By Ronald Hansen | Arizona Republic
Guns, cyberwarfare and climate change currently pose the biggest threats to the U.S., not undocumented immigrants, said Janet Napolitano, the former secretary of Homeland Security and former Arizona governor.
“If you watch the news today, you would think the Department of Homeland Security was really the Department of the Southwest Border because that’s all it does,” Napolitano told about 250 people Tuesday night at the Madison Center for the Arts in Phoenix. “In terms of evaluating what risks really affect the security and safety of Americans, I would not put the southwest border on the list. It’s not a threat to the safety of Americans.”
Napolitano, a Democrat who served in President Barack Obama’s Cabinet, outlined a politically charged message of her new book, “How Safe Are We? Homeland Security Since 9/11,” which seems to run counter to President Donald Trump’s central concern of tightening security along the nation’s southern border.
During an hour-long talk led by Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, Napolitano said that, in some ways, the nation is safer than it once was, such as in preventing the specific kind of attack terrorists used in 2001 in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
But the nation remains “woefully ill-prepared” on other threats, she said.
