 Okay. Okay, all set. Okay. Good afternoon. It is wonderful to be with you today and I want to welcome you to the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. I am Interim Dean of the School and founding director of our Center for Racial Justice Celeste Watkins Hayes. I'm delighted to welcome you all here this afternoon for today's Policy Talks event, the Ford School's annual event in honor of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. featuring the former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security J. Johnson. It's exciting to see so many members of our Ford School community gathered here and to welcome many of you from across the campus and beyond who I know are tuning in virtually. This event is part of the University of Michigan's annual Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Symposium, one of the largest university celebrations honoring the life and work of Dr. King. This year's symposium theme, the revolution of MLK from segregation to elevation, explores Dr. King's activism after 1964 highlighting the evolution of King's primary focus on segregation to a broader, more radical and revolutionary platform that included health, economics, and education. Like Dr. King, our guest speaker today is a graduate of Morehouse College in HBCU in Atlanta as we know and Columbia University where he earned his law degree. Now in private practice in New York City, J. Johnson served as U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security under President Obama and earlier as general counsel of the Department of Defense in the administration. He remains a regular commentator on NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, Fox, and Bloomberg TV. Secretary Johnson will kick off today's event by reflecting on the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and what that means to him as a fellow Morehouse alumnus. Following his remarks, we'll sit down for a conversation alongside some of our faculty experts here in the front row, John Chichari and Chen Lin and Javed Ali to reflect on questions submitted by the Ford School community. With that, I ask you to please join me in welcoming today's special guest, Secretary J. Johnson. Thank you, Dean, very much. It's nice to be back here in Ann Arbor. One day, I will visit Michigan when it is not cold. Had a chance to visit with Debbie Dingle a moment ago. She was here. She left. I'll see her tonight for dinner. Last time I was in Ann Arbor, I was in office. It was 2015. I was with her, her husband, and John Conyers. I noted then that before me represented 110 years of service as Michigan's representative in Congress. Debbie was quick to point out she was only one of those 110 years. It's an honor for me to be here in Ann Arbor to deliver this dress at the school named for Gerald Ford. I was in high school then college when Gerald Ford was president. In my view, Gerald Ford sets a standard for public service as a modest honorable and decent American. He left office as a defeated incumbent, but in the day sense, history has been kind to his legacy as it should be. I served as your Secretary of Homeland Security for 1,124 days. I was counting. I had an app on my phone that counted down the days, hours, minutes until January 20, 2017 at noon when I was going to leave office. And I had a fantasy about how I was going to leave office. I was going to, at the moment, the new president, no matter who he or she was, the moment that person took the oath of office, I was going to, and succeed Barack Obama, I was going to stand up, push back from my desk at DHS headquarters, walk out, wave goodbye to my secret service detail, get behind the wheel of my own car and drive home to our permanent home in Montclair, New Jersey, and wake up the next day a normal person with no bodyguards surrounding my house. Didn't happen that way. For the second time, I was selected to be the designated survivor. A lot of people are fascinated with designated survivor. There's a TV show called Designated Survivor. I was in the presidential line of succession. President, you public policy students all know this, President, Vice President, Speaker of the House, President Pro Tem of the Senate, and then the Cabinet in the order of the seniority of the Cabinet Department. And since DHS is the newest Cabinet-level department, I was last in the presidential line of succession, but I got called to this duty twice. You cannot have all those people in one place at one time in case disaster strikes. So one person has to absent themselves from the situation, whether it's an inauguration or State of the Union, and go off to an undisclosed location. And I got that duty twice. And the second time, the first time I went to the undisclosed location, and I can't disclose it because it's undisclosed. And the last time, they just said, just leave Washington and go home a day early, which I did. And it's not as exciting as you think it is. When you go to the undisclosed location, you sit there and you watch the President's remarks on TV, and then when the President's back in the residence, you get to go home and you get to bring the White House chef with you, which is the nicest part of it, and a nice glass of wine. So interestingly, interestingly, you heard from the Dean that I'm on TV in my post- government life, a fair amount. I get recognized more now than I did when I was in office. When I was in office, I was determined to raise morale within the Department of Homeland Security, which is at the bottom of the list. And I was going to raise morale if it killed me. In 2016, my last year of office, I even went to BWI airport and I literally put on a TSA uniform and worked the line with the TSA officers at BWI, passed the bins, the grumpy passengers, have a nice flight, yeah, yeah, yeah. And no one recognized me. No one, not even most of the TSOs recognized me. I thought by working with them, passing the bins with them, I would raise morale. I had to tell people, do you know who I am? And there was this one elderly couple on their way to their granddaughter's wedding in North Carolina. The wife was in a wheelchair. I helped them through the magnetometers, then I decided to escort them down to their gate. And I finally said to them, I'm Jay Johnson. Do you know who I am? And the husband said, yes, you're Jay Johnson, you just told me. I said, no, no, no. Do you see this patch on the side of my uniform here that says Department of Homeland Security? I'm the head of this whole department. And the wife said, well, thank you very much. Congratulations on your promotion, young man. I get recognized a lot more now. A couple years ago, I was in Martha's Vineyard and an HSI agent recognized me in a restaurant. And we started talking, Mr. Secretary, good to see you again. And I said, good to see you too. I don't remember meeting you. But I know who you are. Good to see you, Mr. Chertoff. Then I had the weirdest things happen to me around trains and airplanes. One day at a train station, somebody said a couple years ago, did anybody ever tell you, you look just like that guy, Jay Johnson? I said, no, as a matter of fact, no one's ever told me that. And on the Assella, I had testified before Congress in 2017, the year after I left office, about Russian interference into our 2016 election. I testified before the House Intel Committee, must have been on a lot of news shows that night because the next day on the Assella, going back home from Washington to Northern New Jersey, it seemed like everybody was recognizing me. Everyone recognized me. The guy next to me, the two people across from me, the ladies on the other end of the car. And I went to the cafe car to get my usual cheese and crackers plate on the Assella. And their line was very long. And this lady, too in front of me in the line, looked at me like that. And she takes out her iPhone. And I could see she's queuing up the camera function on the iPhone. And she approached me. And she said, and I was wearing shirt sleeves. And I was wearing these cufflinks that I got from the White House. And this lady said, sir, I'm from the United Kingdom. And my son, back in the United Kingdom, admires you greatly. And admired all