection." Section 531(a)(1) of the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007 (Pub. L. 110-53) added subsections (a) through (c), which created a separate Office of Intelligence and Analysis and a separate Office of Infrastructure Protection. In 2018, Pub. L. 115-278 struck "and Infrastructure Protection" from the section heading, leaving the Office of Intelligence and Analysis as the only entity codified there.²

The department confirmed, through an unnamed spokesperson, that "Rinaldo Nazzaro worked at DHS from 2004 to 2006." Nazzaro, later the founder of The Base, posted a letter he attributed to the department that referred to his work in "DHS/Intelligence Analysis." The department would not authenticate the letter, and no job title has been disclosed.⁵ His claimed tenure falls before the 2007 amendment that gave the Office of Intelligence and Analysis its statutory name.² He cited the employment among the credentials of his security firm, Omega Solutions International.⁶ In April 2025 the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center, a state fusion center affiliated with the department, published an advisory describing Nazzaro as having "for years garnered suspicions of being a Russian intelligence asset."⁷

Technology partnerships and clients

In-Q-Tel, the venture fund chartered by the Central Intelligence Agency, lists the Department of Homeland Security as a limited partner from 2010.⁸ An In-Q-Tel spokeswoman named "DHS (specifically Customs and Border Protection)" among the fund's clients in 2021.⁹ Dewey Murdick, formerly the department's chief analytics officer and deputy chief scientist and an IARPA program manager, joined the founding team of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University in 2019.¹⁰ The department and ICE are among the documented federal clients of the facial recognition company Clearview AI.¹¹ The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point states that it has provided counterterrorism education to the department.¹²

Domestic extremism and enforcement

On March 17, 2021, the department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Justice jointly released the unclassified summary "Domestic Violent Extremism Poses Heightened Threat in 2021," which identified white supremacist extremists as the domestic violent extremists with "the most persistent and concerning transnational connections."¹³

On October 27, 2025, agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained the former Chilean intelligence operative Armando Fernandez Larios in Florida, and in January 2026 the department put him on a published list of the "worst of the worst." He was released on March 19, 2026.¹⁴