Chad Wolf
Chad Wolf was in leadership at Trump’s DHS from 2017 through 2021, including as Acting DHS Secretary from November 2019 through January 2021 (a position he was later found to have been illegally appointed to). In his leadership roles, Wolf played a central role in executing some of Trump’s most aggressive immigration policies. This includes issuing a memo to suspend the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and making broad changes to the asylum system. Wolf is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
Wolf started in the Trump administration as acting chief of staff to then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and was later appointed Under Secretary for Strategy, Policy, and Plans. As Nielsen’s acting chief of staff, Wolf wrote a list of policy options to target undocumented immigrants, which included to “Announce that DHS is considering separating family units, placing the adults in detention and placing minors under the age of 18 in the custody of HHS as unaccompanied alien children.” The Trump Administration ultimately separated more than 5,000 children from their parents.
Wolf was appointed Acting Secretary in November 2019. This appointment was later deemed “invalid” in a report by the Government Accountability Office. Wolf was made acting head through invalid rule changes made by then-Acting Secretary Kevin McAleenan, who was also unlawfully installed in the role. This made Wolf a “doubly illegal” acting secretary.
As Acting DHS Secretary, Wolf issued a memo to effectively suspend the DACA program that provides protections against deportation for undocumented immigrants that came to the United States as children after the courts blocked a previous Trump administration attack on DACA. Wolf also made broad changes to the asylum system, including forcing migrants to wait in Mexico for the duration of their U.S. court cases, restricting work permits, and disqualifying entire segments of asylum seekers, such as those who claimed persecution based on sexual orientation. Wolf’s suspension of DACA and changes to asylum limits were invalidated by federal judges in New York and California who agreed that Wolf was not legally appointed.
Amid the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, Wolf directed more than 750 federal officers from Border Patrol, ICE, the US Marshals, and Federal Protective Services to occupy the city of Portland, Oregon. The federal officers engaged in brutal tactics like spraying massive amounts of tear gas, shooting a protester’s head with an impact weapon, and other excessive uses of police force. One protest group’s lawsuit recalled individuals having “been tear-gassed night after night, left vomiting and unable to eat or sleep because of the toxic poison blasted at them.” The most troubling of these activities was the use of unmarked vans to seize protesters and interrogate them without formal processing.
When Wolf later testified to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on his agency’s actions, he proclaimed, “enforcing federal law is not by invitation.” The committee’s then-ranking member, Sen. Gary Peters, noted the DHS “chose to escalate conflicts” in Portland. Wolf asserted in an interview that summer that he “[does] not think that we have a systemic racism problem with law enforcement officers across this country.”
In September 2020, a whistleblower alleged top DHS officials, including Wolf, had “a repeated pattern of abuse of authority, attempted censorship of intelligence analysis and improper administration of an intelligence program related to Russian efforts to influence and undermine United States interests.” The whistleblower, former DHS under secretary Brian Murphy, claimed that Wolf delivered orders to alter intelligence assessments so they matched Trump’s public remarks, like holding back reports on the threat of Russian interference in U.S. elections that “made the president look bad,” and spoke of reassigning Murphy’s position to advance his personal political goal of becoming the permanent DHS secretary.
Wolf also defied a subpoena to testify before the House Homeland Security Committee about those allegations and called them “patently false.”
Wolf was also the subject of a complaint regarding a violation of the Hatch Act, which prevents executive branch employees from using their official authority to influence an election. These complaints included concerns about his actions around the 2020 Republican National Convention including leading a naturalization ceremony at the White House.
Wolf first worked in the DHS in the Bush administration overseeing the creation of the Transportation Security Authority (TSA) and then spent 11 years helping to secure TSA contracts on behalf of his clients at the now-defunct D.C. lobbying firm Wexler & Walker. According to an analysis by CNBC, “several of Wolf’s former clients reaped a total of at least $160 million in contracts from DHS” from 2017 to 2020… A DHS spokesperson told CNBC, “Acting Secretary Wolf has had zero involvement in DHS contract awards, including contracts won by his former clients.”
Today, Wolf leads the Center for Homeland Security & Immigration at the America First Policy Institute, which has been called a “White House in waiting” and the largest pro-Trump outside group launched post-administration. Wolf reportedly oversees the group’s day-to-day operations, and the group also recently represented an election official arguing that she had discretion to refuse to certify that state of Georgia’s primary election results. Wolf also wrote a chapter of the group’s book An America First Approach To U.S. National Security, in which he claimed that there are “existing authorities [that] the next America First administration should immediately implement to secure the border.” Other chapters in the book endorse increased support for Israel, only providing aid to Ukraine if it participates in peace negotiations with Russia, and tightening restrictions on Chinese companies.
Wolf is also a member of the Border Security Coalition of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a group that is an advisory member of Project 2025 and was previously led by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts. Wolf is a former fellow of the Heritage Foundation, the main group behind Project 2025. Wolf is also president of Wolf Global Advisors, a firm he founded in 2021 to get contracts on homeland security matters.
This profile has been updated.