the wonderful things that you did in office. You know where this is going, right? Okay. And it would be a great honor to me if I could have a selfie with you that I could show my son. And I was so touched. I was so flattered. I said, of course we can have a selfie. And she took the selfie and she turned around and she said, thank you, Mr. President. And then my absolute favorite. I was at Reagan National in October 2021. And I was flying from Reagan National to a family reunion in Bristol, Virginia. You know, to get from one place in Virginia to another place in Virginia on an airplane, you got to go through Atlanta and change. But anyway, I was in the TSA line, and I had my boarding pass and I had taken out my driver's license. And you know, in some airports, they have that video of the Secretary of Homeland Security saying, if you see something, say something. And I'm standing there, minding my own business. And all of a sudden, I hear my voice. This is five years after I've left office. Hi, I'm Jay Johnson, Secretary of Homeland Security, and it was my video on the tape. Five years, I'm a private citizen waiting in the line. And everybody else in the line was like, and I got up to the front and the TSA officer said to me, lower your mask, please. And I couldn't help it. I said, look behind you. Anyway, I am pleased to be here to reflect on the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a 1948 graduate of Morehouse College. Three of the biggest influences in Dr. King's life were his father, who also graduated from Morehouse, the theologian Howard Thurman, who graduated from Morehouse the same year as Dr. King's father, and Benjamin Mays, the revered president of Morehouse, who was Dr. King's mentor, and delivered his eulogy on the Morehouse campus. I see another Morehouse man back there. Two, okay. I am a 1979 graduate of Morehouse College. I have been inspired and influenced by many of the same people and things that inspired and influenced Dr. King. When I arrived at Morehouse in August 1975, Dr. King had been dead for seven years, but I could still feel his presence on campus in the city of Atlanta. Some of the faculty at Morehouse in the 1970s were faculty in the 1940s when Dr. King was a student. I lived in Howard Thurman Hall for three years. Dr. Mays was our president emeritus, but he still had a large presence on campus. Martin Luther King Sr. came by campus once in a while to preach a sermon about how he didn't hate anybody, despite the murder of his son and his wife. I am a classmate of Martin Luther King III, my study partner and friend of 45 years. As such, I consider myself a student and disciple of Martin Luther King, though a flawed and imperfect one, the moment I became involved in national security. We are here today to celebrate Dr. King's birthday. He would have been 94 yesterday. The very first effort to make Dr. King's birthday a national holiday was just four days after Dr. King was assassinated when Congressman Conyers of Michigan offered a bill to make it so. The movement to make Dr. King's birthday gain momentum in Atlanta in the 1970s. I believe I was an eye witness to history. In 1977, Martin III invited me to attend a strategy meeting hosted by his mother at their home. It was my first visit to 234 Sunset Avenue in Southwest Atlanta. I sat in Mrs. King's living room in the place where Martin Luther King had lived and felt as if I was in the presence of royalty in a shrine. Mrs. King was the commanding and regal presence, but the unforgettable image I still have of Mrs. Martin Luther King was going into her own kitchen, bringing out a tray and serving cookies to her assembled guest of Atlanta University students and local leaders. The other vivid recollection I have of that evening was a less than pleasant one. I and other students had the bright idea to bring to the meeting our political science professor, an African who was in exile in the United States from Sierra Leone. At the meeting, Mrs. King explained with great passion and conviction her dream to see her husband's birthday and official government holiday. I admit thinking then that the prospect of a national holiday for Martin Luther King alongside George Washington and Abraham Lincoln was a long shot, but no one in the room dared disagree with Mrs. King, except my political science professor. Mrs. King, I do not think that your husband's birthday should be a national holiday. What are black people going to do that day? They will simply barbecue. The mood in the room suddenly turned awkward and tense and Mrs. King's commanding presence went on full display. First of all, I do not need a professor from Sierra Leone to come to my home and lecture me. Second, who invited you? At that moment, several of us wanted to crawl under the living room couch. Marty walked over to his mother, whispered something in her ear, probably mom, that's my political science professor. The confrontation ended and the meeting continued. That year, we organized a march to the Georgia State Capitol in downtown Atlanta for a Georgia State holiday for Dr. King's birthday. On November 2, 1983, President Reagan, with Mrs. King at his side, signed a bill that made Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday, effective for the first time on the third Monday in January 1986, 37 years ago today. Thanks to the national holiday, we observe today and every third Monday of January, the name Martin Luther King is one of the most recognizable in America. Almost every major city in America, including Detroit and Ann Arbor, has a street or school named after him. Almost every public school in America has his picture hanging in a classroom. The good news is that many observe the day, not with a barbecue, but with the day committed to performing a public or community service. However, the reality is that much of our country has forgotten what Martin Luther King actually challenged us to do, particularly in the last two years of his life. In this year, 2023, Dr. King has now been dead far longer than he was ever alive, and the great majority of Americans alive today were born after April 4, 1968. For some of us, now well into our 60s and older, Dr. King is still a contemporary figure. For most of us, Dr. King is a figure consigned to history, like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. In the 55 years since Dr. King was assassinated, his legacy has been airbrushed and morphed into one with which almost no one would disagree. Ask Americans, young or old, what words we most associate with Martin Luther King, and they cite the four words, I have a dream. But how many Americans know the essence of the rest of that speech or any other speech Dr. King delivered? Moreover, the notion of a dream is not threatening to people. It's something that lives within my space and does not encroach on yours. It's an aspiration, not action. As Dr. King has consigned further and further into the archives of history, we must not allow the sum total of his life to be about a dream he once had. The reality is that Dr. King was a man of action. He did more than dream. He was divisive. To many, he was a troublemaker, or as John Lewis would put it, good trouble, to force the social change we now all celebrate today. He challenged the social order of things and pushed people out of their comfort zones. When Dr. King arrived in many of the same cities north or south, for which major street is now named for him, the mayor and police commissioner viewed his arrival with dread and could not wait for him to leave. I read that there was a poll taken in 1967 that revealed that Martin Luther King was then one of the most hated men in America. For his efforts, the man we honor today across this country, alongside George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, was the target of government surveillance and harassment. He was jailed numerous times and the target of racist insults, bricks, bottles, numerous death threats, a knife attack in Harlem 1958, and finally he was murdered in Memphis in 1968. One of the most remarkable things about this man who had such a huge impact on our country is that he lived just 39 years and his career as a civil rights activist