Morton has worked to raise the profile of his agency and navigate two very different cultures. Yet the two halves of ICE—Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which handles intellectual property, human trafficking, and other former Customs roles, and the immigration side, Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO)—continue to maintain separate field offices. All told, there are more than 20,000 ICE employees split among 22 ERO offices and 26 HSI offices as well as posted to 47 foreign countries.
ICE still ranks 222nd out of 241 federal agencies in terms of morale, according to the Partnership for Public Service’s Best Places to Work rankings.
As difficult as his days are, Morton wanted his current job—badly, in fact. Had worked for years to land it. Had contributed $1,000 to the Obama campaign to show he was onboard, even though after a lifetime of public service he wasn’t a big-money donor.
“Lots of people asked me, ‘Are you sure you want this?’ ” Morton says. “I’ve always believed in the underlying mission. ICE was always the right fit for me. Immigration is the story of America, both good and bad. ”
Morton, 45, was born in Scotland, the child of a US citizen and an unnaturalized Scot. He grew up in Rome for three years before his parents—his dad was an Episcopal priest—settled in Washington. He spent his first two years of high school at Loudoun Valley in Purcellville and later graduated from Alexandria’s Episcopal High School, then enrolled at the University of Virginia.
From there it was two years in the Peace Corps. He arrived in a small town in Chad soon after the former French colony’s second civil war and witnessed the overthrow of the government.
“Lots of people asked me, ‘Are you sure you want this?’ ” Morton says. “I’ve always believed in the underlying mission. ICE was always the right fit for me. Immigration is the story of America, both good and bad. ”
In Chad, Morton contracted malaria and came close to death. Passing nuns saved his life with an injection of quinine.
After returning from Africa, he enrolled at UVA law school, where he found a mentor who would reshape his life’s path: David Martin, one of the nation’s leading immigration-law scholars.
Morton’s first job out of law school was as a trial attorney in the immigration courts in New York, a role that forced him to tackle huge caseloads. He was named “rookie of the year” by his division.
Soon after, he was plucked to be special assistant to his former professor when Martin was named the INS’s general counsel. From there, Morton went to the deputy attorney general’s office at the Department of Justice, working closely with Eric Holder.
For the next 12 years, Morton rose through the ranks of the Justice Department, including stints with the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria prosecuting terrorism cases and eventually becoming acting deputy assistant attorney general of the criminal division as the George W. Bush presidency ended.
When Obama came to office, Morton saw his next opportunity: head of ICE. It didn’t hurt that Janet Napolitano, the incoming Secretary of Homeland Security, had also been a student of Martin’s at UVA. Or that the short list to take over the agency was, well, short. Running ICE wasn’t exactly the plummest post in the so-called Plum Book of jobs open for new political appointees.
Amid the challenges of the nomination process—the endless swirl of paperwork, meetings, and background checks—Morton’s personal life was in chaos.
His marriage of eight years to Laura Anderson Smith, a lawyer, was falling apart. Smith sat behind Morton at his Senate confirmation hearing in April 2009, their two young girls beside her, even as the couple was legally separated pending a divorce.
Stepping into the greatest challenge of his career, Morton found himself simultaneously learning the role of a divorced parent. Before his morning briefings, he had to pack lunches. International trips were scheduled around parent/teacher conferences. Says Morton: “I picked an interesting job in which to be a single parent.”
Morton toggles day by day, sometimes hour by hour, between the two roles of ICE.
Testifying before a House subcommittee last fall, he faced withering criticism mixed with scant praise. Morton sat stone-faced as the questions and critiques rained down. His refrain was familiar: “Even though the agency funding sought by the President and appropriated by the Congress is at an all-time high, DHS simply does not have the resources to charge, detain, and remove all of the aliens in the country unlawfully.”
The next day, Morton was across town at the French ambassador’s residence in Kalorama for a ceremony repatriating a stolen Jules Breton painting located by the HSI portion of the agency—the other half of his job, the half that people like and appreciate.
“I am delighted to be here today,” Morton said in an elegant room filled with guests sipping Champagne. And unlike at Hill hearings, it actually seemed as if he meant it. He continued: “These are the days it’s good to be the director of ICE.”
It was the second time in 2011 that he’d been able to return a stolen painting to France—and there would be a third returned in January of this year. As he concluded his remarks, he perhaps inadvertently captured what gets him up each morning: “This has been a good year for the forces of good.”
Yet there’s so much more work to do.
In his 11th-floor office at ICE headquarters, filled with mementos from police agencies around the world—including a bottle of excellent Mexican tequila that ethics rules forbid him from opening—there’s still the sense of an agency on the make. The headquarters is sandwiched between the Southwest DC waterfront and the train tracks leading over the Potomac River. Each passing freight train rattles his windows.
Morton roams the headquarters often, asking questions to suss out how ICE policies work on the streets. “He’s become much more sensitive to the practicalities of enforcement,” Vincent says. “Understanding how it works on the ground has done much to form his overall policy direction.”
His relationship with the rank-and-file of his agency is mixed—younger agents, who know only ICE, appreciate his leadership, whereas legacy INS and Customs agents often are muted in their praise.
One of the unions that represent ICE employees on the ERO side has been bogged down in contract negotiations for years and voted no confidence in Morton a year into his role. Says union head Chris Crane: “He was inheriting an agency with a lot of problems. He’s done nothing to fix those problems. He’s just made them worse.”
In House testimony, Crane said Morton’s “prosecutorial discretion” memo provided “a roller coaster of arrest authority that has changed from month to month, week to week, and at times from day to day.”
Morton knows he has few allies in his daily battle to improve and raise the profile of ICE—but he hopes his successor, whoever he or she may be, whenever he or she takes over, won’t be as lonely as he is.
“I knew what I was getting myself into,” Morton says. “My goal is that each time there are more and more people willing to do this job.”
This article appears in the March 2012 issue of The Washingtonian.
