Good afternoon. It's good to see all of you. Go ahead and be seated. Thank you so much for that wonderful welcome.
And thank you to Deputy Secretary Carry Huffman. He's been fantastic, hasn't he? Let's give him a round of applause. Thank him.
I had the chance to visit with him several times on the phone before I was actually sworn in and we had candid conversations and visited and when I got here, he handed me a binder full of papers and he said, “I signed all of this, hope you wanted me to.”
But I’ve enjoyed spending time with him and with all of you. Thank you for welcoming me so much and I am so thrilled to be a part of the family at the United States Department of Homeland Security. Your mission is big and it’s vast and I know that you approach it with the seriousness of which the day and age that we live in requires.
So just know that I am committed to fulfilling our mission with you and walking alongside all of you as you do your work every day to make sure that not only do you accomplish your job and do it with excellence, but that you have the assurance that your families will be safe also. And that we leave this country safe for our kids and our grandkids far into the future.
Now, as Secretary, that's my responsibility. But it also is my responsibility to do everything that I can to give you the resources that you need to do your job. You need the training, you need the equipment, and the resources to make sure you're prepared for every single situation you find yourself in.
Now, my background and experience is in business. It's also in serving at the State legislative level. I served in Congress, and I also served as Governor. But that experience tells me that if you want people to perform with excellence, you have to equip and prepare them to do so.
And that is my commitment to all of you, that we will walk through every single situation together, and I'll prepare you as much as I can for it, and we'll have the flexibility to make sure that we can always keep the American people first and foremost.
I am thrilled that President Trump trusted me with this job, And I'll tell all of you that the reason that he trusted me with this job is because when he talked to me about what my future looked like, I asked him for it. I said, “I would like to be the Secretary of Homeland Security Sir because it's your number one priority.”
And I love my job as governor of South Dakota. I love my home and my family. I would not leave them to spend time away unless I was doing something of significance.
That's the family I was raised in, that we talked every day about the fact that our work should matter, and it should have a purpose, and we should be able to explain why we do what we do, and that it has something that we can show the next generation that really mattered for their future and for this country.
So today, I'm hoping all of us will be a beacon of freedom of light and of hope. That when people look at us, they don't just see people who are there in a time of crisis or conflict, but we're also people that bring a smile to people's faces and remind them what America is about.
You're on the front lines many times, but you're also sometimes the last ones in to help pick up the pieces. And you see people on their very worst days. But that is a presence that you can bring that will bring them comfort and stability. In a time when their whole world seems to be shaken.
Now, I grew up as a farmer and a rancher. I told this story to a few people the first day that I came into the office that I grew up with a dad who was a cowboy, and he was much like you would picture, John Wayne was in his Westerns.
He lived hard and fast. And when he sent us off to school, we obviously lived in the country. We had to drive. He said, drive fast and take chances. So, there's not a lot of people that have dads like that. But he, also, told us every day to get out of bed because more people die in bed than anywhere else.
And so, we knew that when we got up, we got to work, and we worked together as a family. But that also taught me a lot about how you need to live your example — and an example in front of the people that, that you lead of what you want them to do. But they also could respect you in the process of being in front of that organization.
The one story I'll tell you, and I shared it with Carry the other day about my dad, was I remember one time I was building fence with him when I was about ten years old, and we were building fence, stretching wires, and out there putting up about a mile and a half of this fence.
And he turned to me and he said, “Kristi, where's the post mall?” Which is the post pounder, that you pound the post in with and I turned to him, and I said, “It’s in the truck.” And he said, “Go get it.”
So, with my dad, you ran everywhere you went. I turned and ran to the truck, grabbed the post mall, brought it back to him, handed it to him, and as I handed it to him, he said, “You should know what I need before I know what I need.”
And I remember being a ten-year-old girl thinking, how am I ever going to know what he needs before he knows what he needs? But what he was doing was teaching us to think ahead and to think three steps ahead of what he needed and have it ready and prepared for him so he could be more efficient.
He could get more work done, and we could do a better job that he should never have to wait for the next tool or piece of equipment that he was asking for, that I should have already figured it out and had it waiting for him.
That is what our job is here as well at the Department of Homeland Security. We prepare ahead and think three steps ahead so that people have what they need before they need it.
We have lots of stories and lots of experiences, where we've responded beautifully or we've been there, provided safety and security, investigation, protected communities, picked up the pieces after disasters, kept them safe as they flew, protected their cyber infrastructure. All of the agencies under this umbrella, the work that you do is excellent. And then we all remember times we maybe could have performed a little bit better.
I will challenge you to think ahead and to think what people might need before they actually need it. How we can pre-deploy resources, how we can be more efficient, and how we can be more nimble to respond to the situations that we find ourselves in. We do have some challenges, and the world is a dangerous place, and we've got dangerous, evil foreign governments that want to take us down.
We will be the first line of defense for anybody that's in the American homeland. We will do everything that we can to protect the American people. We have jurisdiction over people who live here, people who leave here, and people who come here. We have jurisdiction over products that come into this country and which ones leave. We have jurisdiction over our internet, what comes in, what goes out, what kind of business. I tell people we have jurisdiction over everything.
And we will exercise all legal authorities that we have to protect this country because it is the only last light of freedom left. We woke up this morning more blessed than 99% of the people, because we woke up in the United States of America. We woke up in a country where we get to exercise our freedoms, and that responsibility has been laid at our feet.
And I know that the people in this room and the people in this Department are up to the challenge and up to the task. I will walk alongside you, support you, lead when we need it, but all the time be there to hopefully inspire you to know the kind of work that you do and how important it is for this day and age.
So may God bless you. May God bless the United States of America, and may God keep us all safe. Thank you. Thank you for being here.