lasted for just over 12 years from a point at which he was just 26 years old, younger than my own kids are today. I believe that those 12 years can be divided into two chapters. The first chapter began with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955-56 and basically ended with the Selma to Montgomery march in March 1965. Now take a brief detour with me for some trivia about Martin Luther King Jr. from the early part of the first phase of his career that almost no one knows. The story begins with a man named Charles S. Johnson, a sociologist in the middle part of the last century. He studied the Chicago race riots of 1919, was active in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, joined the faculty of Fisk University in Nashville in the 1930s and in 1947 became the Fisk president. By the mid 1950s Dr. Johnson was considered one of the intellectual engines of the civil rights movement that was about to take off in September 1956. Dr. Johnson wrote an article in the New York Times magazine section entitled A Southern Negro's View of the South which was a call for national effort to rescue a race of people living as second-class citizens under a system of legalized segregation in the Jim Crow South. For his essay, my grandfather received many letters of congratulations from around the country. One was from Langston Hughes who wrote Charles that was certainly a fine piece you had in the Sunday Times. I've been thinking about it's about time the Negro viewpoint be expressed therein since about every white man who can write a line has had his say in the national media but little has been heard from us. Another was from the 27-year-old pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama the original of which I found in my late father's papers. Dear Dr. Johnson, this is just a note to say I have read your article which recently appeared in the New York Times. It is the best statement that I've read in this whole area. You have been a profound grasp of the whole subject. I am sure that the more this article is read it will bring about a greater understanding of the Negro's point of view as he struggles for first-class citizenship. And then here's my favorite line. You combine in this article the fact-finding mind of the social scientist with the moral insights of a religious prophet. Sincerely yours ML King, Jr. Minister. This letter is dated October 11th, 1956 in the 11th month of the Montgomery bus boycott that Minister King was leading at the time. During this first phase of his career from 1955 to 1965 King focused the nation's attention on racial discrimination that could be ended by changes in law. The Montgomery bus boycott ended with a Supreme Court decision. The demonstration in Birmingham and the march on Washington in 1963 led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Salmon of Montgomery March led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Equal access to buses, pools, lunch counters, movie theaters, jobs, and the ballot box. But after Selma Dr. King did not stop. He began the second phase of his career to take on the challenges that could not be remedied by simple changes in law. From about 1966 to the day he died in April 1968 Dr. King devoted himself principally to two very ambitious agendas fighting poverty and promoting world peace. In 1966 King and his wife and four kids literally moved to Chicago and rented an apartment there. While there he shoveled garbage to demonstrate the need for better living conditions in urban America. In the final months of his life Dr. King devoted himself to the grand plan for a poor people's march on Washington. On January 15, 1968 his last birthday alive he presided over a meeting in the basement of his church in Atlanta and talked about a grand assembly of black Americans, Native Americans, organized labor and Appalachian whites that would converge on Washington later that year to demand that the richest nation on earth address the poverty in its midst. On the final weekend of his life Dr. King delivered a sermon in which he reminded us that quote every American is endowed by his creator with certain inalienable rights among those the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But if a man does not have a job or an income he has neither life, liberty, nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists. On the final day of his life Dr. King was in Memphis, Tennessee not to lead a civil rights march but to support a garbage workers strike. On the final night of his life in Memphis Dr. King delivered one of the best known speeches in which he predicted his own death. The famous I've Been to the Mountain Top speech. What is less known about that speech is that it was largely an address about economic power and the effectiveness of an economic boycott. The most controversial and difficult stance Dr. King took during the final year of his life was against the war in Vietnam. Other civil rights leaders turned on him, urged him to remain silent on the issue and not to alienate President Lyndon Johnson, their best and most powerful friend on civil rights. But Dr. King said that he had been fighting segregation too long to segregate his moral concerns. Martin Luther King hated violence. He preached the inherent insanity of all wars. He believed that violence is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy and that returning violence for violence multiplies violence adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind he said. So beginning in April 1967 in a speech at Riverside Church in New York City exactly one year before he died Dr. Martin Luther King the noble peace prize winner made impassioned pleas for ending the war in Vietnam. From the gospel song down by the Riverside Dr. King repeated the line I ain't gonna study war or more. In the final days of his life his friends report that Dr. King had become disillusioned and depressed. I've heard that a day or two before he was assassinated Dr. King telephoned his church secretary and told her that he intended to deliver a sermon next Sunday entitled why America may go to hell. The great irony of today is that Mrs. King's dream of a national holiday for her husband has become reality. Meanwhile Dr. King's dream of a world that peace with itself has not. War goes on poverty persists racism persists but America has not gone to hell. Some of our finest moments as a nation occurred after Dr. King's death on April 4th 1968. A year later a man landed on the moon American innovations in technology have taken the world to new and then unimaginable heights. With an iPhone you can hold the entire world in the palm of your hand. A black man with the first name Barack was twice elected president of the United States. Today a black woman is vice president of the United States. Ten days ago a black man was named CEO of the Southern Company one of the largest public utilities in America and today's pastor of Dr. King's Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta is also the twice elected United States Senator from the state of Georgia. Much of this is due to the service and sacrifice of the remarkable human being we honor today. I close on a note of optimism. What was it that Martin Luther King found so compelling in my grandfather's essay from 1956. I suspect it was this one passage which I quote all the time. Quote it is variously expected that Negro Southerners as a result of their limited status in the racial system would be bitter or hostile or impatient or indifferent. They are typically none of these. Bitterness grows out of hopelessness and there is no sense of hopelessness in this situation. However uncomfortable and menacing and humiliating it may be at the time. Faith in the ultimate strength of the democratic philosophy and code of the nation as a whole has always been stronger than the impulse to despair. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much for those remarks. Thank you for being here. Cross examination. Cross examination. Couple of questions for me and then I'll turn it over to my colleagues and my first one is this. So King's words are often used in policy conversations. So quotations for him are often used to justify policy decisions and positions or on both sides of the political debate or to ground to offer policy critique people often invoke King. So I wonder if you can comment on the rhetorical aspect of our policy debates in which King is is frequently invoked and deployed. It goes back to what I said in my remarks. I think his legacy has been airbrushed and I think that history and those who quote him today have strategically selected things that he has said for their own purposes without appreciating the sacrifice and the danger that he went through to push us to a better place to redeem the soul of America as you like to say. And you know as I said for that he was jailed the subject of numerous death threats was attacked bricks bottles a knife and then ultimately murdered. He's been dead 55 years he lived only 39. People are able to pull out of his speeches from just 12 years to you know cite in support of almost anything. And I think that one of the reasons that I delivered this and I've given a version of this before about 10 years ago and I know others do this to point out that Dr. King was about more than just words and more than just a dream. He pushed us in out of our comfort zones and very often as I said mayors and police commissioners didn't want him in their city because he knew he would stir action and make things uncomfortable. So you're right he's quoted all over the place he's quoted on the right he's quoted on the left sometimes for things that he could not have possibly done. And central to all of his work was this critique of power right and the ways in which power gets deployed in a variety of different ways and that's I think one of the critical things to remember right. So I wonder I was struck by your comment. But even I think his own view of power evolved. Yeah. Early on in his career it was a plea simply like give us the ballot and toward the latter part of his career I think he recognized that really difficult change comes about through not just a plea but an insistence like economic boycotts and in the last speech of his life the night before he was killed I talked about how he talked about the importance and the power of an economic boycott. He literally listed companies that people in Memphis should boycott because they were not doing what they needed to do. So one of the things that I think is so impressive about what you had to say is the nuance that I heard in your words and your own kind of grappling with power and I was so struck by the comment I consider myself a student and disciple of Martin Luther King though a flawed and imperfect one the moment I became involved in national security. So can you unpack that for us further especially given the obvious and more subtle tensions between institutions like the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security and King's critique of state power both here and overseas and then your own kind of biographical intersections with King. Can you unpack that for us? Yes. So by the way I one of the things I do in private life is I'm lost my day job and I have hobbies one of my hobbies is I have a radio show there's a local jazz station in Newark New Jersey called WBGO it's public radio and on weekends it's classic R&B and a couple years ago they gave me my own show on Saturday mornings from 8 to 10 once a month 88.3 FM or WBGO.org and they said I don't care what you call it just as long as it ends with the words with J. Johnson. This past Saturday I and I have an interview every show this past Saturday was Andrew Young. I got Andrew 91 year old Andrew Young to give an interview and he said something very interesting see you know Dr. King was an activist for a cause but he said even in charting a course for your activism sometimes you have to consider multiple different things and steer a middle course he said that in the debates internal at the SCLC and he's probably one of the last people alive who can talk about this he would have the younger more radical people and he referred to those sometimes you get freedom high who wanted to change the world in 15 minutes and and Andy Young was the conservative in that discussion and one time he said they were talking about a march someplace in Mississippi and the younger radicals say let's go let's go let's go we got to do this and Andy Young said yep I agree let's do it and he said Martin got really mad at me he said let's take a break Andy meet me in my office and he yelled at him he said you can't do that you have to be on the other side so I can come down the middle and so even in activism there's a range of considerations you know we all remember Buddy Sunday we all remember that a couple of Sundays later the civil rights marchers came back with Dr. King and marched all the way to Montgomery what we don't always remember is that there was a middle march where they walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the federal judge hearing the case about the march had not ruled yet so King literally turned the marches around and walked back across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and did not have the great confrontation that so many of the marches are ready to have you know we're here to fight we're here to we're here to you know resist and we were ready to put their bodies on the line and he turned them around and a lot of people were angry at them for doing that but his thinking was I cannot defy a federal court order I'm going to wait for this court to rule I'm going to wait for Judge Johnson to rule and so there are a range of considerations are going to that which brings me to the answer to your question so particularly in an area like national security decision making policy making involves not just acting in alignment with your personal convictions and personal preferences there are a range of considerations that go into national security and homeland security enforcing our laws public safety counterterrorism you know getting the bad guys in Afghanistan and in places like Yemen and Pakistan and trying to do the best consistent with your own personal convictions there were several times when based solely on my personal convictions I said no to something or based solely on what I believe to be not consistent with the law where I said no to something even though it was a really important thing that we wanted to do but I didn't think it was legal but most of the time there's a range of factors that go into policy making at the highest levels of our government I gave a commencement address at Georgetown on this in 2016 about the factors that go into national security and government decision making and so the reason I say I'm an imperfect disciple Dr. King believed in the inherent insanity of all wars and while I was the senior legal official for the Department of Defense we were fighting two wars and part of my job was to opine on the legality of specific counterterrorism actions i.e is it okay to go kill this terrorist is it legal and that was part of my job to sanction counterterrorism that would be inconsistent with the belief that war is inherently insane so that's why I say I'm an imperfect disciple but I accepted that the moment I got involved yeah and the the ways in which you navigated that and the complexities around that really fascinating I more house college figures prominently in your biography and in your remarks today and you talked about your grandfather renowned sociologist Charles S. Johnson who was president of FISC another HBCU vice president Kamala Harris graduate of Howard senator Rodney or not yeah for the Howard graduates in this room the vice president likes to refer to Howard as the Mecca I'm sorry Morehouse Spelman is the Mecca okay let's just just clarify that Spelman and Morehouse people in the room Spelman along the gates between Morehouse and Spelman is the Mecca so but yeah senator Raphael we're not we're not Morehouse alum Stacey Abrams Spelman alum she was a year ahead of me at Spelman so I wonder if you can comment on the relevance of HBCUs and political life and what people need to know about them to understand some of our most visible public figures and politics today well Morehouse for me I'll speak for myself made me who