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Janet Napolitano

Janet Napolitano (29 November 1957-) was the Democratic Governor of Arizona from 6 January 2003 to 21 January 2009 (succeeding Jane Dee Hull and preceding Jan Brewer) and the United States Secretary of Homeland Security from 21 January 2009 to 6 September 2013 (succeeding Michael Chertoff and preceding Jeh Johnson).

Biography[]

Janet Napolitano was born in New York City, New York in 1957, and she was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Albuquerque, New Mexico. She became a partner in a Phoenix, Arizona law firm in 1989, and, in 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed her US Attorney for the District of Arizona. She went on to serve as Attorney General of Arizona from 1999 to 2003 and then as Governor from 2003 to 2009, becoming the first elected female governor to succeed another elected female governor in American history. In 2005, Time rated her as one of the five best governors in the United States, and she supported educational initiatives such as voluntary full-day kindergarten and increases in teachers' salaries, built the state's rainy day fund to $650 million, and won every county in her 2006 re-election bid. In 2009, she was appointed the United States' first female Secretary of Homeland Security, and she supported treating the Mexican and Canadian borders equally, supported adding non-manmade threats such as climate crises to the department's list of priorities, and released a controversial threat assessment which warned that disgruntled military veterans might be vulnerable to recruitment by the far-right, a claim which the American Legion and other veterans' groups claimed was derogatory towards armed forces veterans. She also advocated for immigration reform in the form of the DACA program, which provided immigrants who came to the United States as children the legal status to remain in the United States without fear of deportation. In 2013, she left the DHS to serve as President of the University of California, serving until 2020.

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