The case was like thousands of other removal proceedings held each year at the Arlington Immigration Court. A Honduran national, in the United States illegally and with a drunk driving conviction, was petitioning for asylum. The prosecutor, however, was no ordinary frontline Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attorney. It was Stevan Bunnell, JD ’86, the newly appointed general counsel for the United States Department of Homeland Security. 

Before President Obama nominated him for the post in 2013, succeeding Ivan Fong, JD ’87, Bunnell had served 17 years as a respected federal prosecutor, plus six years as a partner at O’Melveny & Myers. 

Nevertheless, he decided to handle the routine case himself, for two reasons: First, he wanted to educate himself on specific areas of immigration law. Second, he wanted to get a feel for what ICE attorneys were up against in the field—day after exhausting day. Job satisfaction ratings were at rock bottom in that particular agency of Homeland Security, and the new general counsel wanted to understand why. 

Bunnell’s arguments prevailed on a technical ground, and the Honduran migrant was denied asylum based on his failure to seek asylum within one year, but the judge granted withholding of removal, allowing the migrant to stay in the United States. The general counsel’s appearance that day made a profound impression on many of the lawyers in his department, particularly the younger ones. “It turned out to be a really big morale booster,” says his special assistant Michael Diakiwski. “Now when he visits ICE field offices all over the country, he can relate to the attorneys. He is able to understand some of their complaints and frustrations and the issues that they face on a daily  basis.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorneys account for about half of the nearly 2,000 lawyers that Bunnell oversees at Homeland Security, a sprawling patchwork of 22 federal agencies stitched together in haste after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Among them: ICE,  Customs and Border Protection, the Transportation Security Administration, the U.S. Secret Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the U.S. Coast Guard.  Bunnell strives to ensure that all of their actions to protect the American public—rules concerning the No Fly List, for example—comply with court orders, executive directives, and statutes meant to safeguard individual privacy and liberties. He also serves as a key advisor to DHS Secretary Jeh Charles Johnson and other senior leaders on significant legal, policy, and operational issues.

Bunnell and his staff do this sometimes-thankless work under the pressure of constantly evolving terrorist threats, frequently intense criticism from the media and the public, and Byzantine congressional oversight (more than 90 committees and subcommittees retain some jurisdiction over the department). But the general counsel is happy in his current post—where he has the opportunity to dig into fascinating legal problems.  “We have these intractable challenges where there is no one right answer,” he explains in a phone interview from his Washington, D.C., office. “My overarching philosophy is principled pragmatism—having a set of values, but also being a constructive problem solver.”

Aside from enjoying the legal challenges at DHS, Bunnell has developed a keen respect over the past two years for his DHS colleagues—especially those he calls “the underdogs.” As he candidly told lawyers attending the American Bar Association’s Homeland Security Law Institute in August, Americans “sometimes don’t appreciate what we are trying to do for them, and that’s particularly true for many of our frontline employees. Whether they are screeners at an airport or a port of entry or attorneys who are trying to principally and fairly enforce the immigration laws, they tend to get more criticism than praise—unfairly, I would say.”

A soft-spoken apolitical man with a dry sense of humor, Bunnell credits his two younger sisters for teaching him to work “with people I do not command or control.” Together they grew up on the campus of Vassar College, where his father was a professor of political science; his mother was a local high school science teacher. Because his father’s specialty was Southeast Asia, the family lived for a couple of years in Indonesia and international students frequently were guests at the family’s New York home. “My dad would go around the dinner table and we’d each have to say something about a current event; we called it ‘Third World meets Nerd World,’ ” Bunnell says, laughing.

The idea of studying the law came to Bunnell shortly after his graduation from Yale. At the time he was counting on getting a job as a speechwriter in the New Haven mayor’s office, but when a hiring freeze put that position on hold, and the magna cum laude history grad found himself driving a cab to pay the rent, he decided to hedge his bets and take the LSAT. The subsequent decision to go to Stanford Law School was fueled by a sense of adventure. “I don’t think I’d been west of Pennsylvania at that point,” he recalls.