I am today I came into Morehouse a D student and I left an A student it just the energy and the ambition and the dedication was contagious I could not help but become an A student at Morehouse and going to an HBCU an all male HBCU with the all female HBCU across the street you know over there really during my formative years really made me who I am today helped me get my head together about a lot of things and then I remember a graduation maybe it wasn't mine if somebody else's but it was a Morehouse graduation maybe you heard it too the speaker said for the rest of your life you're going to look for situations to replicate the brotherhood that you experienced here at Morehouse whether it's the barbershop the church you probably know you understand what you're talking about and that's true you know my fraternity meetings hosting a radio show classic r&b whatever and that stays with you for your entire your entire life but interestingly enough my experience at Morehouse College has enabled me has better enabled me to navigate the white world because it was a four-year opportunity to find out who I was separate and apart from being the minority in the room all the time and people often say HBCUs aren't the real world but they prepare you for the real world and they are the real world yeah I wonder if we can take some questions from our faculty Javid let's start with you Secretary Johnson thank you so much for being here by the way the worst thing I ever did Morehouse College the food at Morehouse College in the 1970s was terrible we had these little trays with compartments and somebody with a with a glove would reach into a vat of food and put it stuff it into little compartments and there was no seconds there was no seconds and one Sunday the kitchen staff you know when it when it snows a half inch in Georgia the entire state shuts down so it's snowed a half inch the kitchen crew didn't come in so a group of us who show our main nameless except me obviously commandeered the kitchen and took over and cooked all the food in one day there was a 10 minute break between brunch and dinner and we cooked all the food that was that was 45 years ago so I think I'm in the clear wow yeah I think they would you learn from that experience though I learned that I mean to be blunt I mean I learned that uh a thousand black men could eat a lot of food and Morehouse was feeding them on a shoestring right yeah yeah if you unleash us we could eat a lot of food yeah yeah Secretary Johnson thank you again for being here I know we spoke a little bit this morning but just for the benefit of the rest of the room my name is Javad Ali I'm an associate professor of practice here I've been teaching here and DHS alum yes not teaching here since 2018 but prior to that I served in a number of different roles we talked about to include being at DHS at the ground floor when the department was being stood up and I didn't have the privilege to serve under you but I was there when Secretary Reagan secretary chair so my question is now that we're coming up on the 20 year anniversary of the department in your time there from 2013 to 2017 where do you think the department's going to go in the next 20 years and can you try to catalog what do you think has worked well for the department and where do you think it needs to to do better going forward so I'm going to answer that question and I'm going to answer what I think is going to be your next question in one answer DHS was created in the aftermath of 9 11 on the realization in counterterrorism was the cornerstone mission on the realization that we needed a ministry of the interior like a whole lot of other governments have my counterparts when I was at DHS were ministers of the interior of Italy Turkey Egypt all these other nations and we didn't think we needed a national level public safety department because we were separated by the from the rest of the world by two oceans and we learned otherwise on 9 11 so the thinking then with counterterrorism uppermost in our minds was that terrorism is an extraterritorial threat that exists beyond our borders and we have to more effectively police how terrorists get into our country and so if we consolidate into one cabinet level department all the different ways you regulate getting into this country land sea and air tsa border patrol customs coast guard you will have better and more effectively dealt with terrorism because it's an extraterritorial threat so let's tighten up our borders land sea and air that was the thinking then like everything in Washington DHS was a political compromise in some respects we went too far in other respects we didn't go far enough meanwhile two things have happened the terrorist threat to our homeland has morphed it is no longer in the ADL tracks this most acts of terrorism this country are domestic based they're not foreign directed or foreign inspired by a foreign terrorist organization and they're not a whole lot of as you know they're not a whole lot of DHS cops running around the interior looking for terrorists that task has fallen to the FBI and so in many respects the DHS model for combating terrorism is outmoded today 20 years later second as everybody knows the immigration mission has overwhelmed DHS the secretary of DHS whether it's me or the or the incumbent doesn't like to say this but the majority of your time as secretary of DHS is immigration border security and that has meant that the mission of DHS has become overwhelmed by politics which i believe has has really you know hurt the brand the department of homeland security should be an apolitical entity aviation security is an apolitical entity i believe border security should be an apolitical thing you have to balance a whole bunch of competing values obviously but border security maritime security cyber security should be apolitical in this country as it is in most other countries now one of the things that i think and when i when i got to DHS nine years ago i was shocked at how immature our bureaucratic structure was we didn't have and i'd come from the department of defense where the bureaucracy is very mature so mature that it becomes intractable and it hard to make change but the acquisition process the budget process was very stovepipe and very immature and so i spent a lot of time on basic management reform including raising morale so the the bureaucratic structure lacked maturity then and i fear that not a whole lot of work's been done since that time and the one thing that we've done well is CISA the new cyber security and infrastructure security agency that i pushed to create didn't happen on my watch it happened in the last administration Chris Krebs was the first director January Jen easterly is the director now and i think CISA is off to a good start CISA is a part of DHS we need a cyber security agency in this government devoted to cyber security and i think they're off to a good start and they're building a lot of credibility with the private sector building good private partnerships so that's the that's the good news but the department of homeland security is it's become over politicized it's over it's an overheated debate and that's that's really unfortunate sir thank you for that you got all my questions in one response so let me just build on your observation that the hs is so politicized my name is an lin i'm the lever thaw rogall director of the center for chinese studies at the university of michigan and an associate professor here at the ford school i've done a lot of work with arab and muslim americans especially communities here in the detroit area and as you know one of our country's responses first responses to 9 11 was to create a no fly list while a very small number of individuals are actually on this list thousands of people with arabic background muslim names or muslim dress are routinely treated as suspicious when they fly return to the us after overseas trips or otherwise interact with tsa or cpb or even ice so could you talk a little bit about how dhs personnel are taught to distinguish between legitimate questions um and illegitimate suspicion that's based on their ethnicity or religion or appearance well i'll tell you what