Five former homeland security secretaries, including recently departed White House chief of staff John Kelly, signed a letter Wednesday imploring President Trump and Congress to “fund the critical mission of DHS” during the partial government shutdown.
Comparing themselves to the Department of Defense, which is fully funded until the end of the current fiscal year on Sept. 30, the letter argues, “With today’s threats, there is no longer a distinction between the ‘away game’ and the ‘home game’ which is why DHS and DoD work hand in hand to defend our country.” The letter, first obtained by NBC News, further asserts that DHS employees are no different from DoD employees in terms of the “mission to secure the homeland, in many cases by putting their own lives at risk.”
“While we are heartened to learn that communities, businesses and religious organizations around the country are providing assistance to DHS employees, this cannot and should not be the answer,” the letter reads. “DHS employees …should not have to rely on the charitable generosity of others for assistance in feeding their families and paying their bills while they steadfastly focus on the mission at hand. This is unconscionable.”
The letter concludes with a call to “our elected leaders to restore the funding necessary” to continue “the Department’s critical national security functions.” Beyond Kelly, the other ex-DHS secretaries to sign on were Tom Ridge, Janet Napolitano, Michael Chertoff, and Jeh Johnson.
Due to the shutdown, a majority of the 245,000 DHS personnel are not being paid, with nearly 32,000 not working at all, according to CNN. On Monday, DHS reinstated 300 furloughed employees to carry out critical tasks for which they will be paid.
The group of reinstated personnel belong to the agency’s E-Verify office, which oversees a program that companies use to verify a job applicant’s legal ability to work in the United States. However, the employees will not be going back to their normal jobs and will be trained starting Tuesday and then assigned to other U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services tasks.
Trump and congressional Democrats have been in a stalemate since December over funding for a wall along the country’s southern border, leading to a partial government shutdown that has roughly 800,000 federal employees either furloughed or working without pay. The shutdown began on Dec. 21 and on Saturday entered a historic fifth week.
