DHS tells Congress about its outreach to ethnic and religious communities

Margo Schlanger

The DHS official in charge of the department’s civil rights and civil liberties activities testified before a House subcommittee on March 17 about her office’s ongoing outreach to Arab American, Muslim, Sikh, Somali and South Asian communities in its effort to build trust and foster a two-way dialogue with these groups.

“Frequent, responsive, and thoughtful engagement with diverse communities is an imperative of effective government,” Margo Schlanger told members of the House Homeland Security Committee’s subcommittee on intelligence, information sharing, and terrorism risk assessment, at a hearing titled, Working with Communities to Disrupt Terror Plots. “Such engagement gathers and shares information, builds trust, informs policy, and enables prompt response to legitimate grievances and needs.”

At the beginning of her remarks, Schlanger emphasized that her office “has no operational role in disrupting terror plots” and that her outreach to various community groups “do not involve source development or intelligence collection.”

She informed subcommittee members about a variety of actions her office has already taken to foster communications with religious and ethnic groups, which have often felt they were being inappropriately profiled or unduly scrutinized in the wake of 9/11 and subsequent terrorist plots:

Incident Community Coordination Team – Schlanger’s office has established a conference call mechanism to bring together ethnic and religious community leaders and DHS component officials in the hours and days after a terrorism incident. This ICCT has been used seven times since 2006, Schlanger testified, most recently after the Fort Hood incident last November and the attempted bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 last December. An ICCT call gives community leaders a channel to speak with federal officials, she noted.

“They can share reactions to government policies or enforcement actions, and provide information about hate crimes that should be investigated, about the mood of communities in the aftermath of a homeland security incident and, possibly, about how the government might improve its effectiveness in investigating the incident,” she observed. 

Roundtables – Since taking up her position last January, Schlanger has led a roundtable that brought together American Muslim, Arab, Sikh, Somali and South Asian leaders with officials from DHS and the National Counter Terrorism Center (which is organizationally part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) and focused on “the threat posed to those communities by terrorist attempts to recruit their members.”

Her office has led other national roundtables, as well as local roundtables in Detroit, Houston, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Columbus and Washington, DC, and a session with Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious leaders, and TSA officials, to discuss how Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT), often called whole body scanners, might conflict with certain religious modesty prescriptions.

Internships -- In 2007, the DHS civil rights and civil liberties office teamed up with the FBI to establish the National Security Internship Program, which brings Arabic-speaking college students to Washington to intern for the summer at DHS or the FBI. The interns also improve their Arabic language skills at George Washington University. “This program brings people with both language and cultural skills to government’s policy, law enforcement, and intelligence offices,” Schlanger explained.

She told the lawmakers that it is the ethnic and religious community leaders who bear the ultimate responsibility to counter radical ideologies that can pave the way for their young people towards violence. “Radical beliefs, after all, are protected by the Constitution,” said Schlanger, as she tip-toed into politically sensitive waters. “Our proper sphere of concern and intervention is violence, not radicalism.”

Prior to her appointment, Schlanger was a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan where her research and teaching focused on civil rights, tort, prisons and equal employment litigation, says her DHS bio. She also ran the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse.

Schlanger had previously been a Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis, and an Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard University. She earned her J.D. and her bachelor's degree, magna cum laude, from Yale University.