On Wednesday, April 10, 2019, the Strauss Center presents Ben Rohrbaugh, a partner at consulting firm BorderWorks. Rohrbaugh was the border security director in the White House National Security Council in 2014, when flows of unaccompanied Central American minors first began to overwhelm processing facilities on the southwest border.
In this talk, he will describe the challenges that exist on the southwest border and why they haven't been addressed, describe the policymaking process on border security — particularly how the National Security Council and Customs and Border Protection deal with politically charged issues — and contrast the approaches of the Obama and Trump administrations. The talk will also address the ways the United States and Mexico interact on security and migration. This is part of the Brumley Speaker Series.
Rohrbaugh currently serves as a principal at BorderWorks, which provide results-oriented services to address complex border security, trade facilitation and border infrastructure issues. Rohrbaugh has been at the forefront of border and supply chain security and advancing U.S.-Mexico relations for nearly a decade. He previously held senior policy positions at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and he was a director on the White House's National Security Council staff where he developed policy on border and supply chain security issues. Rohrbaugh is currently an affiliate at the Belfer Center Homeland Security Project at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.