SECURING THE HOMELAND

Secretary Mullen, thank you very much for being here.

Peter, thanks for having me on.

I remember hearing in Trump 1.0, one of your predecessors at DHS was telling people privately, if you knew what I knew, you wouldn't sleep at night.

What keeps you up at night?

Well, I don't know if I agree with that.

I sleep well because I know we have great men and women throughout Department of Homeland Security.

We have 270,000 employees that every single day their mission is simply to protect the homeland.

Keep in mind, when I took over, we were over a 40 day shutdown and all these men and women were still showing up, doing their job, protecting the homeland for free.

So when I say I've got great patriots that I work with, I sincerely mean that.

Now, do we have serious threats? Peter, every single day I get a briefing, every single day we have new threats, and every single day the threats are changing.

Every time we stop a threat, a terrorist act or a criminal activity that's taken place, they also change their tactics.

We have to be constantly moving from cyber to sea to air and to land.

We are constantly moving.

In fact, I tell you, if you look at most of our SEALs, throughout all the agencies, the eagle looks to the palm leaf because that's in a time of peace.

We're actually changing our seal to make it look towards the arrows because when it looks towards the arrows is when it means we're at war.

Well, Homeland Security is at war every single day against bad actors trying to hurt our backyards, and we're not going to allow that to happen.

I

didn't know that about the SEALs.

The reason that I ask is because we've got the 25th anniversary of 9-11 coming up.

Your department was created to combat threats from Islamic terrorists.

A quarter of a century later, what is the top threat to the homeland?

It's still terrorists, but the terrorists have joined with the cartels.

President Trump, underneath his leadership, he recognized the threat.

He recognized that the cartels are threatening our homeland.

Keep in mind, because of the fentanyl overdose, we've lost more people in a year than we have during the entire Vietnam War.

Secretary Mullen, thank you very much for being here.

Peter, thanks for having me on.

I remember hearing in Trump 1.0, one of your predecessors at DHS was telling people privately, if you knew what I knew, you wouldn't sleep at night.

What keeps you up at night?

Well, I don't know if I agree with that.

I sleep well because I know we have great men and women throughout Department of Homeland Security.

We have 270,000 employees that every single day their mission is simply to protect the homeland.

Keep in mind, when I took over, we were over a 40 day shutdown and all these men and women were still showing up, doing their job, protecting the homeland for free.

So when I say I've got great patriots that I work with, I sincerely mean that.

Now, do we have serious threats? Peter, every single day I get a briefing, every single day we have new threats, and every single day the threats are changing.

Every time we stop a threat, a terrorist act or a criminal activity that's taken place, they also change their tactics.

We have to be constantly moving from cyber to sea to air and to land.

We are constantly moving.

In fact, I tell you, if you look at most of our SEALs, throughout all the agencies, the eagle looks to the palm leaf because that's in a time of peace.

We're actually changing our seal to make it look towards the arrows because when it looks towards the arrows is when it means we're at war.

Well, Homeland Security is at war every single day against bad actors trying to hurt our backyards, and we're not going to allow that to happen.

I

didn't know that about the SEALs.

The reason that I ask is because we've got the 25th anniversary of 9-11 coming up.

Your department was created to combat threats from Islamic terrorists.

A quarter of a century later, what is the top threat to the homeland?

It's still terrorists, but the terrorists have joined with the cartels.

President Trump, underneath his leadership, he recognized the threat.

He recognized that the cartels are threatening our homeland.

Keep in mind, because of the fentanyl overdose, we've lost more people in a year than we have during the entire Vietnam War.