they tell me first um i think in my three years in office i came to michigan probably four times and each time was to an engagement with the muslim communities in this region i was very focused on building trust within the muslim american community um which was challenging um because they met many members of that community view federal law enforcement with suspicion um particularly in the mosque and so i was on a mission to try to build trust and michigan was a place i came to often i consider the highlight of that effort was when i was invited to speak to the islamic society of north america and chicago in 2016 i was the senior most person in the u.s. government to ever address the isna convention which is annual it's 10 000 american muslims and a uh turning point for me in preparation for that address i spoke to some muslim leaders who had invited me and they said would you please not talk to us about terrorism please don't give us a message about you know talk to your friends and family about not being a terrorist and i said you know that's you're right um and i ended up talking about the promise of america and how given our heritage generation after generation our waves of immigrants that seek acceptance into our society who ultimately in this arc is long will ultimately do win acceptance and that was the address i gave to that convention now in answer to your question what i am told i'm passing on what i'm told first of all many people end up on the no fly list maybe even 90 i'm not sure of the exact number because of mistaken identity because of you know a name is spelling one letter is off um the other is the other thing i'm told is that we profile behavior not not personas we profile behavior and very often travelers get secondaryed because they they hit a rule in other words their their travel their travel patterns uh fit a travel pattern that merits secondary screening of some sort there are ways to get off the no fly list it's very cumbersome it's very slow the fbi by the way manages the no fly list not tsa um but that's what i'm told thank you secretary johnson thank you so much for joining our community today i'm john short sherry i'm a professor and associate dean here at the forward school and i focus on international politics and law we've been talking about how central immigration is to dhs's mission not just border security but also in part through its management of refugee flows in this country through its authority to be able to designate populations for temporary protection and i wanted to ask you the question about how you think that our refugee law and policy needs to evolve in light of the fact that we're not talking in this day and age so much about individuals who are fleeing targeted persecution as much as people who are fleeing more generalized harms associated with war or with the effects of climate change do you think that an expansion of the temporary protection system is an adequate means to respond to this change in the demographics of refugees or do you think that a more fundamental change to our asylum and refugee refugee laws needed that gets away from this traditional distinction between those who face targeted persecution and broader harms yes so uh you asked about two things tps and an asylum i have to say uh i'm not a big fan of tps and here's why temporary protected status is something that the secretary has the authority to grant to classes of people who let's say left a country because of an earthquake that devastated the economy or the infrastructure of that country and they were present here in the united states on the date of the earthquake and the the plea is don't send me back to this country because it's been devastated so we have the authority to say yes you 15 000 people who were present in this country on this date because of this earthquake should not be sent back to that country because of that earthquake so i'm granting you temporary protected status and we're going to review that every 18 months for that class of people from that country what happens is is nobody wants to end it so we have tps for classes of people going back years for an earthquake that happened in 1983 and in the meantime we're actively deporting people back to that same country who came here two years ago and so it becomes something that we vest in people and we don't want to take it off it becomes very hard to take it off it ends up being you know a status in perpetuity so it's not the right fit it's not the right model the asylum laws so the current state of asylum law in the u.s. does not fit the current environment as you know the asylum laws are intended for those fleeing some form of persecution most migrants on our southern border flee central america or cuba or hady because of economic conditions the asylum laws do not protect economic migrants you can try to shoehorn that claim into that law but it doesn't fit unfortunately it would require a change in law to make it fit now can this congress wrestle with anything having to do with immigration frankly no though it should we can't even take care of the docker recipients i'm sure that there are docker recipients in the university of michigan there are docker recipients at yale law school there are docker recipients at georgetown law school there's a docker recipient who is an associate of my law firm who was editor-in-chief of georgetown law review when i ask her when she asked me what's my future i can't tell her as long as docker remains executive action and it's not codified into law these these are people who are de facto americans who know nothing but this country and we can't even pass a law to take care of them wrestling with the asylum laws is going to be extremely difficult now the problem larger picture the lesson i learned from having to wrestle with immigration and immigration was the most difficult issue i wrestle with in public life more difficult than guantanamo more difficult than drone strikes more difficult than gays in the military more difficult than a cyber attack more difficult than the theft of two million opm files from the cyber attack the most difficult issue i wrestled with was immigration because no matter what you do somebody's going to be really angry um the thing i learned is that we can do certain things to enhance enforcement on our southern border and immigration and is very information sensitive so it reacts sharply the numbers react sharply to perceived changes in our enforcement policies so if you are perceived as lax the numbers are going to go up if you're perceived as clamping down the numbers are going to go down but it only has a short-term effect the numbers always revert back to their longer-term trend lines as long as the underlying push factors in Haiti Honduras Guatemala El Salvador Cuba persist Venezuela as long as they persist people are going to keep coming the push factors overwhelm any level of defense you can throw up on our southern border and our asylum laws because of the length of time it takes to adjudicate an asylum claim are a magnet many people don't want to hear that but that's that's a reality the push factors are the dominant factor however and as long as it takes three four five years to adjudicate an asylum claim because of the backlog and the number of immigration judges we don't have in this country um families are desperate to come to the u.s even if it means i only get to stay for a couple years while my asylum claim is pending so for congress to take the issue of asylum on would be exceedingly difficult because there'd be a lot of competing factors some people want to enhance expedited removal for asylum applicants some people want to broaden the scope of the protection to include economic migrants and in the meantime the executive branch does all it can to try to do what it can to fix the system within the confines of existing law so it's very very difficult and do you have a follow-up i'm sure um i'm going to to tell you what i didn't tell you at lunch which is my brother is an associate general counsel at lockheed martin um and so when one of our students sent in this next question this is a student question i thought i should pick it up um because of your