Hey, everyone, you're listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from NPR.

I'm B.A. Parker.

And I'm Gene Demby.

Everybody wanted this job.

I said, there's one man for this job, and I have no doubt he's going to be fantastic.

On Monday, March 23rd, Senator Mark Wayne Mullen was officially confirmed as the new head of the Department of Homeland Security.

So help me God.

Congratulations, Secretary.

This is a huge job.

The person in this job is in charge of ice and border patrol and TSA and they

generally set the national tone on how we approach immigration enforcement. Yeah. Mullen is

stepping in to replace Christy Knoe. Earlier this month, Christy Knoan was fired in the wake of some

really high profile bad press for the DHS.

Bad press, she says with an understatement.

As our listeners know, immigration officials shot and killed two people very publicly in Minnesota earlier this year during protests about ice raids that were happening in the Twin Cities.

And Nome was known as being extremely hardline. Some of her highlights

included an ad campaign to convince undocumented migrants to self-deport, which I saw pretty much

every day for like two months on TV. If you're an illegal alien living in the United States,

this runway is your future.

And there was the more recent controversy.

It was over a $220 million border security advertising campaign that featured Noam on

horseback.

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