As a first-year law student, Bunnell was impressed by the intellect of his small-section leader, Mark Kelman, James C. Gaither Professor of Law and vice dean, who was then in his late twenties and already a full professor of law, and by the work of legal historian Lawrence Friedman, Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law. He also was pleasantly surprised by the collegial spirit of his classmates, one of whom eventually became his wife. Bunnell jokingly credits his courtship of Laura Hills, JD/MA ’86 (BA ’83), to the “romantic environment” of Crothers Hall.  As a second- and third-year student, he enjoyed the camaraderie of the Stanford Law Review, where he served as the senior articles editor, although he confesses that the experience of reading hundreds of law review articles probably steered him away from a career in legal academics.   

His fellow law review staffer and roommate John Walsh, JD ’86, now U.S. Attorney for the District of Colorado, recalls that Bunnell was a student who “challenged you to think” and stood out among his peers for his early and vocal commitment to public service. “Especially in the mid-1980s, with a corporate law firm ‘gold rush’ going on, there was a powerful pull in the private practice direction,” Walsh recalls, “but Steve always was interested in a mixed career, doing both public service and private practice.”

Later, while Bunnell and Walsh were clerking on the D. C. Circuit, for Judge Laurence Silberman, their shared apartment overlooking Rock Creek Park became a social hub for newly minted Beltway lawyers. (Among their fellow law clerks was future Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan.) Bunnell’s boss, Judge Silberman, encouraged lively debate and always insisted that his law clerks deliver their bench memos to him orally, rather than in writing. “As a result,” Bunnell says, “I’ve never been afraid of standing up and talking in front of people.”

Bunnell went on to spend three years as an associate at a small, collegial Washington litigation firm, Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin. Then in 1990, craving more trial experience, he took a post at the busy U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. He found he loved the prosecutorial role, where, he says, “The job is not to win, but to do justice.”  One of his memorable cases involved a young man who snatched Mayor Marion Barry’s car keys from his jacket pocket and then took the ex-con politician’s red Chrysler New Yorker for a joy ride.  “I’m probably the only prosecutor,” Bunnell says dryly, “who ever presented Barry as a victim to the grand jury.”

After five years as an assistant U.S. attorney, Bunnell moved to the Department of Justice, where he served as a trial attorney in its Public Integrity Section. Then in 1999 he took a job as counsel to the assistant attorney general for DOJ’s Criminal Division, where two years later he found himself on 9/11 working for future Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who was then the newly appointed assistant attorney general.  Bunnell, who played soccer as a kid, recalls that the weeks at the department following the 9/11 terrorist attacks were a bit like a 5-year-olds’ pickup game. “People were swarming around the ball,” he confesses, “and I was one of them.”

One of Bunnell’s tasks in those dark days was to go to the FBI Command Center to pick up the threat matrix, which contained intelligence about imminent attacks against specific targets, and bring it back in a zippered bag so that high-level staff in the Department of Justice could see what they were up against.  Beyond that, he says ruefully, “There wasn’t nearly as much interaction between the criminal side of the government and the intelligence community as there is today.” Not long afterwards, Bunnell decided to go back to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, where he quickly rose to become chief of its Criminal Division. Then he left government altogether for six years, to join the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers and ultimately manage the firm’s D.C. office.   

Mary Pat Brown, who worked with Bunnell at the U.S. Attorney’s Office and later as a partner at O’Melveny & Myers, says he was “beloved” by lawyers in both organizations for his inclusive, compassionate, open-door style of leadership. When she heard that President Obama had nominated Bunnell to be general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, she wasn’t surprised.  Bunnell, on the other hand, was somewhat taken aback when the White House called. “They asked if I was interested,” he recalls, “and I said I didn’t know much about immigration law and a bunch of other things, but it didn’t seem to matter. They said, ‘You’ve got a lot of law enforcement experience; you’ve managed lawyers; and we understand that you’re a pretty quick study.’ ”

While Bunnell loved the idea of getting back into public service, his hesitancy was understandable. It was widely known that there were morale problems at the sprawling department, not to mention a leadership vacuum. At Bunnell’s confirmation hearing in September 2013, U.S. Senator Tom Coburn lamented that there were 15 senior positions unfilled at the department, including the top job. (Secretary Janet Napolitano had left unexpectedly to become president of the University of California system.) Coburn also was unhappy about the Homeland Security Department’s relationship with Congress. “Too often,” he complained, “DHS doesn’t cooperate with our oversight requests and has undermined what could be a collaborative process to identify and fix problems.”