role as a member of the board at lockheed um and the fact that you've worked in the department of defense um i'd like to ask you to say a little bit about the military industrial complex um when the united states gives aid to foreign countries for weapon systems of course it sounds like we're giving countries lots of aid but actually that's really aid that stays here in the united states to pay american contractors for american weapons um so i'm wondering if you can say a little bit about how that industry um the defense contracting industry affects u.s policy and appropriations and especially the kinds of decisions we might make around foreign policy well for a defense contractor in this country the principal customer is the u.s department of defense and defense contractors do not sell weapons directly to foreign countries there's a requirement that all foreign military sales be blessed by the executive branch of our government and the legislative branch of our government so if congress and the executive branch encourage and don't object to a sale it goes through the u.s department of defense and and with their concurrence and blessing obviously the most notable example today is ukraine we are in many respects the arsenal of freedom right now we do not sell weapons over the objection if congress objects we don't sell weapons to particular countries and we certainly don't sell weapons directly to countries with human rights issues but sometimes that's in the eye of the beholder um defense systems you know support for defense systems goes up and down depending upon the the world the world climate i will say i am surprised at how well our defense department is doing and it's in this year's budget this year's defense budget is exactly half of the entire u.s budget usually in democratic administrations the defense department like the one i was in face a whole lot of budget pressure so that money can be routed to someplace else but the essential role of a defense contractor is to follow the lead of our government just extend that a little bit i mean i think one thing that you see one kind of criticism that you certainly see from foreign countries is that even american allies who are you know buying the weapons that are approved by the executive and the legislative branches um is that this that the u.s is focused on policies that will not because they want to sell weapons but that aren't surprisingly are focused around military readiness military preparation and military deterrence rather than policies that might be more beneficial to those countries and you know because of my role at the center for chinese studies one place where you clearly see this now is in taiwan where there's a very vigorous national argument argument within taiwan about whether they are being pushed to pushed into an aggressive posture vis-a-vis china in ways that benefit the u.s more than they might benefit the inhabitants of that place that is an issue for national security policy makers in our country not not a director of lockheed martin we don't make policy we don't make national security policy we respond to the within the confines of the law and what the defense department tells us they want we respond to the needs of the customer i've got another question when we go back to java's initial question about a larger a larger debate however if i could veer off a little bit a larger debate though around um defense system is ai artificial intelligence and some of the moral dilemmas that may be presented by ai um and i'm not sure that smart people like yourself in private life have fully awakened to the course we are on i'll say that can you say more about that but i will say this um there was just a story on cvs this morning yesterday about ai in the arts in the use of ai technology to create people saw that to create um and replicate art and it was striking to me that one of the founders of the company said well we just create the technology and put it out there and we trust that it will be used responsibly and hey there are firewalls if you put art that you created through ai on facebook facebook might block it if it's heinous or violent or etc so kind of assuming that the twitters and the facebook's of the world and the social media platforms um will monitor the rails yeah and i was struck by this um founders kind of lack of awareness if you will in terms of we've been we've seen this movie before in terms of well i create the technology and and we and we just put it out there so right now that we think about it in in the context of what you're talking about do you see basically history repeating itself in terms of the same kinds of logics are informing our use of the technology and our kind of ignorance around the moral or unwillingness to see the moral and ethical ethical dilemmas what i'm saying is that the technology in this space is moving with lightning speed mm-hmm and the awareness and the thinking around around ai is not keeping pace with the lightning speed mm-hmm that's what i'm saying mm-hmm and we have a science the other day the other night the other night uh uh i have this fancy alarm system in my house mm-hmm put there by the secret service mm-hmm they're gone but the alarm system is still there and it detects everything it detects co2 it detects you know a loose window it detects everything and i don't understand it and so it started beeping at me like midnight on friday night and i was able to figure out it's a dead battery in one of the things and i took that i i undid the the alarm to change the battery and the whole system got mad at me and started beeping and it wouldn't stop and i called i called the i called honeywell the 1 800 number that i could find to say how do you how do i make this thing stop and i realized i couldn't get anybody on the phone forget that and you know i get this little thing on my iphone what is your problem and i said i can't make this thing stop oh well let's try this and i realized i'm talking to i'm not talking to a person behind a keyboard i'm talking to ai mm-hmm i'm talking to a system i'm not talking to a human being mm-hmm mm-hmm yeah did it help how many of you yeah how do you think you're talking to a human being online you're really talking to uh technology right if we have any other faculty questions i have one more question but i'll let you i did have one more when when javid was asking about looking 20 years forward what are some epical challenges that dhs has to face climate change is on every department's list and of course as most of our audience probably knows dhs sits on top of fema and therefore has a major role in domestic uh disaster response um as you know well fema is often in in line of criticism both for the nature of a response but also for equity considerations around racial and other disparities and how aid is provided i wonder if you could walk us through what you see as fema's strengths as an organization as it now stands and the surrounding architecture and what you think some of the key reforms need to be going forward to deal effectively with the greater and more frequent scale of disasters we're facing but also to be sure that we do it in a way that's equitable to our residents so the last poll i saw on this which was a couple years ago the poll was um in what agencies of our government do you most trust do you have the most trust in do the right thing fema was right up there with the u.s. military surprisingly but in my judgment deservedly so fema is particularly when craig fugate basically rebuilt that agency fema is a very agile nimble creative agency knows how to mobilize assets move assets rapid response and in reaction to a disaster as good as the u.s. army fema in my opinion was woefully underutilized during the pandemic if we had life to live over again i think fema should have been a central role fema and the defense production act better use of the defense production act should have been central to our national level response to to covet that's what fema's for um disaster response and it was a disaster it affected every corner of this nation um so i have a lot of faith in the organization um but it policymakers at the top need to know how to