Top 24 Quotes by Jeh Johnson

Those of us in public office and those of us who aspire to public office have a responsibility to be reasonable, fact-based, in our rhetoric and to not suggest things that are unreasonable, to whip up a lot of emotion in public, which can lead to government overreach, fear, suspicions, and prejudice.

There is a terrorist threat to this country that remains, and I believe that counter-terrorism needs to be the cornerstone of our mission, our vast mission... and aviation security is something that we still have a fair amount of concerns about.

It's better for candidates to suggest ideas that are responsible, not ones that are incapable of being executed. People are influenced by what their leaders tell them. And bringing the level of rhetoric down brings the temperature down.

Overly simplistic suggestions that we ban people from entering this country, based on religion, or ban people from an entire region of the world is counterproductive. It will not work. We need to build bridges to communities, to American-Muslim communities right now, to encourage them to help us in our homeland security efforts.

We continually evaluate the world situation, and we not infrequently make changes to aviation security. We either step it up or we feel sometimes we're in a position to dial it back, and so this is something that happens periodically, and people should not overreact to it or over-speculate about what's going on.

Most victims of ISIL are, in fact, Muslims. So it seems to me that to refer to ISIL as occupying any part of the Islamic theology is playing on a - a battlefield that they would like us to be on. I think that to call them - to call them some form of Islam gives the group more dignity than it deserves, frankly.

No level of border security, no wall, doubling the size of the border patrol, all these things will not stop the illegal migration from countries as long as a 7-year-old is desperate enough to flee on her own and travel the entire length of Mexico because of the poverty and the violence in her country.