Bunnell’s wife, Laura Hills, who runs her own successful law practice in Washington, D.C., was watching the confirmation hearing in the Dirksen Senate Office Building along with other family members. She had advised her husband to go for the general counsel position anyway, reasoning that “if it gets better when you’re there, people will think you had something to do with it,” Bunnell recalls, laughing. “The fact that there was a lot to do—that there would be a broad range of problems coming from all different directions—made it more interesting from my perspective,” he adds. “Now that I’m in the middle of it, at times it feels like I’m in the middle of a dodgeball game. But it is fascinating nevertheless.”

It’s 7:30 a.m., on a typical weekday, and Bunnell is seated at a conference table in the Homeland Security headquarters complex on Nebraska Avenue in Washington, D.C. The early morning huddle—standard operating procedure for the secretary of homeland security, who previously served as general counsel at the Pentagon—is followed by a sober intelligence briefing on imminent and specific terrorist and cybersecurity threats. Bunnell will spend the rest of his day in back-to-back meetings with his colleagues, dealing with operational and policy issues or reviewing some of the thousands of cases that the department litigates each year, on issues ranging from asylum requests to DHS employment practices.

Unlike many “command-and-control” managers at DHS, who come from law enforcement or military backgrounds, Bunnell strives to create a collegial, collaborative atmosphere for the attorneys who work under him. “I think lawyers want to know the reasons why we want them to do something,” he explains, “so I try to over-communicate.” He also makes a point of traveling frequently to DHS’s far-flung legal offices, to better understand the concerns of his staffers, bolster their morale, and remind them of their overarching mission.

Jonathan Meyer, one of three deputy counsels who report to Bunnell, says that career government lawyers throughout the department have grown to appreciate the new general counsel’s collegial style of leadership, as well as his work ethic and analytical abilities. “The department has hundreds of cases in litigation, but Steve will figure out which are the ones that need his attention, pick up the filings, and actually read them,” he marvels. Unlike a lot of high-level political appointees, he adds, “Steve will really drill down and be more than just a manager; he’ll be a lawyer. And that has earned him the respect of the lawyers around him.”

Bunnell’s influence extends outside the department. At the 10th annual Homeland Security Law Institute in August 2015, recorded by C-SPAN, the general counsel spoke candidly for more than an hour about the constantly evolving security threats that DHS faces on a daily basis, as well as the legal challenges that accompany them. One development that particularly concerns Bunnell and his colleagues is the proliferation of new smartphone apps, encryption technologies, and offshore cloud storage, which allow would-be terrorists to communicate in ways difficult if not impossible for law enforcement agencies to intercept.

The government’s response, Bunnell said at the conference, likely will involve an increased reliance on the latest innovations in big data predictive tools, so that the department can better apply its limited resources to the risks that pose the most concern. “I’m not predicting that DHS or the federal government generally is going to become a ‘Big Brother’ operation or that we should expect abuses of our privacies or civil liberties in the future,” Bunnell told lawyers sitting in the audience. But, with more than 2 million passengers flying within or over the United States every day and more than a million people entering the country by land, “it’s not enough to rely on the FBI’s Most Wanted List and it’s not possible to do a thorough screening of every airline passenger or international traveler,” said Bunnell. “We need to rely on risk algorithms and collections of data to be smarter about whom we send to secondary screening and whom we don’t.”

Before long, Bunnell himself will be heading to Washington’s Dulles Airport, for yet another cross-country trip to see the attorneys who work under him. If he’s lucky, he may be able to fit in a visit with his younger son, Daniel, who is a Stanford sophomore this year living on the Row. Like millions of others, Bunnell will pack his liquids in three-ounce containers, stand in line at the airport for screening, and present his driver’s license and ticket for scrutiny. Then he’ll do something he always does: He’ll look the TSA agent in the eye—and thank him or her for working to keep us safe. As he says, “I don’t think they hear it that often.”  SL

Theresa Johnston is a freelance journalist and frequent contributor to Stanford Magazine and Stanford Lawyer.