The Department of Homeland Security is a diverse collection of agencies performing a variety of tasks, as evidenced by its three nominees for the Service to America Medals.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement employs people like Ajay Bhatt, an associate legal adviser, to help ensure that violators of human rights can’t hide in the U.S. He led Operation No Safe Haven in 2014 and 2015, capturing almost 70 fugitives in total.

“Our program looks at individuals who have committed human rights abuses overseas in all the various countries, individuals who may have committed torture, extra-judicial killing, extreme violations of religious freedom,” Bhatt told Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

These individuals are still entitled to due process, legal representation and appeals. And most comply with the judgment rendered, Bhatt said, and report peaceably to be removed from the country. But he said a small segment of the population flees. And that’s when the Operation No Safe Haven team goes to work.

He said the team consists primarily of analysts who work closely with law enforcement and other agencies to track these fugitives down. The team uses data like license plates and real estate information to establish a location and track down fugitives and begin the repatriation process.

“Some countries are very comfortable working with the U.S. and we have a great bilateral relationship with them,” Bhatt said. “Other countries are less comfortable with trying to let us repatriate one of their own citizens or nationals.”

Bhatt said the whole process, from the beginning of the investigation to the endpoint of repatriation, can take years.

Meanwhile, Mariela Melero, associate director for Customer Service and Public Engagement at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, works to ensure that immigrants to the U.S. are able to navigate the complicated process of naturalization with as little difficulty as possible, especially online.

She has a personal stake in doing this; she herself is an immigrant and refugee. She recalls helping her parents navigate the naturalization process when she was 12.

“I think that the foundational piece here is about paying it forward, because at the end of the day, I am and will always be immensely grateful to the opportunities that not only the country but on a very personal level, the agency has given to me,” she said.

Her experiences led her to spend a great deal of time and effort making the MyUSCIS online portal as accessible. To her, customer input is an integral part of the process.

“At the end of the day, our agency is primarily fee-funded, meaning that individuals are paying for the services that they receive, and I think that puts us in a space that is just a little bit different,” she said.

USCIS has solicited feedback on its online portal in a number of different ways, including an independent customer service satisfaction survey, regular interactions with customers, a public engagement community outreach team and a constant process of evaluation.

“Believe me, when something does not work, we hear about it right away,” she said. “When something works, we hear about it, but it takes a little longer.”

Tate Jarrow, on the other hand, only hears from customers if something goes wrong. That’s because he’s a cybercrime investigator for the Secret Service.

The Secret Service is in charge of investigating cybercrimes that affect the financial industry and creating electronic task forces consisting of law enforcement, private sector and academic partners.

Jarrow minored in computers in college, so when he joined the Secret Service, he was recruited to the electronic crimes task force. There, he investigates everything from hacked banks and brokerage firms to stores who have their credit card information stolen, like the 2013 Target hack.

He said his job involves applying old-fashioned detective work to digital spaces.

“Cyber investigation to me is fascinating in that sense,” Jarrow said. “We may not have physical evidence like you would in a more pedestrian crime such as a bank robbery, where there would be video surveillance, maybe fingerprints, and you would know serial numbers on money that was stolen. In cyber, we have the same types of fingerprints, they’re just digital based. Instead of fingerprints of a person, we have an IP address, which is a fingerprint of a computer. So we follow the same types of clues that are left behind by a criminal.”

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