Katie Tobin

Senior Advisor

Former Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Transborder, White House National Security Council

Katie is currently a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the American Statecraft Program. She is also an active press contributor in print and TV media, including the Wall Street Journal and MSNBC.

From 2021 to 2024, Katie served in the Biden-Harris Administration as Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Transborder in the White House National Security Council. In this role, Tobin led U.S. policy development on a wide-range of cross-border national security and homeland security matters, including aviation and maritime security, border security, global immigration and visa policy, and security screening and vetting.

During her tenure in the White House, she spearheaded the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection, President Biden’s signature migration framework, adopted by 21 countries in the Western Hemisphere in June 2022. She was also a lead architect of Operation Allies Welcome (2021), Uniting for Ukraine humanitarian parole program (April 2022), the Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela Parole Process (January 2023), and the Safe Mobility Offices Initiative(June 2023). In the aviation sphere, she drove the launch of the Domestic Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems (C-UAS) National Action Plan in April 2022, the first whole-of-government strategy to protect against the nefarious use of commercial drones.

Prior to joining the Biden-Harris Administration, Tobin served for nearly a decade with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), advising the United States and governments across Latin America and the Caribbean on refugee and migration response. She has also served as a Refugee Officer at the Department of Homeland Security and an attorney in private practice in Chicago. During law school, she clerked for Senator Edward Kennedy and Senator Richard Durbin on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Katie started her career working at Annunciation House, an organization that runs migrant shelters on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Katie grew up in Chicago. She earned her B.A. from Villanova University and J.D. from The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law.