Napolitano's Past Jobs May Help With New Post

Copyright © 2008 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

MICHELE NORRIS, host:

When it comes to immigration laws as well as border security, customs, airport screening, and anti-terrorism, Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano will be front and center. She's Barack Obama's pick to head the Department of Homeland Security.

NPR's Ted Robbins has followed her career as governor, as a state attorney general, and as federal prosecutor before that. And, Ted, let's start where Jennifer left off - workplace immigration enforcement. What has been her record on that?

TED ROBBINS: Well, Michele, she has a record which is interesting for a governor. Arizona has been the leading laboratory for states taking a role on immigration enforcement, so it was the first state to pass a bill penalizing employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. Well, she signed that into law. She helped support the idea of local law enforcement cooperating with federal immigration authorities, mostly meaning help detaining illegal immigrants.

She has stopped at a point. She vetoed a law which would have forced local police and sheriffs to cooperate with federal prosecutors. She just wanted to keep it voluntary. So she seems to support workplace enforcement but doesn't want to make it draconian.

NORRIS: What about her positions on immigration and border security? Some people think she may be less supportive of the enforcement-only approach that's been used so far.

ROBBINS: Yeah. Early on, she was a vocal opponent of the border wall, the line everybody quotes as, "build a 50-foot fence and they'll find a 51-foot ladder," that she said. But then she turned it around and frequently asked the federal government for more resources to help slow the number of illegal crossers into Arizona. She was the first to call for the National Guard on the border, but so did her predecessor, which is Secretary Michael Chertoff.

I think what you have here is someone who represents - her background is a lawyer, so she represents the constituency that she's been hired to represent. And I think that probably, she'll represent the federal government when she's in the federal government. She's a pragmatist.

NORRIS: You talked about Governor Napolitano calling for more federal resources. Well, now, she'll be on the other side. And one of those issues is the Real ID. This is a federal initiative that she's opposed as governor. What do we expect now?

ROBBINS: Well, Michele, she's going to face a really interesting dilemma. She opposed the part of the Real ID Act which was supposed to create, in effect, a national ID card by standardizing state drivers' licenses.

She opposed it because she said it would cost the states $11 billion. 21 states have laws forbidding cooperation with the Real ID because of cost or privacy questions. So it's going to be interesting to see how she views the issue from the other side.

NORRIS: Now, DHS has responsibilities beyond border security and immigration. It manages a whole host of things, from the Coast Guard to the Secret Service to terrorism prevention. What qualifications does Janet Napolitano as governor bring to the table there?

ROBBINS: Well, primarily, as governor, she has management experience, some natural disasters, especially a lot of large forest fires. She helped investigate a defendant in the Oklahoma City bombings when she was a U.S. attorney, and she deals with Mexican officials a lot as a border state governor. But she has no military experience, no direct anti-terrorism experience.

NORRIS: Janet Napolitano will now be stepping into a pretty big spotlight. Are there little-known facts about this governor?

ROBBINS: Yeah, the first time she came into the national spotlight was as Anita Hill's attorney in Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearings for Supreme Court justice. Personally, she's in her early-'50s. She's unmarried, doesn't live in a governor's mansion, lives in a condo in the Phoenix area.

NORRIS: That's NPR's Ted Robbins. Ted, thanks so much.

ROBBINS: My pleasure.

Copyright © 2008 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.