effectively use fema um can i ask you a question about political polarization and never heard of it never heard of it i noticed that um you are quite nimble in terms of the different news shows and conversations that you're willing to have on television and i wonder is that a deliberate choice and i wonder if you can tell us what you've learned by and you talked about this at lunch msnbc is literally across the street from fox news yes in new york in terms of where the studios are located and i wonder if you can just talk about your willingness ability strategy around crossing the aisle crossing the street so uh i believe that um in my private life my role is to educate inform challenge a bit and you can't do that if you're just talking to an audience it's always inclined to agree with you and so i make a point of going to fox i work at i work on sixth avenue 51st street in manhattan nbc msnbc is at 49th and sixth avenue fox is at 47th and sixth avenue so we're literally across the street from one another all the same subway station and so once in a while i go on fox i'm on msnbc the most cnn um shows like face the nation and um meet the press but i also do fox once in a while and i pick my spots when i go on fox i pick i'm selective i don't i get a lot during a you know a border surge i'll get a lot of request to go on fox because they want me to talk about how messed up the border is to make the current administration look bad i avoid that i will go on fox to challenge that audience in a way so for example right after trump said of the five women in congress you need to go back to where you came from whatever i'm paraphrasing and they're all us citizens i went on fox um and it happened to be it was fox and friends i go on fox and friends and i go on neil kabuto neil kabuto is reasonable fox and friends i go on just because of the sheer size of the audience and i went on and happened to be a live audience like this in the fox studio that day and i said there's no place for them to go back to that's in the front it's an offense they're americans just like all of you and you can hear a pin drop in the room you know and but i go on fox to challenge that audience the other time i went on fox very deliberately was right after the election the 2020 election it was two days after the election and msnbc was just kind of hanging on the edge of their seat waiting for arizona to be called for biden and fox it was all dark i was channel surfing it was all dark there was this garbled voice of a postal worker who says he swore that he saw ballots being backdated and i said oh this is all dark so i called neil kabuto's people and i said i want to go on fox today and you know being kind of foolish but i want to go on fox today and i said in this country you may not like the result of the election there've been plenty of elections where i didn't like the result of the election but it's a democracy and you have in four years an opportunity to change it but we have to respect the result before i could before i could it was virtual before i could hit leave meeting on zoom my phone in my office was lit up you democrat go back to your cave and you know go back to under your rock how dare you say this blah blah blah that election was stolen and but you need to you know people need to hear things to challenge their points of view so when i go on fox first of all they're very nice to me on fox they want to keep me coming back um but when i go on fox i'll get some of the most offensive emails on my email but also get some of the most complimentary gee you're a democrat and you're really you're you're smart wow you were so reasonable um and you're black too uh wow um you should run for president i mean i really you open my eyes like because and you know on both sides of the spectrum you asked about polarization um too often whether it's social media and can't just blame social media for this cable news you turn on cable news and they're just telling you what they're just feeding your predilections and your suspicions and your likes and that's right yep i agree yep he's right he's right he's so right he's so right he's right because he agrees with me and just reinforces your own views already there's not enough opportunity to be challenged to hear the same objective straightforward news here's what happened at the white house here's the traffic jam on i94 here's the weather and here's the score of the Giants game um there's so often too few opportunities now for just straightforward news and as a result america in my view is more divided now than it ever has been you know down the middle what is the remedy for that how do we well i used to think that the remedy of that for that i used to say well it shouldn't take a crisis like another 9 11 to bring us together but guess what we did have a crisis called covid yep and it didn't bring us together we argued about whether or not you should wear a mask where you know did it come from a lab or did it come from a monkey in china and isn't it all fake and tony fouch should go to jail we couldn't even agree on the source and the cure we couldn't even agree on the the validity and the safety of a 35 cent mask so no it's my freedom and i'm not wearing a mask um i have my rights well there's public health too so we couldn't even agree on that so i don't have a good answer to your question i'm sorry i just don't i'd like to be more optimistic i can quote my grandfather again but um i i think it's getting better i'd like to say it's getting a little better than it was say two three four years ago um well we're more divided now than we have been in a long time what advice would you have for students who are making their way in this kind of environment and building careers in this kind of environment and that'll be our last question my advice is listen read things watch things that will challenge you that will challenge your thinking um seek out the other perspective don't seek out the offensive ignorant perspective uh but sometimes we need to hear that too to understand just how bad it is but seek out things especially when you're in education that will challenge you that are different points of view that will help you either change your point of view or reinforce your own point of view if you if you happen to believe in x and you listen to somebody who espouses y it seems to me you could double down on your belief in x but your conviction will be that much stronger if you've been exposed to y and you can defend x in the face of y so i think it's important to be challenged it's not easy to be challenged it's not you have to be willing to go places and listen to things that you that might make you feel uncomfortable but um you know this is this session is all about martin with the king i'm always impressed when somebody says i didn't know much about martin with the king at all but you taught me something i didn't know about it i'm always impressed by that or 12 years ago 13 years ago i led the effort in the department of defense to assess whether or not we could repeal don't ask don't tell to permit gay people to serve openly in our u.s. military general carter ham and i co-chaired a working group that wrote a report that we gave to congress saying yes we can do this and congress and repeal the law two weeks later in the course of that review we spoke to tens of thousands of service members everybody had an opinion about gays in the military the opinion that i valued most was from the senior enlisted sailor or airman or marine who said who was part of our working group who said i came to this as skeptic but after listening and reading i now believe we can do this that to me was the most valuable input i got mm-hmm secretary johnson this has been an amazing enlightening very helpful discussion thank you so so much for being with us please join me and welcoming and thanking and i want to thank our faculty javid ali and and lin and john chichari for their questions and i want to thank the students because they were the authors of the questions so thank you so much for school students this has been really a fascinating discussion and i wish everyone a wonderful evening thank you again thank you again thank you